There is tremendous waste in the program. That means that Congress can make the program work better for beneficiaries and at the same time free up trillions of dollars to help fund the tax bill. The reforms include Roth Health Savings Accounts, 24/7 direct primary care, and access to a competitive medical marketplace. More
There is a great deal of waste in our entitlement programs. And by cutting out waste, we can make these programs work better for the people who depend on them.
Take Social Security. Last year the agency said it has identified 2 million beneficiaries who have been overpaid. It has sent them “clawback” letters, demanding Uncle Sam’s money back. In some cases, the claims go back several decades, and the amounts can be more than $300,000. More
Our health care system is replete with perverse incentives. If they are not checked, our premiums and taxes will consume ever more of our national income. Canada checks them by limiting resources. Doctors must send their patients to the hospital for simple x-rays. And the country ranks 25th out of 29 developed countries on the number of MRI scanners per person. In the US, private health insurers perform the task – by requiring preauthorization for certain services and denying claims for medically unnecessary procedures. Despite some problems, our system works much better. More.
The FDA wants ads to have more warnings about risks and side effects. RFK, Jr. wants to abolish the ads altogether. Yet, our most important health care problem is not that people are taking too many prescription drugs. They are taking too few. We get our highest return on money we spend on drugs (versus doctors, hospitals, etc.). We do not have too many ads. We have too few. More.
This occurs for three reasons: traditional Medicare requires three separate insurance plans for comprehensive coverage; traditional Medicare drug plans are required to community rate, without adequate risk adjustment; and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are able to calculate patients’ coinsurance based on list prices, rather than on the actual discounted prices the PBM pays the manufacturers. In addition, beneficiaries in all Medicare plans will pay more for drugs and drug insurance because the IRA removes more than $300 billion of government funding from Medicare Part D over 10 years—leaving the market with no alternative but to shift costs to beneficiaries. More.
Although Big Pharma and big business agree on the end result (people get the lifesaving drugs they need), they don’t always agree on who should bear the bulk of the cost. Enter the politicians to tilt the scale. A bipartisan push would allow drug companies to sell brand-name drugs at monopoly prices for virtually all patients with employer-provided health insurance. The result would be higher drug company profits and lower employee wages. More.
More than half of all seniors in Medicare obtain health insurance from a private Medicare Advantage plan. Yet many on the left are hostile to these plans. Yet this hostility is misplaced. A new study finds that the migration of people from traditional Medicare to the Medicare Advantage program over the last decade has saved the federal government $144 billion. More.
