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Health Care
There is at least one bright spot in the recently passed health care reform legislation. Well, sort of.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act finally established a much-needed regulatory pathway for “biosimilars.” Those are the generic versions of “biologics,” complex drugs made from living (or products of living) organisms, such as vaccines, insulin, human growth hormones and many others.
Innovator companies will get:
- 12 years of data exclusivity for their products, providing reasonable intellectual property protection;
- An arbitration mechanism to settle patent disputes; and
- A transition pathway to approve biosimilars, which have been regulated like traditional drugs despite their greater complexity.
That’s all good as far as it goes, but the legislation doesn’t address a number of issues. Read More...
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After President Obama’s election, conservatives were afraid he would drag the U.S. down into European socialism. We underestimated his vision.
A mere 18 months later not even the European socialists want to go where the president wants to lead—ever more government spending. Indeed, most of Europe is headed in the opposite direction.
- The U.K. has announced new austerity measures, including 25 percent budget cuts and a two-year public-sector pay freeze. Even the queen’s allotment will be frozen next year.
- Germany has said it will cut its budget by nearly $100 billion over the next four years.
- And France wants to cut its budget deficit from 8 percent of GDP this year to 3 percent by 2013.
By contrast, Obama tried to convince countries at the G-20 meeting to, lemming like, follow us off the economic cliff. They declined en masse. Read More...
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Republicans have kicked off their ObamaCare “repeal and replace” campaign, but there will likely be neither repeal nor replace unless Republicans control both Congress and the White House, and that’s 2012 at best — if then. However, by taking over only one house of Congress opponents can dramatically lower the unsustainable cost of ObamaCare by refusing to fund its worst elements. Here’s a few suggestions.
Reduce Medicaid eligibility. Historically, states have varied widely on Medicaid eligibility, with some setting the threshold significantly below the federal poverty level (FPL). ObamaCare sets a nationwide eligibility threshold at 133 percent, which increases the number of people in the government-run program by an additional estimated 15 million by 2019. Funding Medicaid eligibility only up to 100 percent of FPL would dramatically lower its cost. Read More...
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I predict that one of the most common phrases in the American vocabulary over the next few years will be, “I didn’t know the health care bill would do that.” And Democrats will be saying it most.
Even as the president traveled to Iowa City to let everyone know Armageddon hadn’t happened, several large companies declared they would start health-reform-related write downs--AT&T for $1 billion.
Here’s the back-story. In 2003, Congress passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit. There was a concern among legislators that including that benefit might encourage large employers that provided retiree coverage to phase it out.
Republicans, who controlled Congress, decided to provide those companies with a subsidy, spending about $665 per retiree to subsidize the employer’s plan, but saving $1,209 if the retiree had been dumped into Medicare. Read More...
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In many developing countries, including most African countries, as much as 60 percent of prescription drugs sold are actually counterfeit, containing little if any of the active molecule, and in some cases containing toxins and other harmful substances.
That's just one of the many frightening statistics that emerged from a conference last week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, sponsored by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the benefit of government officials in the East African Region. IPI was pleased to be able to co-sponsor and participate in the conference.
Designed to help justice and customs officials intercept counterfeits and prosecute the perpetrators, the conference was a terrific example of cooperation between “north and south” in improving the health and welfare of East African populations.
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| So how did Social Security get tied up in health care reform? It’s kind of complicated so stay with me. The Senate version of the health care reform bill that the House is supposed to vote on this week—um, let me correct. Despite weeks of Democrats calling for an “up or down vote,” the House isn’t actually going to vote on the bill. It’s going to vote on amendments to the bill and, if they pass, the Senate version will be “deemed” to have passed—without an actual vote on the bill. Anyway, in the Senate bill is the “Cadillac tax” that makes employer-provided health insurance subject to taxation above a certain level. That means that employees with high-cost health insurance will, at some point after 2018, start paying more taxes—including Social Security taxes. Read More...
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| Senator Jim Bunning could probably use a hug. The retiring Kentucky Republican has been trying to get Congress to live up to its fiscal promises. And for that good deed he’s getting pummeled by Democrats, barraged by reporters and largely ignored by Republicans. This is not a good sign for all that promised future austerity by either party. Congress passed a new version of “pay as you go,” or “paygo,” legislation in February when it increased the government’s borrowing limit to $1.9 trillion. The goal of paygo is to force the government to find ways to offset any new spending. Democrats included the provision to help deflect criticism for their explosion in deficit spending. President Obama showered it with praise: "PAYGO would hold us to a simple but bedrock principle: Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere. Read More...
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President Obama introduced his budget this week amid lots of calls for Republicans to support the president’s laundry list of new and expanded spending programs, along with a minimal spending freeze and some tax cuts.
For example, Politico cites White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer saying that Republicans “have a responsibility now to partner with the President, to try to get things done for the American people.”
In short, Pfeiffer wants Republicans to quit being the party of “no.”
But bipartisanship is only good when the proposed legislation is good. And frankly, most of the president’s proposals have been stinkers.
Take the administration’s proposal to try accused 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in downtown New York City. Republicans opposed the plan, as did most of the public. Read More...
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What Will the President Say in His State of the Union? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says he has some explaining to do.
Washington is all atwitter over President Obama’s upcoming State of the Union address. And understandably so, because the president has some serious explaining to do, like:
- How he plans to get control of the $1.4 trillion federal deficit, more than three times the deficit Obama was so critical of under George Bush.
- And how he intends to pay for all the Democrats’ new federal spending. Yes, he could raise taxes, but he already has several new taxes in his health care bill.
- And maybe the president can explain why his much-boasted stimulus bill has had little impact on creating new jobs.
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 Fate of the Union |
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Something remarkable is going on in America.
I can’t quite explain it; I’m not sure anyone can. But we can use Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska to exemplify the change.
In order to “persuade”—some might say “payoff”—Nelson to vote for Senator Harry Reid’s health care reform bill, Reid agreed that the federal government would pay Nebraska’s portion of the increased Medicaid cost—forever.
Nelson can be forgiven for thinking his so-called “cornhusker kickback” would be hailed back home as a great achievement because, in the past, it would have been. Trying to maximize federal revenue is like a state hobby.
And Reid certainly thought Nebraska would approve. Why, he essentially called the other states a bunch of chumps for not getting their own kickback.
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Can Congress Force You to Buy Health Insurance? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says only by ignoring the Constitution.
The health care reform legislation in Congress requires every American to have health insurance or pay a significant fine. But where does the U.S. Constitution give Congress that power?
Cyber News Service posed the question, and Democrats seemed to fumble for an answer.
Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska is quoted as saying, “probably the same place that states have the authority to require, mandate if you will, compulsory auto liability insurance.” Claire McCaskill and some other Democrats agree.
Of course, state constitutions are completely independent documents and have no bearing on powers granted by the U.S. Constitution.
That document sets strict limits on federal power. Read More...
Limited Powers |
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Presidential elections are expensive—something liberals never tire of reminding us every four years when they push for some way to nationalize the cost of presidential elections.
Except, of course, in 2008. Liberals were remarkably quiet when then-candidate Barack Obama spent money like there was no tomorrow—$741 million, more than the Bush and Kerry campaigns combined in 2004—a mindset the president seems to have carried over into the presidency.
But as expensive as presidential campaigns can be, that’s only a fraction of the true cost taxpayers must pay after the candidate is elected.
And we are only now beginning to discover just how much the election of Barack H. Obama will cost. For example:
- There’s the president’s $3.5 trillion budget for 2010 that passed last April, by far the largest in history.
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President Obama keeps claiming he’s willing to “make the hard choices.”
But so far his administration has been characterized by a lack of said hard choices—except perhaps for his choice in dog breeds.
Congress finally got around to passing the 2009 fiscal budget in February, which should have been passed in the fall of 2008. The Democratic-led Congress preferred to wait for a Democratic president who would sign the fiscally irresponsible budget. That budget contained some 10,000 earmarks, which Obama campaigned against.
Did President Hard Choices send it back demanding a bill clean of earmarks? No, Obama signed it. And his press secretary defended the decision saying it was “last year’s business.”
How about the $787 billion stimulus bill, which was this year’s business? Did the president make any hard choices? Maybe, but only because he would have liked one even bigger.
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President Obama’s claim that health care costs are growing so fast that “doing nothing is not an option” would be a little more believable if he could point to a country that has been able to “bend the curve” on health care spending.
Health care reform advocates constantly remind us that all the other industrialized nations spend less that the U.S. on health care, both in the aggregate and on a per-person basis. But that’s not because those countries are more efficient. Most simply limit the amount of funds available to the system.
The problem with those arbitrary health care spending caps is that they are usually much lower than the economically desirable level. And so there is constant upward pressure to raise the cap.
Germany—one of the oft cited models for U.S. reform—is experiencing that pressure. Created by Bismarck in 1883, it’s the oldest publicly sponsored model.
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There’s maybe 15 new taxes in Senator Harry Reid’s health care plan, including new taxes on:
- “Cadillac plans” (that is expensive, not necessarily rich-benefit plans);
- Medical devices and cosmetic surgery (oops, there went the Hollywood vote);
- Drug companies, health insurers and insurance executives;
- New limits on contributions to flexible spending accounts and increased penalties on non-qualified health savings account expenses;
- Individuals who don’t buy and employers who don’t provide health insurance;
- And, of course, high-income earners, and much more.
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Got Your Swine Flu Vaccination Yet? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says it’s a preview for government-run health care.
When fears of a swine flu epidemic emerged last spring, the federal government stepped in to ensure the H1N1 vaccine was available for every American—promising 120 million doses by mid-October.
But with government managing the effort the vaccine makers missed their deadlines.
So now the government is allocating the early doses to those most in need, while millions go without.
There’s a lesson here for those who think the government should take greater control over the health care system.
We’re seeing vaccine shortages, rationing, waiting lines and people dying for lack of medicine. And no one’s taking responsibility.
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Swine Flu |
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It’s time to expose the lie that the Blue Dog Democrats—a coalition of 52 supposedly fiscally conservative House Democrats—are concerned about federal spending and the budget.
So far this year, the House has seen four major spending bills. Here’s how the Blue Dogs voted:
- The $787 billion stimulus package. Ten of the 52 Blue Dogs, about 20 percent, voted with every Republican against the unprecedented spending bill.
- President Obama’s 2010 federal budget. In April Congress took a vote on the president’s $3.5 trillion budget for 2010—by far the biggest spending package in history. Again, not one House Republican voted for the bill, but only 14 Blue Dogs (27 percent) joined them in opposition.
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So this man or this woman on the public payroll wants out; that’s to say, the man wants to become a woman, or the woman wants to become a man. It’s the taxpayers’ duty to pay for it?
Not so as anyone ever thought before. On the other hand, it’s a crazy time, and there’s this big health care debate going on in Washington, D. C. So, yes, Fort Worth is considering adding sex change operations to health coverage for city employees. Which would make Fort Worth a little bit more like San Francisco, where public insurance plans have covered sex change procedures since 2001.
Our bet is, Fort Worth people aren’t going to let Fort Worth city government model local behavior on what passes for normal in California. Read More...
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Why Is No One Running the Medicare Program? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says the president may be avoiding some difficult questions.
Health care is important to President Obama, so you’d think after nine months in office he would have appointed someone to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
That’s the federal agency that manages the Medicare program for seniors and Medicaid for the poor. Together they cover about 85 million Americans.
But maybe it isn’t so strange. The appointment needs Senate approval, allowing senators to discuss Medicare’s $90 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Or why Medicare fraud is an estimated $60 billion or more a year.
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CMS |
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Most politicians would wince at being accused of trying to push the biggest tax increase in U.S. history.
But under President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress, the question isn’t whether but which tax increase—the “cap and tax” bill or the health care reform legislation—is the biggest in U.S. history.
At IPI we’ve been trying to decide ourselves, but there are so many variables, moving parts and unknowns it’s hard to know.
The Wall Street Journal said last June: “Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history.”
