Fix Health Care Policy

Kaiser Study on Medicare Assumes Seniors Don’t Like Lower Prices

The Kaiser Family Foundation just released a study that grossly misrepresents the premium-support model of Medicare reform and apparently misunderstands normal market dynamics and the differences between efficiency, choice, and higher premiums.

The Kaiser study assumes that an entire class of Americans—senior citizens—is insensitive to price. In reality, seniors are price sensitive when they are presented with options. Already, 90 percent of retirees can and do choose the private health plans they like, ranging from supplemental insurance to Medicare Advantage and Medicare drug plans. Premium support encourages intense competition that will change premiums and hold down costs. The larger impact is that seniors would have a choice of the health options they want, while creating needed savings for themselves and the federal government.

Take a simple analogy: Assume that the price of a gallon of gasoline rose from $3 to $300. How much would this affect your driving habits? It is doubtful that you would still buy the same amount of gas every week. Yet that is the economic intuition embodied in the Kaiser study.

The authors of the Kaiser study assume that zero beneficiaries would switch from traditional Medicare to a cheaper plan, despite cost increases. Part of the gain from competition is that health plans must compete for beneficiaries in order to retain or gain market share. They have to secure high satisfaction, as they do today, for example, in Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage. To create a scenario that simply ignores the gains of market competition grossly misrepresents the economic impact of any consumer-driven market, including a health care market with premium support. The study’s headline is that 53 percent of enrollees in traditional Medicare would pay more, but within the study, when benificiaries respond to higher premiums, the number falls to as low as 33 percent.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: choice, efficiency, health plans, Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare, premium support

Outside the Beltway: Utah’s Successes Highlight Federalism’s Benefits

In the past year, the Congressional health care battle has usurped much of the public discourse on health care reform. In the mean time, Utah has quietly begun implementing its own version of reform, moving its health care system in a more patient-centered, consumer-driven direction. In a recent paper, Heritage analyst Ed Haislmaier outlines the obstacles Utah has overcome to achieving its objectives of giving “employers, particularly smaller firms, an easier way to offer health benefits to their workers and to provide workers and their families with more coverage choices.”

Haislmaier explains how the Utah reforms are intended to secure the following patient-centered benefits for its residents: (more…)

Tags: choice, competition, consumer-driven health care, coverage portability, defined contribution option, Ed Haislmaier, unintended consequences, Utah

The New Squeeze on Private Pregnancy Care

With very peccable timing, a handful of local officials are launching legislative assaults on popular pregnancy care centers even as Congress debates health care reforms it claims will promote more choice and competition. The assaults began in Baltimore where the City Council passed a law last week imposing regulations and penalties on the overwhelmingly privately funded centers that provide pregnancy-related services to some of the city’s neediest women.

The Council’s ostensible concern was that the centers misrepresent their services by failing to inform new clients what they don’t offer – abortion and contraceptives. What the centers do offer is not in dispute and is widely valued by their clients – confirmation of pregnancy; sexually transmitted infection/disease counseling; relationship counseling; food, clothing and prenatal vitamins; and referral to an array of community resources for family and medical support – all services provided at little or no cost to the clients or to taxpayers.

Baltimore officials rejected suggestions from some council members that it regulate Planned Parenthood of Maryland and other agencies that offer abortion and contraception, but do not provide material assistance to mothers. Meanwhile, officials in Montgomery County, Maryland are taking up the issue as well.

Ironically, these challenges follow on the heels of newly published information about the quality and depth of the services pregnancy resource centers provide in the United States. The information was quantified for the first time in a collaborative report released by the Family Research Council in September. The report demonstrates the medical accuracy standards the centers follow and the international scope of their networks. Among other findings, the centers:

– Assist an average of 5,500 Americans daily with sexuality-and pregnancy-related concerns;

– Offer parenting classes to new mothers through nearly 70 percent of centers nationwide;

– Provide medically referenced literature, reviewed by national-level experts, on prenatal/fetal development, risk avoidance/primary prevention of sexually transmitted infection and disease, and the physical and psychological risks of abortion;

– Provide live, 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-per-week accessibility to centers via Option Line, a national telephone hotline and web site that averages 20,000 contacts per month;

– Includes an international network of more than 60 centers in Canada, and another 40-plus countries worldwide from Romania, to Vietnam, to Zambia, and beyond;

– Rely on the engagement of more than 40,000 trained volunteers, including professional counselors and medical personnel, many of whom were honored last year at the White House.

With a national debate underway over cost containment and patient choice in health care, attacks on the privately supported and publicly popular centers are incomprehensible.

Tags: abortion, choice, competition, contraceptives, pregnancy care center

ObamaCare’s One-Size-Fits-All Style Not Good Fit for Women

First Lady Michelle Obama’s video on health care reform raises important issues about female patients who are falling through the cracks of the U.S. health care system. It’s not a perfect system, but Nina Owcharenko explains that ObamaCare would take women and the rest of the country in the wrong direction. Having to depend on politicians or faceless bureaucrats to make decisions about their care doesn’t empower women or improve their health care situations. Plus, the Obama health reform agenda isn’t what women want. A majority of female respondents told the Independent Women’s Forum in a recent survey that they don’t think government-run health care is best for them or their families. Watch:

Tags: choice, competition, faceless bureaucrats, government-run, health reform, Michelle Obama, ObamaCare, women