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In the New York Times, Robert H. Frank, a Cornell economics professor, discusses the “market failure” he sees as necessitating Obamacare. According to Frank, “unregulated insurance markets [are] a catastrophically ineffective way” of achieving “universal” health care, which he considers the goal of health reform efforts.
In a recent article, Megan McArdle considers why insuring her dog is much cheaper than insuring a person. McArdle sees two reasons. Many of today’s highly advanced, expensive medical treatments are not available in veterinary medicine.
Obamacare requires young people to pay higher health insurance premiums in order to subsidize older people’s coverage. But don’t worry, say Obamacare’s defenders: Many young people will qualify for federal subsidies to offset the higher premiums.
In a recent op-ed Judith Stein of the Center for Medicare Advocacy explains why she thinks government should lower drug prices for Medicare recipients. The article is worth reading because it is an example of a pernicious assumption that permeates most health policy discussions.
In my recent interview with Sally Pipes about Canadian health care, we discussed how Canada succumbed to socialized medicine. According to Ms. Pipes, calls for government-provided health care began in the province of Saskatchewan in the 1940s.
A recent NPR story described efforts to extend the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) to long-term care insurance providers. GINA, passed in 2008, prohibits health insurers from taking into account genetic information about you when deciding what coverage to offer you and at what price.
Next year Obamacare will give more than thirty million Americans completely subsidized health care under Medicaid, or mostly subsidized health care under the state exchanges. As the demand for health care will dramatically increase and the supply of medical professionals able to service that demand will remain essentially unchanged, we can expect to experience things like longer wait times for surgery, having to drive further to visit a specialist and even the possibility that no doctor in drivable distance is accepting new patients.