To support the claim, the Journal cited the Heritage Foundation’s analysis, which found Waxman-Markey, the House version of the cap and trade bill, “would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. Read More...
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Money, money, money—all we need right now is a whole lot more of it. To finance, say, congressional Democratic lust for spending more on health care.
The supposedly “moderate” Senate Finance Committee plan for health insurance overhaul figures on Texas picking up an additional $20 billion in Medicaid spending over the next decade. That’s to pay for another 2.5 million program enrollees, on top of the 2.9 million we have right now.
There are places in the U.S. where Medicaid pays for about half of the births. Yet one of Congress’s top solutions to solving the problem of the uninsured is expanding Medicaid to even more people.
Here’s another fun statistic. Texas taxpayers right now pay about 42 percent—$19 billion—of state Medicaid costs, with the feds picking up the rest. In the 2006-07 fiscal biennium it was $13.1 billion.
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Has Washington completely abandoned any effort to stay within the parameters established by the U.S. Constitution?
Last week we learned that then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis an ultimatum: Go forward with BoA’s proposed merger with faltering Merrill Lynch or the government would fire BoA’s executives.
Excuse me, but under which article of the Constitution did the American people give any administration that power?
Similarly, is there any constitutional authority for Washington bailing out Chrysler and GM, then taking them over when just a bailout didn’t work, firing the executives and implementing its own hand-picked board and executives?
Is there any constitutional authority for gathering email addresses on those who might disagree with the administration, otherwise known as “fishy emails,” and using them for who knows what?
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With all the political tricks flying around Washington this week you’d think it was Halloween, but we still have more than a week to go.
Last week, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) passed, to much fanfare, his health care reform bill. Much of the buzz around the bill is that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “scored” it as costing only $829 billion over 10 years. Democrats cheered.
(It goes to show you just how much ”change” the president has brought to Washington when you can preface $829 billion with the word “only” and no one laughs you out of town.)
But then it became clear that the only reason it came in under a trillion dollars is that the legislation didn’t include the “doc fix,” which costs some $240 billion or so. Read More...
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Somewhere lost in all of the heated rhetoric about whether or not to move the country to a government health insurance plan are the patients—those who are and who will be ailing but who could be helped by advances in technology if that technology were deployed and not hindered.
Lost in all the rhetoric is that all the pieces of health care must work together to work in the interests of patients—not politicians or bureaucrats.
While the healthcare reform debate goes on, other parts of government are acting to the detriment of a better healthcare system and causing near and long term harm to those whose future well-being depends on innovation.
Perhaps the greatest threat is the FCC’s newly suggested heavy regulation of the Internet. As currently proposed the new regulations could hinder network providers from giving priority to healthcare applications. Read More...
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Advocates of the national health care overhaul scrambling to raise the taxes to pay for it have floated the idea of imposing federal excise taxes on soda, fruit juice, and similar drinks. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a left-leaning advocacy group, wants to include energy drinks, sports drinks (e.g., Gatorade) and ready-to-drink teas as well.
But the tax would cover only a small fraction of any national health care bill. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that imposing a tax of 3 cents per 12-ounce serving would raise $6 billion a year. One proposal would increase the price of a 20-ounce soft drink by 15 percent to 20 percent.
Such a tax would be regressive, hitting the poor harder than the rich. The tax may not seem like much to Washington policymakers, but it adds up, especially for hard-pressed families in these difficult economic times.
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| Here’s a great idea for health care makeover—one you’ve heard precious little about from the Obama administration, which claims to be so determined about reducing health care costs: Redo the laws on medical liability, counsels Texas Sen. John Cornyn. And then sit back and watch malpractice premiums fall and overall expenses slump as the trial lawyer spiders look for other flies caught in the frivolous-lawsuit net. How would Cornyn know any such thing? By looking around Texas, of course. “We know a thing or two about this subject in Texas,” Cornyn wrote recently on a D.C. blog. It’s kind of an understatement actually. A decade ago, Cornyn related, “frivolous lawsuits and jackpot justice” were pushing up insurance costs and driving physicians out of the state. Fluent trial lawyers talked particular juries in particular localities into sticking it to doctors they portrayed as hardly human. Read More...
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Like all of the Democrats trying to push through health care reform with no way of paying for it, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) has been on a quest to find new revenue for his plan.
He was considering imposing a tax on employer health insurance contributions above a certain level, say $20,000 for a family. That means that a worker with dependant coverage whose employer spends $25,000 a year on the policy would have to pay normal income taxes on an additional $5,000. The first $20,000 would still be tax free.
Besides raising revenue to pay for the legislation, there was an expectation that employees would opt for higher deductibles in order to stay under the limit and avoid the additional tax, which would eventually help bend the health care cost curve by lowering utilization.
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Can Health Insurers Compete with a Government Plan? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says when the government’s accounting is so dishonest, who knows.
The real problem with a government-run health insurance option is the government would hide the costs, making it look more affordable than it actually is. We know, because that’s what Medicare does.
Medicare’s official administrative costs only count what it takes to process claims checks. Rent, salaries, management, even the numerous fraud investigations all appear in other parts of the federal budget.
Now some Democrats want to create a health insurance co-op with $6 billion of taxpayer seed money. If you were a private insurance company, you’d have to borrow the money and pay interest or sell stock.
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Public Option |
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After uncovering yet another troubling aspect of the current health care proposal, IPI recently wrote, “Because HR 3200 (the House of Representatives health care reform legislation) contains the most egregious violations of Americans’ privacy imaginable. Indeed, one way to characterize HR 3200 is as ‘The End of Privacy.’”
HR 3200 would protect your privacy right up to the point that it runs into the most disgruntled, curious or careless government employee.
Bad enough. But wow, did we miss the big story…
As it turns out, privacy is under attack from many new “programs,” creating a virtual pattern of turning a person’s private life into a public exposition. |
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How Do You Get Good Health Care in Great Britain? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says become a dog.
A British physician writes in The Wall Street Journal that his dog has a better health care system than most Brits.
In the privately funded animal system dogs can:
- Pick their doctor, and change veterinarians if the service is bad.
- Have no waiting line.
- Get treated immediately.
- And the Brits even have a safety net system for dogs with no money.
The British public isn’t so lucky. The government, which runs the health care system, wants to ensure that everyone is treated equally, which means everyone is treated equally bad.
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Dog's Health |
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President Obama says that his health care overhaul plan will reduce costs. But the career estimators at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) say it will actually increase federal spending by close to $1 trillion. President Obama keeps saying that his health plan will reduce the deficit. But CBO says it will increase the deficit by hundreds of billions.
So now liberals are arguing that the CBO actually has a history of overestimating health costs and underestimating savings. A New York Times op-ed, echoed by the Commonwealth Fund, insists that CBO underestimated the cost savings from reduced reimbursements in the past for hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health services, and from the market competition included in the 2003 Medicare prescription drug plan.
But the government’s official estimators actually have a long history of grossly underestimating the costs of new health programs.
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Is the White House Monitoring Your Political Discussions?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says the administration is looking for names....
The White House has released a video telling Americans that if they get an email about health insurance reform that seems “fishy” to send it to the White House.
That means the administration would have the email addresses, IP addresses, recipients of the email, and the allegedly fishy comments, which could be used to monitor future conversations or take other actions.
And yet the mainstream media seem oblivious to this potential threat to civil liberties.
Texas Senator John Cornyn has sent the White House a letter saying that he is unaware of any president ever asking Americans to report their fellow citizens for simply exercising their right to engage in political discussion.
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Fishy |
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The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” in a 1993 article for the academic journal The American Scholar. His point was that as deviant behavior expands the public begins to redefine and even accepting it by lowering the standard for acceptable behavior.
That’s pretty much were we are with the term “paid for.”
What most people mean when they say something is paid for is that they own it free and clear. Any money borrowed to buy the item has been paid back. No one who had just borrowed thousands of dollars against future earnings to buy a car or home would say it was “paid for.” Yet that is exactly how President Obama is redefining the term.
Last week he cited four things he had to have in the health care reform bill. One of those requirements was that it had to be “paid for.”
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From the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI)
Privacy advocates who enjoy focusing on issues like browser cookies, behavioral advertising, database privacy and deep packet inspection can just throw in the towel if anything approaching HR 3200, the current draft of the health care bill in the House of Representatives, becomes law.
Because HR 3200 contains the most egregious violations of Americans’ privacy imaginable. Indeed, one way to characterize HR 3200 is as “The End of Privacy.”
The bill creates a “Health Choices Commissioner” (henceforth sarcastically referred to as the Health Choices Commissar), and, of course, the Commissar needs to be able to pry into your finances. HR 3200 gives the Commissar the right to look at your tax return, so as to quickly determine your eligibility for services and for federal health care benefits.
Yes, it’s right there, on pages 195-196 Read More...
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Should We Pay Doctors More When They Do More?Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says it’s a lot better than the alternative.
President Obama claims that one problem in the health care system is that doctors get paid more for doing more, and he wants to change that economic incentive.
Of course, all kinds of professionals can be paid more for doing more, including accountants, therapists and trial lawyers. But we’ve heard precious little from this administration about changing the economic incentives for trial lawyers.
The president seems to have in mind the old HMO model, where doctors were paid a flat monthly fee per patient. If the patient didn’t need much care the doctor profited; if the patient needed lots of care, the doctor bore those costs.
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Paying Doctors |
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So Congress ponied up an extra $2 billion last week for the Cash for Clunkers program.
Our elected solons were stunned at how popular the program turned out to be. And they’re apparently eager to placate an increasingly restive public, angered by government overspending, by … spending even more.
There’s a lesson in the Cash for Clunkers program that Congress should learn—but probably won’t—with regard to its massive health care reform effort: When the government hands out free money for something the public wants, it will nearly always underestimate the demand for that money.
Yes, those who have stalked Washington for many years can cite some programs where people didn’t take advantage of free money, but that’s usually because the restrictions and bureaucracy made it difficult to navigate the program. The Cash for Clunkers program wasn’t just free money, it was easy money.
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Yesterday we learned that, in order to “stimulate the economy,” the federal government spent millions of dollars buying boiled ham. Pushing back against the public outcry, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack proudly proclaimed that his department had purchased the ham for the needy, and at $1.50 per pound.
It didn’t take long for people to point out that any shopper could purchase that same ham for (drumroll please) about 79 cents per pound.
So the federal government paid twice the market price for ham, right? No, it’s worse than that.
When you’re buying millions of dollars worth of ham, shouldn’t you be able to negotiate the best possible price? A price lower than the full retail price that any consumer pays at the grocery store? Isn’t it more likely that the Feds paid 3 or 4 times what they should have for boiled ham?
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President Obama has been taking some political licks for backtracking on his campaign opposition to taxing employee health benefits.
Good. He so demagogued a somewhat similar proposal by his opponent, Sen. John McCain, that the president should be taking some heat for—at least potentially—flip-flopping.
That said, capping the employee health insurance tax exclusion is one of those public policy issues that deserves a serious debate—and it’s not getting it.
The money employers spend on employee health coverage is excluded from employee income. Not taxing that employer-provided income “costs” the federal government nearly $150 billion a year, according to the Joint Tax Committee (for 2007). And those with the richest insurance packages get the biggest tax subsidy.
Now, the tax code is often used to encourage certain behavior (whether it should is a question for another day). Read More...
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One could blog every day with instances like this, where Canadians with health emergencies end up having to come to the U.S. for treatment.
A critically ill Hamilton preemie turned away from McMaster Children's Hospital is all alone in a Buffalo intensive care unit because her parents don't have passports to get across the border.
Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph's Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.
A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.
Her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, couldn't follow their baby because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States. Read More...
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We’ve been scanning the headlines for even a hint of media outrage and we’re coming up empty.
Where’s the headline complaining: “Democrats propose cutting Medicare, seniors to see decreased access to health care”?
