By Nicolas Terry and Frank Pasquale
This week we welcome Melinda J. Beeuwkes Buntin, Chair of the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Director for Health at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and worked at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. At RAND, Melinda served as deputy director of RAND Health’s Economics, Financing, and Organization Program and co-director of the Bing Center for Health Economics. Her research at RAND focused on insurance benefit design, provider payment, and the care use and needs of the elderly. For the lightning round, Nic discussed technological improvement of decisionmaking, both for consumers and doctors. Nic also covered CMS’s rejection of Ohio’s request for a new section 1115 demonstration (which would have charged “premiums, regardless of income, to the 600,000 individuals in Ohio’s new adult group, as well as hundreds of thousands of low income parents, foster care youth, and beneficiaries with breast and cervical cancer”). Frank offered a counterintuitive look at the EpiPen and the present technocrat rage to privatize the VA. During the conversation, we covered some topics in CBO modeling, including Melinda’s recent paper on changes in spending by age of beneficiary. Frank mentioned some general concerns about CBO’s modeling raised by Federal Reserve economists, the GAO, Tim Westmoreland (in 2008 and 2007), Maggie Mahar, Timothy Jost, and Bruce Vladeck. We look forward to more conversations on the nature of health cost projections!
The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy. Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher Radio, Tunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw
