Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care

Obamacare’s Three Key Failings

Posted on by John C. Goodman
  • Obamacare worsened the quality of individual market health insurance and caused millions of people to replace better coverage with worse coverage. Obamacare substantially raised premiums and deductibles and most plans exclude top hospitals and doctors.
  • The rising costs from Obamacare led more small businesses to drop health insurance.
  • The law’s coverage expansion now costs taxpayers more than $200 billion a year — almost all of which are subsidies to health insurers — without improving health outcomes.

Source: Brian Blase

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The Cost of Price Controls on Drugs

Posted on by John C. Goodman

We conservatively find that the IRA’s policy to set prices at 9 years after market entry for select small molecule drugs will reduce their expected revenues in the U.S. market by 8.0%, which implies a reduction in R&D investment of almost 12.3%, or $232.1 billion over 20 years. Over the same time frame, we conclude that there will be 188 fewer small molecule treatments, including 79 fewer new small molecule drugs and 109 fewer post-approval indications for these drugs. We find that this forgone innovation is expected to lead to 116.0 million life years lost due to the missed opportunities to improve health.

Source:  Tomas J. Philipson, Yier Ling and Ruiquan Chang, “The Impact of Price Setting at 9 Years on Small Molecule Innovation Under the Inflation Reduction Act.”

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Wednesday Links

Posted on by John C. Goodman
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Annual Exams are Often a Complete Waste of Time and Money

Posted on by Devon Herrick

There has long been a belief that preventive medical services save money. The theory holds that if Americans’ primary care physicians ordered more preventive medical screening services we would not only be healthier but the cost of the preventive care would be more than offset by the savings from more serious care avoided. In other words, the cost of a colonoscopy would be offset by not getting colon cancer. The only problem with the theory is that it is wrong.

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