We know the media aren’t unaware that Medicare cuts can hurt seniors, because they have always complained loudly—until this time.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) says he expects to find $1 trillion for health care reform, in part by cutting Medicare by $400 billion. President Obama has indicated that he too wants to cut Medicare.
So why aren’t the media asking whether such deep cuts will hurt seniors? They certainly picked up on the issue back in 1995, when then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed slowing Medicare’s rate of growth. Not “cutting” Medicare, mind you, just slowing its growth rate.
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Well, whatever else can be said about health care reform, it now seems clear it won’t be cheap.
Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, says he expects to raise $1 trillion for health care reform (over 10 years) by cutting Medicare and Medicaid spending by $400 billion (ouch!) and raising taxes by $600 billion (double ouch!!)
President Obama is putting a little detail in his proposed Medicare cuts.
- He wants to chop $106 billion from the disproportionate share hospital program. Actually, cutting the “DSH” program is reasonable. It’s federal money that reimburses certain hospitals that treat a “disproportionate” number of uninsured. If nearly everyone has coverage—and that’s a big IF—then reducing DSH payments makes sense.
- The president also wants to cut $110 billion by making “productivity adjustments” to Medicare providers. Read More...
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee, will soon introduce his disability program known as the CLASS Act.
If you were taking some consolation that Congress had spent so much money over the past few months that funding its remaining wish list, like health care reform, was impossible, well then unconsolate yourself. The CLASS Act could siphon out of the economy the estimated $1.2 trillion over 10 years for the Obama health plan, with billions to spare.
The legislation creates a new government-run disability program. All workers would be automatically enrolled. People could opt out—at least that’s what we’re being told now—but sponsors don’t expect many people to do that.
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Can the Government Help You Get Thinner? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says not if it’s getting fatter.
The Obama administration wants to spend billions of dollars pushing us to be healthy.
But the town of Sommerville, Massachusetts, has found an easy and inexpensive way to encourage healthier lifestyles. It changed some of the foods in the public schools, replacing French fries, candy and sodas with fresh fruit, skim milk and other healthy foods.
The city also built some bike and walking paths.
When the program started seven years ago, 44 percent of the elementary school children were either overweight or at risk of becoming so. Within just one year the city noticed significant weight changes among the children. Now other cities are adopting the model.
We don’t need the government monitoring our calories. Read More...
Fat Government |
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Is The Swine Flu Crisis Made Worse by the Uninsured? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says some politicians are using an epidemic to promote their agendas.
Some health care reform advocates are using the swine flu outbreak to claim that a government-run health care system would have minimized the problems. Everyone would have a family doctor rather than going to an emergency room.
But that’s just nonsense!
Family doctors are important, but accidents and illnesses often happen at nights and on weekends, when the doctor’s office is closed.
Plus, insured people frequently go to emergency rooms. One ER study found that 85 percent of the emergency room patients had insurance.
Yes, the ER can be overcrowded—and abused. A recent study in Austin, Texas, found that just nine people used the ER nearly 2,700 times in six years.
Read More...
Emergency Rooms |
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Can the Government Compare Medical Treatments? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says the government is better at comparing price than quality...
Congress recently created a 15-member committee whose job is to compare various types of medical treatments to determine which is the most effective.
It’s known as comparative effectiveness research.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with scientists comparing therapies and drugs to see which works best. The government has been doing that for years through the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.
The concern is that this new committee won’t just ask what works best, but also which procedures and treatments cost the least.
And when government budgets are tight, there will be a lot of pressure for the committee to choose the least-expensive therapies.
Read More...
CER |
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“Merger mania is gripping the global pharmaceutical industry” scream the headlines. Pfizer is buying Wyeth, Roche is buying Genentech, Merck is buying Schering-Plough, Gilead is buying CV Therapeutics, and GlaxoSmithKline is rumored to be considering purchasing Allergan.
The best way to understand all these pharmaceutical mega-mergers is to recognize an industry battening down the hatches against the coming tsunami of harmful government policies that are aligning against the innovative pharmaceutical industry.
The first is the Obama administration’s push for health care “reform.” The pharmaceutical industry has long been the scapegoat for high health care costs, despite the fact that drugs are responsible for only about 10 percent of all health care costs, and its growth rate is down to 4.9 percent, the lowest since 1963. Read More...
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Are You Living a Healthy Lifestyle? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says that some politicians think you will—if you have insurance...
Senators Edward Kennedy and Max Baucus published an article in The Wall Street Journal recently stating that once everyone has insurance, health care costs will go down. That’s because people will get the preventive care and timely treatments they need.
But 85 percent of the population already has health coverage, and yet a recent survey of large employers by Watson Wyatt found that: - Two-thirds of their insured employees have poor health habits; and
- Forty-two percent under utilize preventive care.
In other words, people with good health coverage often engage in unhealthy or risky behavior, or avoid getting the preventive care they need.
Read More...
Preventive Care |
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The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is open to the idea of taxing some employee health insurance benefits.
The Times continues by noting that such a tax might create some political difficulties for the president, since he ran campaign commercials criticizing his Republican opponent John McCain for proposing exactly the same thing.
Of course, there was one teeny, weenie little difference: McCain also proposed a $5,000 per-family refundable tax credit intended to offset the increase in taxable income. The Obama administration apparently would use the increased tax revenue to pay for its health care reform goal of providing universal coverage.
The current tax break for employer-provided coverage is unlimited; every penny the employer spends on coverage is excluded from an employee’s income.
Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed published today in the Detroit News, IPI resident scholar and health care expert Dr. Merrill Matthews discusses the merits of Medicare PartD over federal comparative effectiveness research.
Matthews writes:
President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package not only will take America one step closer to a European-style health care system, but a key provision could hamper access to health care.
The key provision is $1.1 billion going to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for so-called comparative effectiveness research or CER. Ostensibly, comparative effectiveness research is an effort to compare two or more prescription drugs or medical devices, or even medical procedures, to find out which ones are most effective with the fewest problems or side effects.
Read More...
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“If we want to create jobs and rebuild our economy, then we must address the crushing cost of health care this year, in this administration,” President Barack Obama recently claimed. “By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nation’s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care.”
The president’s claim—echoed by his Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag—is ridiculous.
Yes, we do spend more on health care than any other country, about 16 percent of our GDP. But we also spend more on cars than any other country, and the administration is trying to get us to buy even more of them—especially “green” cars.
The president says if we don’t buy more cars people will lose their jobs, and companies—especially the automakers—may close.
Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed published in American Spectator online, Peter Ferrara warns against the coming rationing of health care.
An excerpt: “Buried in Barack Obama's so-called stimulus bill is funding for a bureaucratic structure for the government to begin rationing the health care of the American people. A centralized government bureaucracy would be established that would ultimately have the power to decide what health care you can have, and when, especially when it involves highly expensive, advanced medical care for the seriously ill. Unless this is stopped, many of you reading this article right now will one day suffer death-by-liberalism, when the government bureaucracy decides that the health care you need is not worth the cost, or puts you in a waiting line where death will arrive before treatment. Read More...
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We thought we should highlight a recent USA Today story because, well, the public needs to know … and the politicians are trying to ignore it.
Millions of Americans are already concerned about the future of Social Security and Medicare—as well they should. According to the Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports, Social Security’s unfunded liabilities was an estimated $15.8 trillion in 2008, and $86 trillion for Medicare. That’s a total of $101.7 trillion (in today’s dollars) for both programs.
Yes, that’s “trillion” with a “T.”
Now USA Today tells us that states have retiree health care obligations totaling about $445 billion. Not all states, however. Read More...
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IPI resident scholar and health care expert Dr. Merrill Matthews will appear today on the USA Radio Network’s “Point of View” with hosts Kerby Anderson and Carmen Pate.
Dr. Matthews will be discussing the new health information technology provisions within the stimulus bill, and how this may affect patients and health care providers.
Listen live online from 1 pm to 3 pm CT. To read more about this topic in IPI’s new TechByte, “Up Close and Personal,” click here. Read More...
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The “stimulus bill” will throw $20 billion dollars at an effort to improve health information technology (IT). The idea is that if patient health data is digitized and formatted in standardized ways so that the data is easily exchanged and is interoperable with different systems, health outcomes should improve and efficiencies can be obtained.
And that’s almost certainly true (although we don’t think for a minute that it ought to be done through a bill claiming to provide short-term economic stimulus).
But when you digitize and standardize data, you don’t simply make it easily accessible, but you also make is EASILY ACCESSIBLE, if you take our meaning.
Health care providers should be able to transfer information efficiently, and that usually means electronically. Read More...
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IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara will appear this evening on Wisconsin’s “Vicki McKenna Show” to discuss Senate bill 334, “The Healthy Americans Act”—a real healthcare nightmare.
To listen live at 6:09 pm EST, visit WISN online at http://www.newstalk1130.com/main.html. Read More...
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Can Democrats Make the Health Care System More Efficient? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says they’ve never done it in Medicare, after 40 years...
Democrats say they want to make health care more affordable by reducing inefficiencies in the health care system.
But Medicare, the 40-year-old federal health insurance program for seniors, is riddled with fraud and inefficiency. And Congress has never fixed those problems.
The government estimates there is $60 billion of fraud in Medicare—every year.
- A recent government report found that Medicare paid as much as $92 million since 2000 for equipment supposedly prescribed by dead doctors.
- And a Justice Department strike force recently prosecuted 120 people for trying to bilk Medicare out of $400 million.
Read More...
Medicare Fraud |
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In American Spectator online, IPI’s Peter Ferrara takes on S. 334, “The Healthy Americans Act,” calling it a “health care nightmare,” and “an assault on the standard of living for the American middle class.”
Ferrara writes:
“There are roughly 8 million people in America without health insurance, who are not illegal immigrants, already eligible for coverage under Medicaid or other government health programs, or in families earning over twice the poverty level. This is out of a total U.S. population of over 300 million (less than 3%). But not to worry. The federal government is going to fix that problem by taking over and running the entire U.S. health insurance market. In the process, the government will tell you what health insurance you must buy, and send you the bill, to be paid on your income taxes. Read More...
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Out of the $825 billion House version of the proposed economic stimulus package, $157 billion is tagged for health care. But roughly 75 percent of that spending really does nothing for the uninsured. Rather, it goes to projects like:
- $20 billion to improve health information technology (HIT);
- $1 billion for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to create a comparative effectiveness research program that’s supposed to compare different medical devices, prescription drugs and specified medical procedures to see which are the most effective, including the issue of cost;
- $2 billion for renovations at NIH facilities and new agency research grants and $1.5 billion for renovations at university laboratories that conduct research sponsored by the agency;
There is $30 billion to help workers losing their jobs pay their COBRA premiums, but is that a good thing?
Read More...
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In a new op/ed featured this week in Massachusetts’ My Backyard News, IPI resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews explains why a new law in the Bay State could hurt biotech industry.
Matthews writes:
“The economy is in turmoil. So it’s more important than ever for state governments to support vital industries. But a new law could end up hurting the Bay State’s still-bustling biotech community.
Signed by Gov. Deval Patrick this past summer, the new law is designed to prevent drug and medical device companies from unduly influencing the decisions of physicians. Consequently, it bans certain gifts and requires the disclosure of any payments of $50 or more to physicians…”
Read More...
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Democrats have proposed an economic stimulus package that takes us one step closer to a system in which price controls determine innovation. The key provision is $1.1 billion going to the federal Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research for so-called “comparative effectiveness research,” or CER.
Ostensibly, comparative effectiveness research is an effort to compare two or more prescription drugs to find out which ones are most effective with the fewest side effects.
But there is a dirty little secret to CER when it comes to prescription drugs. When the government sets up a process to do the research, there may be an ulterior motive: to save money, even at the expense of patient health and satisfaction.
Read More...
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Dr. Merrill Matthews, IPI resident scholar and health care expert, is cited in a new medical news article discussing the pre-emption case recently heard in the Supreme Court, Wyeth v. Levine.
