Category: Market Design

a pill in place of a model globe

Preparing for Antimicrobial Resistance: Vision and Social Science Mission of the INAMRSS Network

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Timo Minssen, Kevin Outterson, Susan Rogers Van Katwyk, Pedro Henrique D. Batista, Clare Chandler, Francesco Ciabuschi, Stephan Harbarth, Aaron S. Kesselheim, Ramanan Laxminarayan, Kathleen Liddell, Michael T. Osterholm, Lance Price, Steven J. Hoffman

NB: The below contribution is an extended version of our editorial that was recently published in the Bulletin of the Word Health Organization.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised awareness of the urgent need to improve the design of health systems, as well as the practical implementation of new strategies and technical solutions to better prepare for future pandemics. These preparations must also consider harms secondary to the pandemic, including the resulting effects on antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

While drug-resistant infections pose a well-known and severe threat to human and animal health, the COVID-19 pandemic is compounding this already problematic situation.

Read More

Man in hospital.

Following the Yellow Brick Road Toward Hospital Price Transparency

Laura Karas Leave a comment

By Laura Karas

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) scored a victory on the price transparency front in June of this year with the D.C. Circuit decision in American Hospital Association v. Azar, No. 1:19-cv-03619-CJN.

The CMS final rule at issue in the suit requires price transparency for hospital items and services. The legal victory will begin to remedy the information asymmetry that has kept patients in the dark about hospital prices for far too long.

As the final rule states, its aim is to empower patients to become “active consumers” of health care “so that they can lead the drive towards value.” The rule is part of a federal effort to improve the ability of patients to make informed choices based on price and gain leverage to negotiate unreasonable hospital charges.

The American Hospital Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and several other groups brought suit to contest the CMS final rule mandating that hospitals make public and update annually certain “standard charges” for hospital “items and services.”

Read More

Up close details of a dark soda in ice.

Why soda taxes, an awesome public health policy, are rare

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By Daniel Aaron

This post is, in part, a response to a panel discussion on soda taxes and obesity, given by Professors Emily Broad Leib, Steven Gortmaker, and Carmel Shachar on February 14, 2020.

Diet is devastating the public’s health

Diet is the top cause of death and disability in the United States and abroad. Diet-related disease has been rising for forty years, and we cannot seem to control it. Currently 39.8% of Americans are obese. By 2030, this will climb to half of all Americans. Obesity causes numerous health risks, including heart attacks and strokes, and increases the risk of many different types of cancer.

Read More

A calculator, a stethoscope, and a stack of money rest on a table.

Why Our Health Care Is Incomplete: Review of “Exposed” (Part II)

Daniel G. Aaron 2 Comments

By: Daniel Aaron

Just last month, Professor Christopher T. Robertson, at the University of Arizona College of Law, released his new book about health care, entitled Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance Is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It. Part II of this book review offers an analytical discussion of “cost exposure,” the main subject of his book with a focus on solutions. Read Part I here.

Baby solutions

Prof. Robertson writes two chapters on solutions. In the first, titled “Fixes We Could Try,” he offers reforms, from mild to moderate, that would make cost exposure less harmful. The chapter largely retains the analytical nature of the prior chapters, but it comes across like a chapter he might have rather not written. This is evident in the following chapter’s title, “What We Must Do.” It’s also evident because some of the proposals do not seem fully considered, and in some ways appear more controversial than the more comprehensive solution offered later. Read More

A calculator, a stethoscope, and a stack of money rest on a table.

Why Our Health Care Is Incomplete: Review of “Exposed” (Part I)

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By: Daniel Aaron

Just last month, Professor Christopher T. Robertson, at the University of Arizona College of Law, released his new book about health care, entitled Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance Is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It. This book review will offer an analytical discussion of “cost exposure,” the main subject of his book.

What is cost exposure in health care?

Cost exposure is payments people make related to their medical care. There are many ways patients pay – here are a few common ones.

  • Deductible – Patient is responsible for the first, say, $5,000 of their medical care; after this point, the health insurance kicks in. Resets each year.
  • Copay – Patient pays a specific amount, say $25, when having an episode of care.
  • Coinsurance – Patient pays a specified percentage, say 20%, of care.

Read More

Several vaping devices on a table

E-Cigarette Laws that Work for Everyone

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By Daniel Aaron

The Trump Administration has retreated from proposed tobacco regulations that experts generally agree would benefit public health. The regulations would have included a ban on flavored e-cigarettes, a favorite of children who use e-cigarettes. Currently millions of youth are estimated to be addicted to e-cigarettes.

The rules also could have reduced nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels. Nicotine is the addicting substance largely responsible for continued smoking. If nicotine were “decoupled” from smoking, smokers might turn to other sources of nicotine, rather than continuing to smoke. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., killing about 500,000 Americans each year, or just about the number of Americans who died in World War I and World War II combined.

Part of the difficulty in regulating e-cigarettes is that, unlike cigarettes, they offer benefits and harms that differ across generations. This concern is called intergenerational equity. How can a solution be crafted that serves all Americans?

Read More

Immigration And Health Care Under The Trump Administration

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by Wendy E. Parmet appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Sixth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, December 12, 2017.

