This is not the end of Obamacare; it’s the beginning.In a surprising move, Paul Ryan pulled the American Health Care Act, the Republican ACA repeal and replace bill, last Friday. It had become clear that there was no movement to the left or the right that would garner enough votes Read more
Is Paul Ryan’s world view a place we want to live? We’re about to find out.In the current debate over the Affordable Care Act’s repeal and replacement, we are watching the collision of two world views. While partisans on both sides are likely to disagree, here’s my mini sketch of Read more
Why assuming we’re rational about health care may be a dangerous assumptionI am reading a wonderful book called The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, about the development of behavioral economics by two of its pioneers, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. One point of their work over five decades is that Read more
Why you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.I think for most people, including me at times, the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is an exercise in taking something they didn’t understand well but have feelings about, and replacing it with something else Read more
The election of Donald Trump was surprising, to say the least. In a victory anticipated by few, a President Trump opens the way for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and with it many of the provisions meant to stabilize insurance markets and broaden coverage for individuals. The provisions of Read more
On April 27th, CMS released proposed rules for the implementation of the Medicare and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), an act that heretofore was famous for containing the repeal of the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR). The SGR was uniformly hated by physicians and other providers, as it theoretically controlled the rate Read more
Originally featured on WantHealthcareLLC.com.In a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, economists from Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did a very interesting thing. There is a general assumption that the richer you are, the longer you live, on average. This turns out to be Read more
For many years we have been assuming that if Medicare costs were low in a particular region, like Grand Junction on our Western Slope, then commercial insurance (insurance like the kind many of us get through our employer) costs were also likely to be relatively low. A recent report in Read more