Lynne Jeter writes in "Healthcare Leaders Watching Supreme Court Case,":
Merrill Matthews, Jr., PhD, a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation, said the outcome of Wyeth could change how drugs are regulated in America.
"If the Supremes rule against Wyeth," said Matthews, "local juries and trial lawyers could become the de facto authority on drug safety in the United States."
The justices will determine whether the principle of preemption applies in matters of drug safety. (Preemption holds that federal law supersedes state law when there's a conflict between the two.)
Read More...
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Do You Need Some Vitamin C for that Cold? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says then we better not do what India’s doing.
The Times of India reports that the country is facing a growing shortage of vitamin C. The reason? The Indian government imposed price controls on the vitamin in an effort to make it more affordable.
But pharmaceutical companies making vitamin C tablets have seen the cost of the raw ingredients soar by 300 percent or more. That means it’s costing the companies more to make the tablets than they can charge for them. So they’ve quit making them.
While that vitamin C shortage may not affect the U.S., the economic policy behind it could.
Democrats in Congress think price controls will lower the cost of prescription drugs here. But the only thing price controls lower … is your chance of getting a product you need. Read More...
Vitamin C |
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During the presidential campaign Barack Obama claimed that under his tax plan 95 percent of working Americans would get a tax cut.
But given where President-elect Obama’s health care reform initiative is likely heading, it would be more accurate to say that every American will see a tax increase.
Obama was very careful to say during the campaign that he did not want to require every American to buy health insurance—known as an individual mandate—or pay a fine, as his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton wanted to do.
Rather, he claimed he would only impose a health insurance mandate on children. Of course, that’s a distinction with only a minor difference—since children don’t buy their own health insurance, their parents do.
Read More...
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The headline of the Nov. 18 company press release reads, “Two Thousand Companies Now Offering VPI [Veterinary] Pet Insurance as a Voluntary Employee Benefit.”
About now you’re probably wondering what in the world pet health insurance has to do with tax and fiscal policy. Say with us here.
Pet health insurance has been around for a number of years. Initially, the coverage was primarily intended for larger animals, such as reimbursing the owners for horse surgery and the like.
But as more expensive veterinary options have become available, and since there are a lot of people willing to pay thousands of dollars to do, say, joint replacement on a house pet, pet insurance has expanded.
Read More...
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Should politicians make health care decisions? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says it’s already happening . . . in Australia.
Dr. Bernhard Moeller moved from Germany to Australia two years ago to help the Australian government. He’s practicing in rural communities where few doctors want to go.
According to the Associated Press, everything was going well until Dr. Moeller applied for residency and the immigration department said . . . no.
See, Dr. Moeller has a 13-year-old son with Down syndrome. Although the boy’s well-adjusted, in school and likes to play sports, the government says his health care costs would pose a burden to taxpayers.
Australia, like Great Britain, has a government-run health care system—much like some politicians want for the U.S.
Read More...
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IPI resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews is featured today in the Washington Times with a brand new op/ed discussing President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to ensure universal health-insurance coverage.
In “A Recipe Already Doomed for Disaster,” Matthews writes:
“President-elect Barack Obama says his plan to ensure universal health-insurance coverage will lower family premiums by about $2,500 a year by the end of his first term - a roughly 20 percent reduction in the $12,000 cost of an average comprehensive family health-insurance policy.
While most health economists agree there is waste in the system - perhaps as much as 30 percent - the question is where is it and how to remove it? The Obama team suggests at least three areas for savings:
-- Computerizing medical records would save $77 billion. Read More...
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Dr. Merrill Matthews, resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation, is featured today in the Washington DC Examiner in a letter to the editor discussing the Wyeth v. Levine case recently heard in the nation’s top court.
Dr. Matthews writes:
“If the Supreme Court decides that federal law does not "preempt" state law in matters of drug safety, a flood of liability lawsuits could cause patients to lose access to critical medicines.
Just the threat of wasteful litigation can drive safe and effective products from the market. Take the case of the morning-sickness drug Bendectin. The National Enquirer reported 30 years ago - without evidence - that the drug caused birth defects. The story proved false, but lawsuits prompted by the unsubstantiated story forced the manufacturer to take the drug off pharmacy shelves. Read More...
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IPI resident scholar and health care expert Dr. Merrill Matthews is featured in The Buffalo News this week with a letter-to-the-editor discussing what’s at stake if the Supreme Court decides federal law does not ‘pre-empt’ state law in matters of drug safety.
Matthews writes:
“If the Supreme Court decides that federal law does not 'pre-empt' state law in matters of drug safety, a flood of liability lawsuits could cause patients to lose access to critical medicines. ("What does FDA approval mean?," People's Pharmacy column in the Oct. 30 News.) Just the threat of wasteful litigation can drive safe and effective products from the market. Take the case of the morning-sickness drug Bendectin. The National Enquirer reported 30 years ago, without evidence, that the drug caused birth defects. The story proved false, but lawsuits prompted by the unsubstantiated story forced the manufacturer to take the drug off pharmacy shelves. Read More...
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IPI resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews is featured today in the Denver Post with a letter to the editor regarding the case Wyeth vs. Levine, recently heard in the Supreme Court.
Dr. Matthews writes:
“If the Supreme Court decides that federal law does not pre-empt state law in matters of drug safety, a flood of liability lawsuits could cause patients to lose access to critical medicines. Just the threat of wasteful litigation can drive safe and effective products from the market. Take the case of the morning-sickness drug Bendectin. The National Enquirer reported 30 years ago — without evidence — that the drug caused birth defects. The story proved false, but lawsuits prompted by the unsubstantiated story forced the manufacturer to take the drug off pharmacy shelves. Read More...
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| IPI’s Dr. Merrill Matthews delivers a compelling argument today on Opposing Views, explaining why the U.S. should not adopt a single-payer health care system. Matthews writes: “Almost every claim proponents make about single-payer health care systems—where the government taxes the public and then pays their health care bills—is wrong, or at least should be qualified. They don’t cost less, but they do spend less. That’s an important distinction. The U.S. spends about 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care; most other developed countries with single-payer systems (or something close to it) spend between 8 percent and 12 percent of GDP. The key distinction is that in the single-payer countries the government, not the market, decides how much will be spent on health care. Read More...
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| IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara is featured today with a new op/ed discussing McCain’s middle class health tax cut versus Obama’s ‘socialized medicine’ in American Spectator online. Ferrara writes: “Under the McCain plan, if your employer pays for your health insurance, what the employer spends would be included in your taxable income. But then your family would get the $5,000 tax credit to offset any resulting tax. Suppose you are a middle class family in the 25% income tax bracket, and your employer pays $1,000 a month for your health insurance, $12,000 for the year. The resulting tax would be only $3,000, which would be more than covered by the $5,000 tax credit. So there would be no tax coming out of your paycheck due to the McCain plan. Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed published today in The Shreveport Times, IPI resident scholar and health care expert Dr. Merrill Matthews discusses a “step in the right direction” to protecting intellectual property rights and therefore the future of a critical new frontier in medicine—biologics.
Matthews writes: “Congress is currently debating a bill that would establish new rules for one of the most promising fields of medical technology this country has ever seen. The Pathway for Biosimilars Act includes new rules for intellectual property protection for "biologics," pharmaceutical drugs derived from living organisms. Most of what you think you know about traditional prescription drugs doesn't apply to biologics. They usually come in a vial, not a pill. They are as effective as they are complex; indeed they are effective because they are complex. Read More...
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In a brand new op/ed featured today in The Wall Street Journal, IPI resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews discusses the health insurance proposal from presidential candidate Sen. John McCain which would offer more options to the 45 million uninsured Americans by allowing health insurance policies to be purchased across state lines.
Matthews writes:
"Let's hope Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama understands more about financial markets than he does about health-insurance markets. But the initial evidence isn't promising. A recent kerfuffle between Mr. Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain concerned the interstate purchase of health insurance. Mr. McCain wants to allow people to buy health insurance across state lines. Read More...
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Can Increased Prevention Save Health Care Money? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says it will more likely cost money—and freedom...
Both Barack Obama and John McCain say they will reduce health care costs by focusing on prevention.
That means encouraging vaccinations, mammograms, prostate screening and other tests. And that’s good.
But while catching and treating diseases early is cheaper than waiting until they become a medical crisis, many actuaries say we can spend a lot more testing people than we’ll ever save catching diseases early.
Prevention also means helping people exercise, lose weight and stop smoking.
Of course, getting people to live healthier lifestyles would save money, but do you really want the government scrutinizing and even dictating your eating, drinking and exercising habits?
Read More...
Prevention |
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As we noted in July of 2007, Rwanda filed a curious notification to the WTO TRIPS Council to compulsory licensing (CL) HIV/AIDS medications, despite continuing to receive no-cost drugs (and related infrastructure assistance) and also having no ongoing TRIPS obligations with respect to patents.
At that time, I pointed this out I asked why Rwanda would devote any of its scarce resources to a purely political process, which, by necessity, would divert funds from the actual treatment of patients?
No one contradicted this assessment.
However, IPI did receive heartfelt concurrence from two actively engaged individuals echoing the view that the problem is not fundamentally patents. These commentators pointed to intricately and deeply connected issues of culture, gender-equity and, of course, poverty.
Read More...
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“The world's intellectual property system is broken, stopping lifesaving technologies from reaching the people who need them most in developed and developing countries, according to a report released in Ottawa today by an international coalition of experts.”
So says the grandiosely entitled “International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property.” But, in fact, the majority of these self-anointed experts hail not from international biotech hot-spots like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune but from various Canadian universities. And since the report was funded by the Canadian government, the “study” is really the perspective of the policy establishment in Canada, a nation that isn’t exactly known as a hotspot of IP production.
Read More...
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Dr. Merrill Matthews will appear live in-studio today from 2 to 3 pm ET on the USA Radio Network's "Point of View" with Kerby Anderson. Dr. Matthews will be discussing the grim reality of government funded health care system, as well as the differences between presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama's health care policies.
Listen live online from 2 pm to 3 pm ET here. Read More...
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Continuing protests destabilizing Thailand’s democratically elected government appear to enjoy tacit support from the military and from former military rulers. Given continuing threats to democracy in Thailand, it may be timely to recall some of the controversial policies of the former military junta, the last time around, like the abrogation of rule-of-law protections for private intellectual property rights, also known as compulsory licensing.
Compulsory licensing is controversial practice in which a country over-rides intellectual property rights (generally) associated with a brand name prescription drug. On review, it turns out, this counterproductive move had little or nothing to do with urgent public health needs, and everything to do with the junta’s need to bite the hands of multinational companies to further their political ends.
Read More...
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Dr. Merrill Matthews is featured today with a brand new op/ed discussing the differences in health care policy between Barack Obama and John McCain, entitled 'Competing Visions on Health Care.'
An excerpt: "Despite his image as a politician who transcends party boundaries, Barack Obama's health care platform is mostly composed of proposals long propounded by the Democratic mainstream. And it just won't work. Take his plan to expand Medicaid, primarily by adjusting the eligibility criteria to include families earning up to $84,800 a year. Many patients already enrolled in Medicaid can't get medical care. Administrators have made major cuts to reimbursement rates, to the point that many physicians lose money on Medicaid patients. In New York, for example, physicians earn just $20 for 60-minute consultations with Medicaid patients. Read More...
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IPI resident scholar and health care expert Dr. Merrill Matthews is featured with a brand new op/ed on Townhall.com discussing “The Failures of Government-Run Healthcare.”
“Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, in a rare moment of honesty on what he’d really like to do about health care reform, recently asserted that if we were starting from scratch he would probably choose a single-payer health care system.
That’s a system in which people pay higher taxes and the government pays most medical bills.
Obama’s not alone in that opinion. Filmmaker Michael Moore took his “Sicko” audience to England, among other places, where we learned that doctors in that single-payer system made good salaries, had nice homes and cars, and patients were very satisfied.
Read More...