Non-citizen immigrants are the canaries in the health care coal mine. Disproportionately poor, non-white, and non-English speaking, and without access to the franchise, they are among the most vulnerable groups in the United States. Consequently, they are often the first to experience the gaps, inefficiencies, and conflicts in our health care system. Meanwhile, anti-immigrant sentiment often spills into health policy debates, as was evident in 2009 when opponents of the bill that became the Affordable Care Act (ACA) focused their opposition on the erroneous claim that it would cover undocumented immigrants. It is therefore not surprising that the first year of the Trump administration, which has focused its domestic agenda on restricting immigration and repealing the ACA, has proven especially perilous for immigrants who need health care.

As a group, immigrants tend to be healthier than the native-born population. They are also far less likely to have insurance. In 2015, for example, 18 percent of lawfully present nonelderly adult immigrants, and 42 percent of undocumented immigrants were uninsured, compared to only 11 percent of United States citizens. Immigrants’ low insurance rate is partly due to the fact that they disproportionately work in sectors of the economy in which employer-sponsored insurance is uncommon. But the law also plays a significant role. Even before the Trump administration took office, immigrants faced an array of legal barriers to obtaining health insurance. Most importantly, the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PROWRA) prohibited undocumented immigrants from accessing most federally-funded insurance programs (including Medicaid, Medicare and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)). PRWORA also barred most authorized immigrants (except refugees) from benefiting from federally-funded programs for five years after obtaining legal status. And although the ACA made it easier for many documented immigrants to gain coverage, it left PROWRA in place. The ACA also limited participation in the exchanges to immigrants who are “lawfully present,” a category that the Obama administration decided did not include the approximately 800,000 young adults who participated in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. […]

Read the full post here!

Medicaid Program Under Siege

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by Robert Greenwald and Judith Solomon appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Sixth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, December 12, 2017.

For more than 50 years, Medicaid has been our nation’s health care safety net. Medicaid allows our lowest-income, sickest, and often most vulnerable populations to get care and treatment, and supports the health of more than 68 million Americans today. As an entitlement program, Medicaid grows to meet demand: There is no such thing as a waiting list. This vital health program found itself under fire in 2017, and while there were no major reductions in funding or enrollment, it is far from safe in 2018. Whether by new legislation or actions the Trump administration may take, the threats to Medicaid are not going away anytime soon.

Congressional Threats To Medicaid’s Expansion, Structure, And Funding

Throughout 2017, Republicans tried unsuccessfully to roll back the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including the law’s expansion of Medicaid. Underpinning each effort was the oft-stated belief, held by Republican leadership, that the expansion was a disastrous move that extended coverage to more than 12 million able-bodied people who should not be getting health insurance from the government. While these unsuccessful efforts were commonly referred to as attempts to “repeal and replace the ACA,” every bill that gained any traction in 2017 went far beyond repealing only the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. The proposals also included plans to fundamentally alter the way in which the traditional Medicaid program is structured and paid for. […]

Read the full post here!

Searching For Stability: The Political Future Of The Affordable Care Act

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by Benjamin Sommers and John McDonough appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Sixth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, December 12, 2017.

Efforts to repeal and replace the coverage expansions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as well as the tax increases that financed them were persistent throughout 2017. Even after the congressional Republicans’ highly visible failures earlier this year, they kept coming back—finally succeeding in zeroing out the penalties in the ACA’s individual mandate as part of federal tax cut legislation signed into law in late December.

Of keen interest and importance now is the question: What’s next for the ACA?

Originally, many ACA supporters assumed during the years of the Obama administration that once the law’s major coverage provisions took effect in January 2014, the reality on the ground of a successful coverage expansion and broader insurance benefits would transform the ACA into a popular program—growing in acceptance and inevitability as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid all did before it. […]

Read the full article here!

The Individual Insurance Market In 2018: Business As Usual?

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by Joseph Antos appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Sixth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, December 12, 2017.

Congress has enacted a tax bill that repeals the Affordable Care Act (ACA) penalties for individuals who fail to enroll in health insurance. Open enrollment for the 2018 plan year may stay roughly even with 2017 exchange enrollment—lackluster performance that some blame on what they call “Trump sabotage”. Some Republicans are urging Congress to appropriate funds for cost sharing reduction (CSR) payments and a national reinsurance pool, presumably to promote enrollment and moderate premium increases. Will Democrats vote to resolve the CSR problem and reinstitute reinsurance—policies many say they support? Or will it be business as usual on Capitol Hill with strict party-line votes (and the inevitable failure of ACA fixes)? Would that change anything about the way the nongroup insurance market operates next year?

The short answers are no, yes, and no. Here are some thoughts about why the status quo is likely to remain largely undisturbed by political speech-making and over-reaction from the editorial pages. My comments are based loosely on my presentation at the Petrie-Flom Health Law Year in P/Review conference held at Harvard University on December 12, 2017.

Exchange Enrollment For 2018

Early reports showed a more rapid pace of exchange enrollment this year than last.  As of December 15, 2017, 8.8 million people in the 39 states using the federal exchange had selected plans. That is less than last year’s total of 9.2 million enrollments through Healthcare.gov, but not the dramatic reduction that advocates may have expected. […]

Read the full article here!