Posts Tagged ‘health care’
By James Kwak I’m currently in the process of buying long-term care insurance—you know, so my daughter won’t have to take care of me when I’m old. I have a good agent who knows all about the market and has answered every question I’ve had. I understand personal finance, opportunity costs, discount rates, and inflation. [...]
By James Kwak I was looking at OECD health care data for something else I’ve been working on and wanted to share some of it. It’s well known that the United States spends a lot more per person on health care than comparable countries and that our actual health outcomes are anywhere from average to [...]
By James Kwak Masquerading behind an invocation to “wisdom” in the title, David Brooks today finds his false equivalence (see here for another example) by comparing the the two parties’ approaches to Medicare: the Democrats, he says, favor “top-down centralized planning” while the Republicans favor the “decentralized discovery process of the market.” David Brooks swallowing [...]
By James Kwak Jennifer Steinhauer in the Times reports that some Republicans are running away from the Ryan Plan (you know, the one that changes Medicare from a health insurance plan to an underfunded subsidy), while others are trying to figure out if they should support in order to gain Tea Party votes. As policy, [...]
By James Kwak David Brooks, perhaps realizing that it was a bad idea to swallow a politician’s PR bullet points whole, is now backpedaling. The Ryan Plan, which he originally hailed as “the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” now has the principal virtue of [...]
By James Kwak This isn’t a post explaining how Medicare works in detail. It’s a post about why Medicare matters to you. The basic “problem” with Medicare is that its liabilities are projected to grow faster than its revenues indefinitely because health care costs are growing faster than GDP (and Medicare’s revenues are a function [...]
By James Kwak Driving home from school today, I listened to a Fresh Air interview from two months ago with Atul Gawande, by now perhaps the most famous doctor in the policy intelligentsia. The interview was based on a New Yorker article discussing how some doctors and even some health care payor organizations are trying [...]
By James Kwak Uwe Reinhardt has a post about the Rivlin-Ryan Medicare Plan, which would convert Medicare into a voucher program for people currently under 55 and also fix the growth rate of the value of the vouchers at GDP growth plus one percentage point. The issue Reinhardt focuses on, and which I also blogged [...]
By James Kwak Ezra Klein makes an important point about our nation’s health care problem: it’s not just a government deficit problem. The underlying problem is that health care costs are not only growing faster than prices (inflation), but also faster than GDP (economic growth), and as a result the amount of stuff we as [...]
By James Kwak Planet Money did a story this week on the problems with medical billing. This is something I’ve been vaguely interested in for a long time; nine years ago, we seriously thought about it as a business opportunity for our company. The Planet Money team said that there is $7 billion in waste in [...]
By James Kwak I should leave the country more often: I go away and suddenly we have (near-)universal health care coverage! (Well, we’ll have to wait a few years for all of the health care reform provisions to kick in, but you know what I mean.) Not only that, but Ezra Klein reminds me that [...]
This guest post was contributed by Andrzej Kuhl, a colleague of mine from a former life. Andrzej is a management consultant based in Montclair, New Jersey. His company, Kuhl Solutions, helps improve the efficiency and effectiveness of operations in financial sector companies. I am getting thoroughly frustrated with a facet of the health care debate – [...]
(This is a multi-post series on the Republicans’ Roadmap for America’s Future. Part I was on how it slashes Medicare spending. Part II was on how it shifts risk from the government to individuals.) The Roadmap brings up the issue that there is little price transparency in the health care market. This is the solution: [...]
In my previous post on the Roadmap for America’s Future, I discussed how the Republican plan is based on converting Medicare into a voucher program and then slashing the vouchers drastically relative to current Medicare spending projections, leaving seniors without the ability to buy anything close to what they get from Medicare today. In that [...]
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Vouchers vs. Premium Support
December 23, 2011 in Commentary
Tags: health care, Medicare
Uwe Reinhardt has a very clear post on the difference between vouchers and premium support and how it applies to the Ryan-Wyden plan. You might may say that the labels are arbitrary, but there is still a substantive difference between the two in where the risk lies.