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Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation wonders who’s writing prescriptions from beyond the grave
Congressional investigators recently announced that the Medicare program, which provides health coverage for 44 million seniors, paid $92 million since 2000 for wheel chairs and other home medical equipment.
What’s strange, though, is that the prescriptions for that equipment came from doctors . . . who are dead. And about half of them have been dead for more than five years.
Somebody’s making some money out there, but it’s not those doctors.
People who want a government-run health care system say the government is more efficient than private sector health insurers. It pays medical bills faster and spends less in administrative costs to do it.
Health insurers do spend more money scrutinizing medical claims, but at least all the doctors those insurers pay are alive.
Read More...
Dead Docs |
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How Big Is Your Waistline?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says it makes a difference . . . if you live in Japan.
When the government pays for health care, it has a vested interest in making sure its citizens are healthy—whether they like it or not.
That’s why the Japanese government recently passed legislation requiring everyone between the ages of 40 and 74—56 million people—to have their waistlines measured regularly.
The maximum waistline for men is 33.5 inches. That’s the maximum. For women it’s 35.4 inches.
Those whose waistlines are larger will have three months to shape up, or undergo what’s being called “reeducation.”
Those who persist in ignoring the will of the government will face fines and other penalties.
Read More...
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The government determines how much it pays doctors for seeing Medicare patients, so you know that’s going to create problems.
For several years now, doctors have faced a cut in how much Medicare pays them, with the current scheduled cut at 10.6 percent. But the Congress always manages to come up with a temporary bipartisan fix to postpone the pay cuts.
This time, however, Democrats are claiming that Senate Republicans are blocking legislation that would postpone the scheduled pay cut—and they are, by one vote in the Senate. But there’s a reason.
Democrats want to “pay” for the pay-cut postponement by cutting the Medicare Advantage program, and a handful of Republican senators have said no.
Read More...
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In a new op/ed published in the Washington Times, IPI resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews discusses how high-risk pools may offer some hope for ‘The Uninsurable.’
An excerpt:
"While much of the health care reform debate centers on the 47 million uninsured Americans, there is an equally important subgroup that must be part or the solution - the uninsurable - i.e., those who have been denied health insurance coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition, or whose condition results in premiums much higher than the standard.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (and also Hillary Clinton and even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican) has said he would forbid insurers from denying anyone who applied. In health insurance parlance that's known as "guaranteed issue." Read More...
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IPI director of entitlement and budget policy Peter Ferrara is featured today in the American Spectator with a new op/ed entitled, “Free Market Universal Care.”
In the piece, Ferrara discusses a new bipartisan Senate bill that he says is “a complete government takeover of health insurance,” that would raise Federal taxes and spending by $10 trillion over the first ten years.
An excerpt:
“Universal health care can be guaranteed to all while making government smaller rather than bigger. This arose out of the best thinking from conservative health care policy analysts as far back as the enormous debate and victory over the Hillary health care plan in 1993-1994. The public does demand a social safety net that does not let anyone suffer without essential health care. Read More...
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Massive government spending and entitlement programs create opportunities for fraud. Nevertheless, never underestimate the ability of politicians to claim against all evidence that their new entitlement will be the exception.
A perfect example is Barack Obama’s claim that once president, his sweeping health care reform proposal will save billions of dollars, in part by getting rid of “waste, fraud and abuse.”
If only it were so.
Just last week Attorney General Michael Mukasey praised federal and state law enforcement efforts in trying to stem the wave of Medicare fraud, especially in medical devices.
It’s a really BIG wave.
Since a Medicare anti-fraud strike force began targeting South Florida, 200 people have been arrested responsible for an estimated $638 million in false claims.
Read More...
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In 2006, the World Health Organization launched its International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT). The reason and importance behind this effort was clearly and succinctly captured in an IMPACT-produced brochure that reads, “Counterfeit Drugs Kill.”
How curious and disappointing then it is to see some influential nations oppose the IMPACT effort, and, in fact, question entirely the need for WHO and leading nations to step up efforts to combat the deluge of dangerous, illicit medicines.
At the recent World Health Assembly in Geneva, a group of developing countries that included India, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Thailand thundered loudly against the WHO’s IMPACT initiative because it may stand in the way of the parallel trade of generic manufacturers. Read More...
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There was an interesting exchange at a reception held in Geneva this week by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA).
A Q&A session ensued after presentations on the challenges of developing and distributing medicines for neglected diseases by Dr. Chris Hentschel, President and CEO of Medicines for Malaria Venture, Dr. Bernard Pecoul, Executive Director, Drug for Neglected Diseases Initiative and Dr. Paul Herrling, Head of Corporate Research for Novartis.
Jamie Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, asked whether the panel supported the (his) proposal for replacing the current structure of IP-based innovation and development with some mix of a global R&D fund and prize structure for new medicines.
Several good points where made, all of which cast doubt on Love’s proposals. Read More...
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The World Health Assembly in Geneva is this week’s forum for those seeking to roll back incentives for innovation and strip away the value of intellectual property.
As predicted, a range of activist NGOs (non-governmental organizations) were back to pick up on a battle against intellectual property that had delivered them some notable setbacks in recent weeks. These setbacks include the election of Frances Gurry to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization and a recent meeting of the World Health Organization’s Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property that failed to embrace their agenda of targeting the global patent system. But the anti-IP crowd is already flying in the face of established trade policies, decades of proven innovation models and a proliferation of expansive programs by the private sector to provide access to medicines, so a couple recent losses are probably not that big of a deal. Read More...
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In a new op/ed published today in the Washington Times, IPI Resident Scholar Merrill Matthews describes how the availability of health insurance coverage may be affected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ current review of federal laws limiting wide-reaching health care reforms at the local and state levels.
An excerpt:
Federal law severely limits state and local efforts to pass sweeping health care reform legislation. But a case now being reviewed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, regarding a San Francisco law that forces employers to provide health insurance or pay the city an assessment, could change all of that. And in so doing, it might fundamentally change the availability of good health insurance coverage.
Unwilling to wait on federal health care reform legislation, several states have taken their own steps.
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Would You Like to Pay for Health Insurance with that Hotdog, M’am?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says in San Francisco you may not have a choice.
San Francisco is the first city in the country to pass a universal health insurance program to cover the uninsured. Employers with 20 or more employees have to provide coverage.
And who’s going to pay for it? Why, consumers, of course.
The Los Angeles Times reports that some restaurants are raising their prices.
A popular Mexican food restaurant has added a 3.5 percent surcharge to every food bill. Along with a note on the menu saying it’s to cover the health insurance program.
Another restaurant is adding 4 percent to the bill. And one has a flat fee or one or two dollars per person. It’s enough to give you heartburn.
Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but Read More...
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Dr. Larry Hunter is featured in the Denver Post today with a new op/ed on the dangers a potential move by Congress would have on the economy should the legislative body institute a “forced sale” of prescription drugs by the American drug manufacturing industry.
An excerpt:
More than seven in 10 economists believe that the United States has already slid into recession, according to a recent forecasting survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal. Imagine if, in the face of such a downturn, federal lawmakers were on the verge of forcing an entire industry to sell an unlimited amount of product at a loss. Sound too Orwellian to be true? Well, that's exactly what some congressmen are trying to do. Read More...
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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain has proposed a radical reform for the tax treatment of health insurance. He would eliminate the current employer tax exclusion (i.e., employees do not count as income the money employers spend on employee health insurance; it is “excluded” from income) and replace it with a refundable tax credit: $2,500 for an individual and $5,000 for a family.
Critics of the McCain proposal—and they are legion—say that a $5,000 tax credit for a family doesn’t come near covering the cost of the average family policy, about $12,000 a year.
But to make that claim is to display a woeful ignorance of how the current tax exclusion affects a family’s income tax bill.
Consider, for example, a family making $60,000 a year, which has an employer-provided policy that costs $12,000 a year.
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In a new op/ed published in the Tucson Citizen, IPI senior fellow Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter discusses a great canard coming from Washington regarding the costs of prescription drugs.
Several lawmakers are pledging lower costs for Americans on prescription drugs if Congress legalizes the importation of foreign price-controlled drugs. Hunter calls this a “false promise guaranteed to backfire.”
An excerpt:
If you liked waiting in line for gas in the 1970s, you'll love what's coming next from Washington.
A number of lawmakers, including Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, have pledged to legalize the importation of prescription drugs from countries where price controls are imposed with the promise that it will lower costs for American consumers. But it is a false promise guaranteed to backfire.
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Maybe, just maybe, Great Britain is finally getting serious about welfare reform.
The country has certainly been talking about welfare reform for years. But talk’s cheap; welfare isn’t.
A recently released government report, the largest of its kind ever done, has quantified the extent of the problem. According to the report, illness and disability claims cost Great Britain more than £100 billion a year.
Currently, some 2.6 million Brits are on “incapacity benefit,” those determined by a doctor to be unfit to work. According to David Freud, the government’s welfare reform advisor, 1.9 million of them have no business being there.
In the Welsh town of Merthyr, just outside of the capitol Cardiff, 20 percent of the working-age population is on incapacity benefit. That’s one out every five adults, unable to work.
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Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have proposed Americans should be able to enroll in the same health care plans as offered to members of Congress, known as the Federal Employees Heath Benefits Program (FEHBP). A similar plan has just been introduced in the House. But how much would that cost taxpayers?
In a new op/ed featured today in the Washington Times, IPI Resident Scholar and Health Care expert Dr. Merrill Matthews discusses the price tag for the plan and asks, “Is it reasonable to ask taxpayers to pay for it?”
An excerpt:
The Democratic presidential candidates are suggesting that Americans should have access to health insurance just like members of Congress, and propose allowing them to enroll in the lawmakers' program, known as the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). Read More...
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In a new article today, "What Matters to Voters: The Price of Health Care," Forbes’ Carl Lavin reports on the campaign trail, discussing concerns held by voters about the costs of universal health care and citing yesterday’s op/ed by IPI senior fellow Lawrence A. Hunter, “A Price Control By Any Other Name.”
An excerpt: “The 3 AM call that rings loudly for most Americans isn't about national security, it's about a sick child or an elderly relative with an urgent health problem. In November, swing voters will be deciding whether the Democratic candidate's plan for universal health care provides needed relief or imposes too much government involvement. Read More...
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In a new op/ed featured today on Forbes.com, IPI Senior Fellow Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter discusses how prescription drug “price negotiation” policies promised by the current presidential candidates may cost patients more than they think.
An excerpt:
In recent weeks, the presidential candidates have been competing with each other to see who can be toughest with the nation's drug companies. "I'm running on having taken on the drug companies and the health insurance companies," Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., declared during a New Hampshire debate. At the same debate, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., vowed to bring drug companies to the table to "negotiate" lower prices for prescription drugs. Read More...
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You Do the Math (and You Won’t Like It)
We don’t really know yet how much taxpayers will have to cough up for Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to fulfill their promise to get every American covered with health insurance. But it’s possible to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.
And it appears, well, let’s just say it won’t be cheap.
Both candidates say they would let the uninsured (anyone, actually) join the program that covers some 8 million federal employees and retirees and their dependents—or something similar— known as the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP).
While lots of private sector health insurers offer coverage under the FEHBP, one of the most popular is the Blue Cross Blue Shield “Standard Family” plan, which costs $1,028 a month, or $12,336 for this year.
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"What I try to do every day is figure out how to help somebody. . . But you can try to help somebody every single day. And I’ve tried to do that as a public servant, as an activist, and now as a senator, and that’s what I will do as president.” (Hillary Clinton presidential ad)
Call us old fashioned. Or maybe call us Constitutionalists. But we can’t for the life of us figure out why or when the presidency morphed into the Salvation Army.
The president of the United States is the leader of the free world, not the leader of a charity. The Commander-in-Chief, not Mother Teresa. The one trying to grow the economy, not grow economic dependency.
When he was running for president, Bill Clinton liked to say “I feel your pain”: apparently his wife thinks she feels everyone’s pain.
