A second Biden administration would likely have limited ambitions when it comes to health policy. Health-care policy has been a major political battleground in recent years. More than two-thirds of Americans say that the nation's health-care system has major problems. From 2003 to 2023, the average health-insurance premium paid by employers ...

To reduce coverage costs and encourage more people to enroll in plans while healthy, Republicans should demand changes to insurance-pricing rules. Former president Donald Trump recently revived a pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, noting on Truth Social: "The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it's not good ...

Misunderstanding the New Deal has encouraged ideological overreach. Two years ago, President Biden's inauguration was accompanied by excited talk that his administration represented a revival of the New Deal. The president proposed a sweeping package of public-works and new entitlement programs, which would have added a further $7.5 billion to ...

Congress should avoid the innovation-killing habit of using Medicare drug-price cuts to fund other pet projects. On August 28, the Biden administration announced the first set of drugs that would be subject to the Medicare price caps established by last year's Inflation Reduction Act. The administration justified this move as necessary to curb ...

A bipartisan group of 51 senators recently called for Congress to cancel an impending $8 billion cut to federal Medicaid allotments for "uncompensated" hospital care. No limit currently exists on the federal matching funds that states can claim to provide Medicaid benefits to eligible beneficiaries. The $8 billion cut would only trim the degree ...

Medicare was originally operated as a single-payer health care system, with the federal government directly purchasing medical services for elderly and disabled beneficiaries. Yet, the proportion of beneficiaries opting to receive those healthcare benefits through privately managed Medicare Advantage plans has increased from 25 percent in 2010 ...

As a condition of providing extra funds to support the existing benefit, legislators should let younger workers opt for a better-focused safety net. In his 2024 budget proposal, President Biden promised to oppose any cuts to Social Security — pledging to defend the current structure of the program. The past four decades have seen enormous ...

Trust fund’ financing makes Social Security and Medicare needlessly costly.As congressional Republicans search for ways to rein in federal spending, Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) has sought to revive the Time to Rescue United States Trusts (TRUST) Act. That bill would force Congress to consider legislation to restore the solvency of trust ...

State-level “public options” for health insurance are leading to higher costs. In his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden proposed to establish a "public option"–the choice to buy health insurance operated by the government, rather than from private insurance companies. The idea made little headway in Congress, but Colorado recently secured ...

Should a future recession necessitate another round of state-welfare bailouts, the federal government should nationalize currently split entitlement programs. America's state governments are currently flush with funds and expanding their spending commitments. Congress had provided over $1 trillion in pandemic aid to state governments, fearing ...

The Inflation Reduction Act consists largely of an agenda put together when inflation was not a pressing concern. As they took control of Congress at the beginning of 2021, Democrats eyed the opportunity for an enormous increase in public spending to rebuild the post-pandemic American economy. It has taken almost 18 months for them to assemble ...

In his two campaigns for the presidency, Bernie Sanders regularly cited a favorite statistic to assail American health care: "In 2015, the United States spent almost $10,000 per person for health care; the Canadians, Germans, French and British spent less than half of that, while guaranteeing health care to everyone." Furthermore, he noted, ...

Not where prices are highest. Last month, Mark Cuban, the billionaire serial entrepreneur and star of NBC's Shark Tank, announced the launch of an online pharmacy with a mission to drive down the cost of generic drugs. Generic drug prices often greatly exceed manufacturing costs, though competition is generally uninhibited by patents. But ...

The Biden administration’s proposal to use a new Medicare metric to alleviate racial disparities won’t have much effect. Medicare has historically advanced the desegregation of American hospitals, but the Biden administration's attempt to use the program's physician-fee schedule to address racial disparities is likely to generate little more ...

Lawmakers use Medicare's trust fund to kick the can down the road on entitlement reform. In 2020, the federal government for the first time spent more on Medicare than on national defense. Absent legislative reform, Medicare funding as a share of GDP is projected to increase by another 50 percent over the next 20 years. Medicare's ...

Congressional Democrats want to throw more money at Medicaid, but that won't improve long-term care. The reconciliation bill being prepared by congressional Democrats is so substantial that specific provisions as large as $400 billion in proposed extra funds for Medicaid's long-term-care benefit have attracted little attention. America ...

Congressional Democratic leaders are assembling a multitrillion-dollar omnibus spending package, bringing together their main legislative priorities for the Biden administration's first year in office. Though the health care reforms proposed have received much less news coverage than the Affordable Care Act of 2010, they would, in fact, ...