Category: Policy & Legislation

How to Create Transparent Pricing

Posted on by John C. Goodman

James Capretta and David Bernstein (AEI) recommend these changes for CMS:

  1. Require transparent, “all in” prices for standardized services required to fully complete a clinical intervention.
  2. Require all providers to participate in this bundled pricing system.
  3. The prices posted for these services should be “walk up” prices available to all patients, irrespective of their insurance status.
  4. Require insurers to make available to their enrollees the dollar value of their median out-of-network rates, so that patients could then apply those payments from their insurers to any provider of their choosing.
  5. An additional option would be to allow patients to place the dollars saved by selecting lower-priced providers into tax-free health savings accounts (HSAs) for future use.
    6. +

The British NHS: Don’t Get Cancer

Posted on by John C. Goodman

NHS sets a goal of providing the first treatments within two months of a confirmed diagnosis. In September 2019, the NHS fell short of this goal, with only 78.7 percent of cancer patients receiving their first treatment in that time frame. By September 2022, the timeliness of cancer treatment had eroded further, with only 60.5 percent of new cancer patients receiving treatment within the time frame called for in NHS guidance.

+

Free Market Competition Is the Way to Lower the Cost of Insulin and Other Drugs

Posted on by John C. Goodman

In 1951, Congress stopped letting drug makers decide which drugs they would sell over the counter and which would require a prescription and turned that decision over to the FDA. Drugs already available without a prescription were “grandfathered.”

That is why, to this day, people can buy regular and NPH insulin without a prescription. Because those forms of insulin are off‐patent and because consumers comparison‐shop, they are relatively cheap: “ReliOn,” a brand available from Walmart, can cost as little as $25 a vial. Evidence suggests that prescription requirements correlate with higher drug prices and that removing them correlates with reductions in drug prices.

Jeffrey Singer in The Hill

+

Indiana Bill Would Allow Associate Physicians in Underserved Areas Work

Posted on by Devon Herrick

The state of Indiana has a bill before the Legislature (SB 400) that would allow medical graduates who have not matched to a residency to practice under licensed physicians. This is important because more than 10,000 medical graduates fail to match to a residency program each year. Many of those will try again the following year but many will ultimately never complete a residency program. In most states medical graduates who never complete a residency will never have an opportunity to care for patients.

+