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In case you’ve forgotten recently why not so long ago many conservatives could not abide Senator John McCain, read the transcript of George Stephanopoulos’s interview with him Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
When asked, what would differentiate a McCain Administration from that of George W. Bush, the first thing out of the Senator’s mouth was “global warming.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “Both Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama are basically saying, ‘Vote for John McCain, you're voting for a third Bush term.’”
MCCAIN: “We will wage this campaign on profound and significant philosophical difference. . .How am I different? Climate change. Climate change is an issue.”
Not only does the Senator embrace the dubious evidence of man-made global warming as scientifically sound and settled, he also reveals a remarkable misunderstanding of the basic precepts of economics when he talks about the issue. The heir presumptive to the Republican presidential nomination told Stephanopoulos that capping and trading carbon emissions would actually be beneficial economically—a new profit center for American business, as it were: Read More...
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Yes, that sounds a little strange, but those deficits may be the only thing that saves us from what we referred to in the 1990s as HillaryCare.
Today, HillaryCare has many iterations, from the Democratic presidential candidates, to reform proposals in Congress, to legislation already passed in Massachusetts and being considered by other states. They all look for ways to impose the heavy hand of government on health care.
But the heavy hand isn’t what’s slowing them down. It’s the cost of the heavy hand.
Take California, for example. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) made a pact with the liberal Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Nunez (D)—never a good sign!—to pass a massive new health care reform plan based on the Massachusetts legislation. But with a lot more new taxes. You might call it Massachusetts on steroids.
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| In a new oped published in the Press-Enterprise newspaper, “Reckless Prescription,” Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter discusses the prescription drug re-importation debate, shedding light on price controls and the “consumer-savings myth.” An excerpt: “A growing number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill mistakenly believe prescription-drug prices would decline if U.S. pharmacies and drug wholesalers were allowed to re-import prescription medicines from abroad. With drugs, lawmakers see the obvious: that medicines retail for less in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several European countries than they do here. But they don't see why. Consequently, they leap to the erroneous conclusion that pharmaceutical companies must be gouging American consumers. Read More...
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Dr. Merrill Matthews’ latest oped "Is Romney's Healthcare Plan Conservative?" is featured today in Human Events.
In the piece, Matthews discusses the presidential hopeful and former governor’s effort to pass universal health care coverage in the state of Massachusetts last year, and how the reform stacks up with conservative principles.
An excerpt:
“A recent headline in the Boston Herald said, “Republican rivals try to rough up Romney over Massachusetts healthcare.”
That headline was a reference to former Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s successful effort in 2006 to pass “universal” health insurance coverage in Massachusetts.
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IPI Resident Scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews is featured today in the Wall Street Journal.
In his new oped, “A Health-Insurance Solution,” Matthews discusses the reintroduction of the “The Health Care Choice Act” in Congress by Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona, and how the bill may increase competition and consumer choice when it comes to health insurance.
An excerpt:
"Why can't people living in New Jersey buy health insurance available to residents of, say, Pennsylvania?
Rep. John Shadegg, an Arizona Republican, thinks they should -- and today will reintroduce legislation to make that possible.
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Democrats have become eager—really eager—to do something about the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) before it forces millions of upper-middle-income Americans to pay more taxes this year.
Republicans, well, not so much.
That may strike a few people as odd, since Republicans have for years been calling for an end to the AMT, or at least reforming it or indexing it for inflation so that it doesn’t threaten to hammer more and more Americans every year. But those perplexed may not have seen the recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
According to the BLS, New Yorkers—and specifically those working in Manhattan—have the highest incomes in the country, making an average of $147,000 annually for the first quarter of 2007. Read More...
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| IPI Senior Fellow Dr. Lawrence Hunter is featured today with a new oped in American Spectator entitled, “Hillary Hoists GOP by its Own Petard.” In the piece, the author discusses how Hillary Clinton’s new health care plan “builds on the misguided principles espoused by Republicans themselves,” such as Mitt Romney’s plan for Massachusetts and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan for California. An excerpt: Generals fight the last war, and politicians run against their opponents' historical records. So it's no surprise that the Republican Party is dredging up the specter of "HillaryCare" in response to Sen. Clinton's latest health-care reform proposals. This is a mistake. HillaryCare 2.0 is a very different creature than the stillborn beast Clinton unveiled to widespread scorn in 1993. Read More...
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IPI Resident Scholar and Health Care Expert Dr. Merrill Matthews is featured in the Wall Street Journal with a new oped entitled, “Hillary’s False Claims.”
In the piece, Matthews discusses the presidential hopeful’s false claims about the private-sector health insurance industry.
An excerpt:
“Earlier this week, campaigning in New Hampshire, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton asserted that health insurance companies spend $50 billion to avoid paying claims. "This is all part of their business model," she was quoted as saying. "This is how they make money, but it's so bad for the rest of us. I say to them, use the $50 billion to actually take care of people."
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One of the criticisms we constantly hear from the critics of the pharmaceutical industry is that they "put profits ahead of patients."
Their heroes, on the other hand, are the health ministers of developing countries, like Thailand, who "stand up" to the greedy pharmaceutical companies.
It's a common stereotype--the government person who is trying to "help" through government power is the good guy, while the people who are trying to accomplish things through corporate organizational structures are evil, greedy and untrustworthy.
Well, let's take a look at that.
The Minister of Health in Indonesia, Ms. Siti Fadilah Supari, has famously refused to supply key samples of the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus to international researchers because she sees these virus samples as part of Indonesia's "genetic and biological resources."
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IPI Senior Research Fellow Dr. Lawrence Hunter is featured today in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel discussing the costs of medicine and the issue of drug reimportation.
An excerpt:
Are drug prices spiraling out of control? Absolutely — according to some of America’s political leaders. In most cases, they'd like to fix the problem by foisting a government-run healthcare system upon us.
But a look at the facts reveals that we’re being misled. Drug prices are falling in inflation-adjusted terms.
The Labor Department just released numbers showing that nominal drug prices rose one percent since last September.
Moreover, it’s nearly two full percentage points below overall inflation. And it’s 3.5 poits less than medical-care inflation.
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At the World Health Organization, where a handful of Marxist NGOs have manipulated developing countries to push for the elimination of patents on pharmaceutical and medical products (much more on that later), the Mexican delegation is standing up for innovation and sound economic thinking.
I think a trip to Mexico City to give them all medals should be a part of my future travel plans.
Here is the anti-IP language that Mexico is rightly seeking to have deleted from the final document that will be produced by the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health:
"Intellectual property, investment or trade agreements should not prevent a country from adopting measures necessary to prevent anti-competitive practices that may result from the abuse of intellectual property rights." (Mexico suggests delete)
" . . . urge active and effective participation of health representatives in IP-related negotiations in order to ensure Read More...
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Making Drugs Cheaper . . . or Not
At least no one can say we weren’t warned.
Several of the Democratic presidential candidates have said that if elected president, they would impose price controls on prescription drugs.
Well, to be fair, they didn’t say it exactly like that. Rather, they are using euphemisms like “increase competition” or “allow the government to negotiate prices with prescription drug manufacturers.”
Here’s a quick test for those of you on Medicare: Next time you go to see your doctor, ask how much “negotiating” goes on between your physician and the government over how much the government will reimburse for that visit.
Even if the candidates don’t say “price controls,” that’s what they mean. Read More...
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Now You See It; Now You . . .
You know, a person could be forgiven for wondering who’s running the show—or if anyone is running the show—over at the White House.
You will recall that in 2003, the Bush administration pushed through—and we do mean “pushed”—the Medicare Modernization Act, which provided a new prescription drug benefit for every senior.
First, let it be said that the program has worked much better than some of us had predicted, thanks in no small part to the administrative efforts of then-Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mark McClellan.
But the administration met with a lot of resistance from conservatives at the time because the drug plan included everyone, regardless of income. There was some minor means-testing introduced in the bill. Read More...
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California's Santa Ynez Valley Journal features IPI Senior Fellow Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter's oped "The Fatal Conceit of America's Lawmakers".
An Excerpt:
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Read Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter's latest oped, "Supporters of Drug Re-importation are TRIPping," published by Georgia's The Post-Searchlight newspaper.
An excerpt:
Congress is soon expected to consider whether U.S. consumers should be able to purchase medicines from abroad.
The legislation to allow drug re-importation is expected to include a provision that represents one of the most destructive government interventions into free markets since the New Deal.
Called "forced sale," the provision would compel American companies to sell drugs to any foreign re-seller planning to re-import them back into the United States, and they will be required to sell them at a price and in quantities dictated by the U.S. government.
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| Read Dr. Lawrence Hunter’s latest oped published this week in Pennsylvania’s Phoenixville News. In “The Lawmaker’s Conceit,” Dr. Hunter discusses new plans to “fix” America’s healthcare system. Read More...
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Today we get another reminder of all of the wonderful benefits that we Americans are missing out on because we don't have government-run universal health care.
According to this news report, the Nirvana of British health care includes nurses not having time to wash their hands, and not having time to wash excrement off of patients' bodies.
The result of this lack of basic hygiene in government-run British hospitals is the death of at least 90 patients from an infectious "superbug."
It's not just me calling it a lack of basic hygiene. That's exactly the phrase in the official UK government report.
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| Check out Dr. Larry Hunter’s latest oped published this week in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. In the piece entitled, “Hillary’s health care bomb could blow up a good system,” Hunter analyzes Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton’s latest proposal for a universal health care system.
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Late last week, I wrote a commentary on this blog that concluded:
“Give Hillary credit for her political wiles—she is positioning herself to hoist the Republicans on their own petard, stealing their ill-conceived ideas and making it increasingly difficult for even a Republican majority (which few people believe will return in 2008 anyway) to resist. Hillary’s new [health care] plan is really just a refinement and extension of the framework Republicans have pieced together during the past several years. . .Why is anyone surprised that Hillary is about to beat the Republicans at their own game and make them an offer they can’t refuse? It would be funny if the consequences weren’t going to be so gruesome.”
Now comes confirmation of exactly what I said. Read More...
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In listening to all the experts pro and con on whether the President should veto the SCHIP bill two issues remain virtually undiscussed.
First this is a tax increase. It really doesn't matter what the tax is on, the fact remains that it is a tax increase. One thing that President Bush Senior learned was that when you say you're not going to raise taxes the public tends to take you at your word and gets very testy when you renege on that promise. If you don't believe that check the 1992 election results.
President Bush Junior understands that and is passionate about his opposition to any increases in taxes. And anyway what's wrong with vetoing on principle? No he hasn't vetoed any fiscal legislation for his first six years but we should applaud his resolve even late in his presidency
The second point is about expectations. When you finance a program like children's health insurance on a tax for which there is likely to be a reduction in revenue over time due to a decrease in the use of the base that is taxed - i.e. tobacco - then somewhere along the line you are going to have to find a revenue replacement. It doesn't matter whether there is enough revenue for the next five years (according to the Congressional Budgeting Office), sooner or later this revenue source -- tobacco taxes--is going to dissipate -- like tobacco smoke! Congress is certainly not going to say, "Sorry kids there's been a reduction in smoking so we don't have enough money to fund your health insurance!" It'll never happen. Read More...
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Read Peter Ferrara’s new oped in National Review Online today calling for the veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
Ferrara challenges the President to make good on his pledge to veto expansion of SCHIP, a program Ferrara says was created supposedly to help poor children get health insurance, but now would “finance subsidies to families earning as much as $82,000 a year.”
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Generals tend to fight the last war and politicians are predisposed to run against the historical records of their opponents. Thus, it is not surprising to see Republican candidates for the presidency beginning to run against “HillaryCare” in response to Senator Hillary Clinton’s recently released national health care proposal.
No matter what newspaper or web site you open these days there seems to be another conservative critique of Hillary’s new health care proposal that condemns it by associating it with the Senator’s 1994 plan. A welcome exception to this proclivity is Kevin Hassett’s recent critique that, for the most part, confines the analysis to Clinton’s current plan.
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Read Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara’s latest oped today in National Review Online.
