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March 6, 2023 Innovation, Issues

Experts from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission , and the American Medical Association just released a paper urging Congress to peel back the Affordable Care Act's restrictions on creating and expanding physician-owned hospitals. Their analysis is correct. Such hospitals inject much-needed competition into the healthcare market. Consequently, repealing restrictions on them could help lower healthcare costs and expand access to healthcare. The 2010 Affordable Care Act bans physician-owned hospitals from expanding and prevents new ones from participating in Medicare or Medicaid. Proponents of this ban...

February 18, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

President Biden hit the road last week to castigate Republicans for supposedly proposing to make healthcare more expensive. The president is upset that Republicans want to undo the innovation-destroying price controls on prescription drugs included in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act and rein in the billions of dollars in subsidies he’s handing out to prop up Obamacare’s exchanges. He’s conveniently ignoring some of Republicans’ own ideas for making health insurance more affordable. In a recent opinion piece, Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas — a member of the...

February 15, 2023 Issues, Policy Proposals

Should the government put a price on human life? The new head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., doesn't think so. She recently introduced legislation alongside several of her colleagues to ban the use of "quality-adjusted life years," or QALYs, in federal healthcare programs. A QALY purports to measure the value of one additional year of life. A QALY of one is equivalent to one year of life in perfect health. A value of zero is death. Economists sometimes try to...

February 8, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

Last night's State of the Union address was a festival of cognitive dissonance. President Biden proudly lauded the price controls that Democrats have begun implementing on prescription drugs as part of last August's Inflation Reduction Act. He also touted his administration's Cancer Moonshot, which aims to halve the cancer death rate over the next 25 years. These policies are in direct conflict with one another. Pharmaceutical companies are already responding to the IRA's looming price controls by scaling back their research and development efforts....

January 28, 2023 Issues, Policy Proposals

Americans are getting squeezed by rising health care costs. The latest numbers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show that patient out-of-pocket spending increased by 10.4% in 2021, a rate not seen for more than three decades. The cost of monthly health insurance premiums also leapt, by 6.5%. And that was all before last year’s rapid inflation squeezed household budgets. One often overlooked cause of soaring health care costs is hospital consolidation. When a single health care system becomes...

January 26, 2023 Issues, Policy Proposals, Price and Costs

A group of 25 senators, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), requested that HHS Sec. Xavier Becerra exercise march-in rights for Xtandi (enzalutamide), a prostate cancer therapeutic. March-in rights give the government the right to take a license for itself if it helped to fund the product owner's research . . . “Net prices, which take into account discounts and rebates, have been going down for several years,” Wayne Winegarden, Ph.D., senior fellow, business and economics, Pacific Research Institute, told BioSpace. “Gross...

January 18, 2023 Issues, Policy Proposals

The U.S. Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services has issued a new joint federal rule. Another federal mandate is hardly newsworthy, but one devised under the Trump Administration and eagerly implemented by the Biden Administration is certainly unique. Beyond the politics, the Transparency in Coverage rule, while not without its shortcomings, helps to address on one of the fundamental flaws worsening the effectiveness of the nation’s healthcare system – its opacity. The lack of transparency that pervades the healthcare system...

January 17, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

Democrats remain fixated on prescription drug prices. Last August, they managed to include price controls on drugs dispensed through Medicare in the Inflation Reduction Act. And they're not done meddling. Earlier this month, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, called on President Biden to unilaterally suspend drug patents in order "to address the crisis of unaffordable medicines." Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has named drug pricing as one of his top legislative priorities in his new role as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee....

January 7, 2023 Innovation, Issues

Roughly 100 million Americans live in areas without enough primary care doctors. Nationwide, we’re short about 17,000 of them right now. By 2034, that number could jump to 48,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. To meet our country’s growing demand for care, we need to increase the supply of clinicians who can provide it. But that doesn’t mean just training more doctors. In fact, nurse practitioners and physician assistants could be delivering much more primary care but are...

January 7, 2023 Issues, Price and Costs

Shopping around has never been easier. With a few clicks, consumers can easily find deals on flights, get multiple quotes on car insurance or price-match items in their local shopping mall. Yet when it comes to spending money on something really important — their health — consumers are largely in the dark. Federal rules that took effect last year were supposed to address this problem by requiring hospitals to publish the prices of 300 common services. The goal was to make health...

January 6, 2023 Innovation, Issues

Government regulation is supposed to make products safer. But new research shows that, at least for medical devices, regulation can have the opposite effect. In a paper published this past November, UC San Diego economist Parker Rogers found that when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reduces regulation on a category of products, innovation and competition in that category increase, prices decrease, and safety actually improves. How could this be? Rogers hypothesized that firms “increas[e] their emphasis on product safety as deregulation exposes them to more...

December 27, 2022 Issues, Price and Costs

On Dec. 14, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (cms.gov) released their latest estimate of the country's annual healthcare tab. For the second straight year, U.S. healthcare spending topped $4 trillion. In 2021, health spending accounted for more than 18% of U.S. GDP. Progressives tend to cite numbers like these when making their case for greater government involvement in healthcare — or even a government takeover of the health insurance system, a la Medicare for All....

December 16, 2022 Issues, Price and Costs

Three days before Christmas, the Institute for Clinical & Economic Review (ICER) is scheduled to publish a draft assessment of two promising treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately for the millions of Americans living with this fatal illness, it is likely that ICER will be giving lumps of coal, not gifts, this holiday season. ICER performs studies that declare how much we as patients value medicines that treat devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s. And depending upon their proclamations, patients’ access to life-altering medicines...

November 16, 2022 Briefs, Price and Costs, Studies

SACRAMENTO – The broken 340B program, designed to provide affordable care for at-risk patients, creates massive profits for providers without necessarily improving patient health outcomes and should be reformed, finds a new issue brief released today by the Center for Medical Economics and Innovation at the nonpartisan Pacific Research Institute. Click here to download a copy of the brief “The 340B program is growing unsustainably and isn’t improving health outcomes for at-risk patients,” said Dr. Wayne Winegarden, the Center’s director and the...

November 15, 2022 Coronavirus, Issues

To the old saying about the inevitability of death and taxes, we should add another: another health crisis linked to COVID-19. As of the end of October, the CDC’s official tally of U.S. COVID infections was just under 100 million, but with many positive home test results unreported, the real number is estimated to be several times greater. Infections, while unfortunate and sometimes deadly, do provide immunity to survivors, but only for a limited time. Natural post-infection and vaccine-induced immunity wane...

October 29, 2022 Innovation, Issues

The silver lining of COVID-19 has been the dawn of the telehealth era — the greatest exercise in deregulation and individual empowerment in the health sector in years. In response to the arrival of the pandemic in 2020, Congress and executive branch officials waived a number of rules governing access to medical care, including restrictions on telehealth. As a result, millions of people were able to secure care from the comfort of their homes — many for the first time. Some of...

October 27, 2022 Innovation, Issues

October 29th marks the 40th anniversary of one of biotechnology’s most significant milestones — the approval by the FDA of human insulin synthesized in genetically engineered bacteria to treat diabetes. The first “biopharmaceutical,” or drug made with molecular genetic engineering techniques, to be approved, it launched a revolutionary era in drug development. Insulin is secreted in the pancreas and is essential to the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats. Insulin deficiency leads to the development of diabetes. Many diabetics require regular injections...

October 25, 2022 Issues, Policy Proposals

Next month, Arizonans will consider Proposition 209, a ballot initiative intended to alleviate a supposed “crisis” in medical debt. A look at the facts reveals there is no such crisis. If this ballot initiative passes, ordinary Arizonans could face higher interest rates on all kinds of debt, have fewer lenders to choose from and pay higher prices for goods and services. The initiative has two parts. The first caps the interest rate for medical expenses at 3%. The second imposes sweeping new limits on how lenders...

October 17, 2022 Issues, Policy Proposals

A new poll from West Health and Gallup paints a grim picture of health care in the United States. Among the survey's most striking findings is that three-quarters of the country grades the cost of care at either a D or an F. Critics of our nation's market-based health system are sure to see these survey findings as evidence that the status quo is broken. But what person wouldn't want to pay less for health care — or any other good or service they desire? By...

October 16, 2022 Issues, Price and Costs

Hospitals aren't complying with a nearly 2-year-old federal rule requiring them to publish their prices, according to new research from PatientRightsAdvocate.org. Their willingness to flout the law is understandable. They make more money when people don't know how much the medical services they consume cost. But patients and payers shouldn't stand for this intransigence. It's depriving us of information we could use to foster competition among healthcare providers — and ultimately secure better care at a lower cost....