In the piece, Ferrara speaks out against Hillary’s health care initiative, saying her proposal would ration health care and “end any real private insurance in America”.
An excerpt:
The new Hillary health-care plan is very different from the old 1993-1994 Hillary plan. It is far slyer, and far cleverer, far more well-packaged. The same arguments that applied to the old Hillary plan do not necessarily apply to the new plan. But the new health plan ends up in the same place as the old health plan — with the government running everything.
Visit NRO to read the entire article. Read More...
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Check out Peter Ferrara's new oped published today on Forbes.com.
Ferrara examines not only the current push towards a national health care system, substantiated by the Democrats' move to double the amount of federal spending on SCHIP, but also discusses the positive moves Congress should make to reduce federal spending on health care.
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IPI Research Fellow and economist Larry Hunter appears in the State Journal-Register of Springfield, IL this week, explaining why price controls on the health care industry don’t work.
An excerpt: Sens. Clinton and Obama are only two of the many politicians who fail to see the consequences of ill-conceived government regulations in response to the rising cost of health care. “Harnessing the free market” on prescription drugs may make for good campaign copy, but its byproducts are real. Few economists doubt that price controls would lead to higher prices and rationing and also would discourage research spending on new life-saving and life-extending medications. Visit the State Journal-Register for the full text of the article. Read More...
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Explaining why Mitt Romney would be more successful in reforming health care as president than he was as governor of Massachusetts, Romney economic advisor Glenn Hubbard (former Bush Council of Economic Advisers Chairman) said:
"Massachusetts didn't have the federal tax code to play with."
Oh boy, so much for principled, comprehensive tax reform. It's pretty depressing when one of the Republican front runners is being advised to "play with" the federal tax code as a machine for social engineering.
And what exactly does Hubbard advise Romney to do about health-care per se? The best way to answer that question is to look at what he proposed in a book co-authored with John Cogan and Daniel Kessler ( Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System, Read More...
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Read Dr. Merrill Matthews' latest oped published today in The Wall Street Journal.
Resident Scholar and health care expert Matthews discusses how government attempts to regulate costs and put price controls on the health care industry only leave society to reap the consequences of an arbitrarily-budgeted, politically-driven system.
“There is not one government-funded health care system that is considered adequately funded by those who have to deal with it,” writes Matthews, referring to nations such as Canada, England and France, often-lauded by universal-health care supporters.
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On Monday, August 6th, the Madras High Court dismissed Novartis’ petition, which had challenged the constitutional validity of Section 3(d) of the Indian Third Patent Amendments (2005).
For a detailed outline of technical aspects of the case, Shamnad Basheer has posted his analysis at the Spicy IP blog.
MSF and other affiliated NGOs cited the Indian provision in question, known for as “3(d)” for the number of the provision, as essential to promote public health as it creates a higher hurdle for patentability. Read More...
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An FDA panel has decided not to follow a recommendation that GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia be taken off the U.S. market.
The concern was raised that the drug increased the risk of heart attack in diabetes patients. The review panel apparently agreed with that assessment, but thought it would be “draconian” to remove it completely.
There has been a long-running concern that the FDA’s panel errs on the side of patient safety; it should err on the side of patient choice.
By being overly restrictive, the panel inserts itself in between the doctor-patient relationship and it can remove the last vestige of choice some patients might have. Rather, the panel should be guided by three fundamental principles:
· Do doctors and their patients want access to a particular drug because they are finding it effective?
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Read IPI Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara's latest op/ed published today in National Review Online. In it, Ferrara discusses Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama's proposed plan to combat urban poverty, entitled "Impoverished Poverty Program."
Although Obama's received accolade for this $6 billion proposal, Ferrara says these intiatives are not only outdated, but deficient and a waste of taxpayer dollars.
The solution to fighting poverty is not escalating the size of government programs and spending billions more for micro-initiatives, but rather empowering the poor by promoting private accounts, adopting school choice and providing vouchers for private health insurance instead of Medicaid. Read More...
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Read Larry Hunter's new op/ed in the Boston Herald.
Hunter’s led a discussion on the numerous attempts politicians from both sides of the aisle are making to "fix" America's health care system by encroaching upon the market.
“In pursuit of a health care utopia through bogus economic policy prescriptions,” Hunter says reforms such as Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts universal health insurance coverage plan and Hillary Clinton’s proposal to put price controls on prescription drugs could sicken the system, and “politicians… would be wise to find a little humility.”
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Sometimes you just have to groan at the hypocrisy in the battle over access to prescription drugs.
Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) has just published a new study in AIDS, the Official Journal of the International AIDS Society.
The new study looks at Thailand’s and Brazil’s recent efforts at compulsory licensing two anti-HIV drugs, liponavir and ritonavir. The article claims that Brazil paid too much—perhaps four times too much—when it negotiated a settlement with a drug manufacturer. Thailand got a much better price by compulsory licensing the drugs.
MSF’s point? Thailand has the model for other middle-income countries.
At lease that what I think the article says.
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Political rhythms would suggest that 2008 will be a banner year for Democrats. Republicans have held the White House for 8 years with a now unpopular incumbent. They held the Congress for longer until recently. At some point, voters just want to try a change.
The Democrats, however, are quite vulnerable because they are not offering voters a change. Completely captive to their far left, they are offering a nostalgic rollback to the 1960s, or even the 1930s.
If Republicans are going to take advantage of this, however, they are going to have to offer a positive, even populist message that speaks to voters’ basic concerns. To rally the nation to their side, the Republicans need a deeply appealing economic growth message. Indeed, such a credible message is the key to appealing to all the important voter base groups that are currently weak for Republicans – younger voters, Hispanics, African Americans, labor.
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On May 29, 2007, Hillary Clinton gave a major economic policy speech at the Manchester School for Technology in New Hampshire. Free market advocates ignore that speech at their peril.
What was shocking about it to me is that it started off with Jack Kemp themes about prosperity, particularly for working people. Indeed, the title of the speech was Modern Progressive Vision: Shared Prosperity”. Clinton goes on to say,
“I believe that one of the most crucial jobs of the next President is to define a new vision of economic fairness and prosperity for the 21st century, a vision for how we ensure greater opportunity for our next generation, and then to outline a strategy and then to implement it.”
She goes on to promise to “provide more opportunities for more Americans to succeed” and to “promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none.” She says Read More...
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Forgive me for being shocked, but the best criticism I've seen yet of Michael Moore's left-wing propaganda film "Sicko" is an article yesterday on the MTV website by Kurt Loder.
Yes, I really said that. MTV.
Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18 million people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools.
Kurt Loder, take a bow.
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As many may already be aware, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions has passed the The Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2007, on June 27, 2007, which includes a 12-year period of data exclusivity for innovators of biologics. As noted previously, the House Bill lacks this key provision.
Although they have the most to gain from ending exclusivity for innovative biologics, the Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA) and leading international generics giant Teva continue opposition to the 12 year data exclusivity term, which is much closer to the overall data exclusivity period for pharmaceuticals and biopharmaceuticals in Europe.
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Hillary and Barack have committed themselves to "fixing" the American health care system by inaugurating price controls, raising taxes and imposing heavy-handed regulation on the health-care industry. To illustrate the incredible stupidity and real-world consequences of adopting their delusional ideas, earlier this week I posted short descriptions of what the imposition of price controls has wrought in Argentina, Venezuela and Iran.
Today, I call your attention to the chaos inflationary monetary policy and price controls are wreaking in Zimbabwe.
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It has always been a bit strange to me that in the United States the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) administer unequal standards for protection of commercially valuable, and sensitive, clinical dossiers associated with applications for marketing approval for agro-chemical products vs. pharmaceutical products. Now it looks like at least the Senate may recognize the need to equalize data exclusivity periods for biologics.
In the case of agro-chemicals, the EPA currently provides a full ten years of protection (and the U.S. Trade Representative has negotiated similar terms with most trading partners in free trade talks). During this period, no one but the right holder is entitled to rely on the data submitted in support of the initial application for marketing approval. Read More...
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Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both say if they become president they will "fix" America's health-care system with price controls, higher taxes and heavy-handed regulation. It will be a disaster if they try. Rather than curing the health-care system with more of their ham-handed rules and regulations—which suffers primarily from ill-conceived government laws and regulations to begin with—they will infect the entire economy with an "econosocomial" infection that could be deadly.
Don't take my word for it; look at the empirical record.
There are two natural experiments in price controls underway currently in Argentina and Venezuela. The results were predictable but the politicians paid no attention. Read More...
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"Let the multinationals go . . . . We will supply whatever drugs the Thai or other governments may want." Cipla CEO Yusuf Hamied, Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2007
Cipla, the Indian generic manufacturer, has earned a reputation as the drug company with a heart of gold, dedicated to the plight of poor HIV/AIDS patients in Africa. As is often the case, the truth is more complicated:
- Cipla sells drugs to make money - - it is not a charity. Cipla’s deals, most recently with the William J. Clinton Foundation, guarantee the company large captive markets and comfortable profit margins.
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By nine votes earlier this month, the U.S. Senate put the breaks on what appeared to be a run-away effort to allow the re-importation of prescription drugs without adequate safety certification. While they were at it, unfortunately, Senators neglected to remove a poison pill from the bill that could be just as deadly—the "forced sale" provision—which represents one of the most audacious and pernicious government interventions into free markets since the heyday of the New Deal.
This poison pill is a time-release capsule too. When the Senate adopted the Cochran safety-certification amendment to the drug re-importation legislation, it effectively put a moratorium on re-importation pending certification by the Secretary of Health and Human Services that it can be done so safely, something that is not likely to happen under the current administration. Read More...
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The following op/ed was published today in the San Jose Mercury News and co-authored by IPI's Merrill Matthews and Peter Pitts of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest:
One of the first items passed in the House of Representatives by the new Congress seeks to vanquish the Medicare prescription drug benefit's "non-interference clause" so that the government can "negotiate" with drug companies for lower prices. In the coming weeks, the Senate is set to take up the same measure. One of us supported the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, which created the prescription drug benefit for seniors known as Part D, while the other had serious concerns about the legislation. However, we are united on three essential points: Thus far, the prescription drug benefit is working much better than almost anyone expected. Read More...
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If you like Snickers, you might want to start stashing away a reserve pile. As IPI's George Pieler and co-author Jens Laurson note in this new op/ed published in the Washington Examiner, trans-fat regulating is getting out of hand.
The problem is not that trans fats are being “outlawed,” but that elected officials presume a right (and power) to “help” their citizen with lifestyle choices far beyond the proper purview of government.
WASHINGTON - What do Marriott, McDonald’s and New York City have in common? They’re all moving to protect you from trans fats in your diet. The difference is the first two are voluntary initiatives aimed to create customer goodwill, while New York’s dictates your customer’s choic Read More...
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The following op/ed by IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews appeared in the San Francisco Examiner.
SAN FRANCISCO - Now that Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont, is chairman, once again, of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Health, what he believes about the health care system matters — especially if he’s wrong. Which he surely is when he talks about Medicare.
Stark has already announced that he would like to expand Medicare to cover all Americans. Such proponents of a single-payer, government-run health care system assert that if the U.S. would put everyone in Medicare, or something similar, Medicare’s efficiency would save so much money that the country could provide health insurance coverage for everyone, including the 46 million uninsured, for what it is currently spending. Read More...
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February's edition of Manufacturing News quotes an IPI analysis by Dr. Merrill Matthews on the President's health insurance tax reform plan:
How it would work
The Institute for Policy Innovation, which calls Bush's proposal for health insurance tax reform "the simplest and yet most radical proposal to emerge in decades," gives this practical example: An employee makes $50,000 and his employer provides $5,000 for health insurance. The employee currently pays taxes on $50,000 in income but nothing for the insurance. Under the Bush proposal, that worker would report $55,000 income but get the full $7,500 deduction for an individual, so he would pay taxes on $47,500. If the employer were to spend $8,000 on his health insurance policy, the employee would now have taxable income of $58,000. Read More...
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In an article published in Modern Health Care, IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews is quoted on the President's health insurance tax reform plan:
"The proposal makes sense on many levels, said Merrill Matthews, resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation. Economists for some time have been saying that people should get tax breaks individually and not through their employer, since the average person changes jobs about 10 times in their lifetime, and often loses doctors as they move from one plan to the next. At least under this proposal, “If an employer drops a policy, the employee still gets a significant tax break for it,” he said.
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My sources on Capitol Hill tell me that despite great excitement and enthusiasm among the Washington think-tank crowd, President Bush’s health-care proposal is dead on arrival in Congress, and it wasn’t Democrats who put a stake through its heart; it was Republicans. Why? Because it continues in the politically suicidal Bush tradition established with Social Security and tax reform of attempting to cut middle-class entitlements and limit middle-class tax breaks without offering a larger vision of reform that will leave everyone better off in the long run and compensate those who lose in the short run.
At the heart of the Bush health-insurance plan is a proposed trade off. On the one hand, the president’s proposal would extend to individuals purchasing health insurance in the private market the same health-insurance deduction currently available to employers who purchase group-health insurance coverage on behalf of their employees. Read More...
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According to The Wall Street Journal, a major research study on an anti-AIDS microbicide gel has been halted, because women who used the gel developed more HIV infections than those who used a placebo.
Millions of dollars have been spent on this effort, and while lessons have no doubt been learned, it is a tremendous setback for those who have been funding this effort, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I take no glee in the failure of an anti-AIDS effort. My comments should in no way be interpreted as glee at the failure of this study.
But here is the point: Right now we have a bunch of activists who are constantly arguing that pharmaceutical companies are flatly lying when they talk about how expensive it is to develop new successful drugs. People who have never developed anything in their lives--people who have never so much as picked up a mortar and pestle, think they know better than the research-based pharmaceutical industry what goes into developing a drug that actually works, and that doesn't do more harm than good in the process. Read More...
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Last night we received an excellent comment from someone on the ground in Thailand who has firsthand knowledge of the situation. If you're interested in the compulsory license developments in Thailand, I urge you to read it. Read More...
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The Financial Times has an excellent leader on Thailand's seizure of pharmaceutical patents.
An excerpt:
Widening the interpretation to include a patented cardio-vascular blood-thinning preventative drug, when many more affordable and off-patent alternatives are available, weakens that consensus and could end up making the rules tougher in future.
While Thailand remains relatively poor, it and other emerging economies such as India (also currently subject to a legal challenge to its patent regime) also have a growing middle class that can increasingly afford to pay for medicines and should begin to help share the cost of future drug innovation.
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Thailand is almost unique among developing nations in that the country's leadership has generally valued economic growth driven through innovation and protected by intellectual property.
Until lately, that is.
The King of Thailand, His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, is a noted musician, bandleader and composer. He holds numerous patents, copyrights and trademarks, and is the creator of over 1,000 creative works.
His Majesty the King feels very strongly about the importance of intellectual property:
His Majesty addressed the issue of intellectual property by stressing the importance of patent and copyright. Read More...
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It was heartening to see the president promise to veto the House prescription-drug price-negotiation bill if it appears on his desk. Not surprisingly, despite the promise of a presidential veto, the bill still passed the House as part of the Democrats' first-100-hours blitz on January 12 by a vote of 255 to 170 with only 24 Republicans voting for passage, far fewer that the 290 votes required to override a presidential veto. Now it is time for the Senate to step up to the plate and defeat the measure.
If that means a filibuster, so be it. The last thing in the world voters want to see now is a bunch of Senate Republicans playing political games and trying to have it both ways by currying favor with liberals by casting a “free” yea vote with the assurance the president will save them from themselves with a veto.
Time and time again in recent years while the Republicans controlled the Senate (in the 109th Congress by a margin of 55 to 45, one Independent Read More...
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The President is finally listening to us.
This morning, IPI Research Fellow Lawrence Hunter published a piece on-line in the American Spectator where he gave some unsolicited advice for the GOP, which was essentially an expanded version of his most recent blog entry here at IPI Policy Bytes.
Among Hunter's recommendations was that the President should issue an immediate threat to veto the Medicare prescription price negotiation legislation scheduled for a vote in the House on Friday.
If the President doesn't issue an immediate promise to veto the House bill, he will send an unambiguous signal to the Congress that he is willing to sign the measure. Read More...
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The President just promised to veto any legislation requiring the government to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers for purchasing related to the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
It will be good to see the veto pen dusted off and used. Read More...
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| The House of Representatives plans to vote on Friday on legislation allowing the federal government (i.e., the Department of Health and Human Services) to negotiate drug prices with prescription drug companies for the Medicare prescription drug benefit, rather than relying on private sector competition to do so. Although the Congressional Budget Office announced on January 10 that “H.R. 4 would have a negligible effect on federal spending because we anticipate that the Secretary would be unable to negotiate prices across the broad of covered Part D drugs that are more favorable than those obtained by the PDPs [private sector prescription drug plans] under current law,” Democrats in the House remain undeterred by the CBO report. Or the fact that the current private sector competition in the program has resulted in average premiums dropping by 40 percent, from $37 a month (projected) to $22 a month. Read More...
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According to a brief analysis released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today, H.R. 4, The Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007 probably won't save Medicare beneficiaries any money.
hr4_1_CBO.pdf
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Oh, yeah. THAT was a good idea.
Since some genius conservatives innovated a way for the state of Massachusetts to implement universal health coverage, what we all knew would happen is, well, happening.
ArnoldCare "builds upon the Massachusetts Plan," and of course extends it.
And now Kennedy wants to "build upon the Massachusetts Plan" and extend universal health care to the entire country.
Right. Will someone please explain to me how creating the ingenious mechanism that makes socialized medicine possible is "rolling back the welfare state"? Read More...
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There is much whining and righteous indignation on the Republican side of the aisle as the new Democratically controlled Congress gets underway. “They aren’t playing fair,” “they are jamming legislation down our throats without due deliberation and public hearings,” “they aren’t giving us an opportunity to amend bills on the floor,” and on and on.
Come on, guys, get over it. Stop acting like a bunch of babies and just accept the fact that you brought it on yourselves by the way you treated Democrats for more than a decade while you were in control—the same Democrats, by the way, who brought it on themselves for treating you the same way during the previous four decades when they controlled the Congress.
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Should the Government Control the Price of Prescription Drugs?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovations says only if you don’t want access to new medicines
Currently, drug companies negotiate drug prices with insurance companies providing the new Medicare drug benefit. That process has led to insurance premiums being 35 percent below what Congress expected.
Democrats say the government could negotiate even lower prices. But the government doesn’t “negotiate.” It simply imposes price controls—just as it currently dictates prices on what Medicare pays doctors who treat seniors.
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Should the Government Control the Price of Prescription Drugs? |
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Our friend Richard Epstein has a great op/ed in The LA Times today on "The Myth of the Big Bad Drug Companies." The article is based in part on a new IPI book "Overdose," written by Richard and published by Yale University Press. More information on the book is available here.
The myth of the big bad drug companies
They're not greedy, they're over-regulated. The result is fewer pills to cure our ills.
By Richard A. Epstein
December 22, 2006
THE PHARMACEUTICAL industry is getting bad press. Read More...
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Has someone figured out how to create a government-run health-care system that actually works? Not really.
According to the following op/ed by IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews (published in Riverside, California's Press Enterprise on Sunday, Dec. 17), the U.S. health-care system has problems, but it is silly to think that the single-payer countries have solved all the problems. Instead, we should fix our problems without importing theirs.
You can access the newspaper's home page here. Read More...
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The new GAO report on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, “Prescription Drugs: Improvement Needed in FDA’s Oversight of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising,” (GAO-07-54) says that DTC spending has been growing at a little more than three time rate as spending on direct promotion to physicians.
There are two reasons for that:
We are increasingly moving to a consumer-driven health care system, where patients have—and want—more access to information. And that’s all the ads are: information.
But another important factor may be the growing number of complaints targeting drug company efforts to see doctors and discuss new products with them. The claim is that these efforts are tantamount to influence peddling and bribery. Lunches, dinners, ballpoint pens, note pads, you name it and someone says it is inappropriate. Read More...
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Our friend Richard Epstein has an op/ed on the Boston Globe on the current state of the pharmaceutical industry.
An excerpt:
Pharmaceuticals are not tobacco. There is no reason to rejoice in putting pharma on the ropes if its business reversals hurt the very consumers they are trying to serve. The medical advances of the past 30 years are not just a matter of dumb luck. They are very heavily dependent on the patent law, pricing freedom, and marketing strategies that have allowed these firms to bring a wide variety of vital products to market.
The champions of further regulation argue that their efforts won't limit innovations or curtail the widespread use of new drugs. But there are no free fixes. Read More...
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Thanks to the National Association of Manufacturers' blog for tipping its hat to IPI's work on prescription drug policy, and especially to our new book by Richard Epstein. Read More...
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Federal spending as a percent of GDP has been stable for over 50 years now at around 20%. The latest long term projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that over the next 40 years Federal spending will explode out of this long term stability, and grow to close to 40% of GDP or more. That spending explosion is primarily due to our current entitlement programs, particularly Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
But that reality didn’t stop Roger Altman and Alan Blinder from calling for new entitlement spending increases and programs in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on November 21, 2006 [subscription required]. Altman was a Deputy Secretary at Treasury under President Clinton,
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On November 15th, the World Health Organization (WHO) will launch the first ever International Medical Products Anti-counterfeiting Taskforce (IMPACT) and unveil the global plan to combat counterfeit medical products.
At its first official meeting in Bonn, Germany, IMPACT will release the most recent estimates of the number of counterfeit products currently circulating on the world's markets, launch pilot programmes in three countries, and present a tool to strengthen countries' legislative capacity to deal with medical counterfeiting.
IMPACT is focused on five action areas embracing the different national and international sectors related to counterfeiting. These are: legislative and regulatory infrastructure; regulatory implementation; enforcement; technology; and risk communication.
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Our friend Alberto Mingardi of the Instituto Bruno Leoni, based in Italy, has an excellent op/ed in Sunday's Washington Post on "A Drug Price Path to Avoid."
Alberto was a featured speaker at an event IPI did in September on Capitol Hill entitled
Streaming video of the event is available here, if you're interested.
Since we're constantly hearing calls for more European-styled health care systems in the U.S.,
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More on the fact that destroying the market mechanism in the Medicare prescription drug benefit will be a top priority for Democrats if they take control of Congress.
We've blogged on this before.
When you have Wal-Mart as a customer, it's a blessing and then a curse. It's a blessing because you're selling to the world's largest retail customer. But once Wal-Mart is responsible for 65% of your volume, and they come along and demand a 35% discount or they'll cancel their order, you're stuck. You're hostage to your best customer.
But that's not the relationship between drug companies an Read More...
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Somehow we missed this very flattering review of Richard Epstein's new book "Overdose," written for IPI and released earlier this month by Yale University Press.
The review was in The New York Post on October 8th.
DRUG DILEMMA: IS THE U.S. SYSTEM HEALTHY?
By JOHN CALFEE
October 8, 2006 -- OVERDOSE: HOW EXCESSIVE GOVERNMENT REGULATION STIFLES PHARMACEUTICAL INNOVATION BY RICHARD EPSTEIN YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 296 PAGES.
NOTWITHSTANDING his vigorous, even colorful, writing style, University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein is a lawyer's lawyer. So it's entirely characteristic that he begin his analysis of the pharmaceuti Read More...
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According to an article by Robert Pear in the New York Times, among the first things a Democrat-controlled Congress will attempt to do is repeal the noninterference clause in the Medicare Prescription Read More...
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I'm proud to announce the release of a
new book by IPI, entitled Overdose:
How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation.
The author is our good friend and legal genius Read More...
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Author: Merrill Matthew Jr. || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA