Peter Ferrara was a graduate of Harvard Law School. He could have been a wealthy DC lawyer. Instead, he spent his life in the less remunerative world of ideas. Peter was one of a kind. We are unlikely to see someone like him again.
Next year, the out-of-pocket exposure for someone who buys insurance on the (Obamacare) exchange will be $12,000. It will be $24,000 for a family. If they have chronic health problems, families can face those costs every year.
Congressman Pete Sessions and John Goodman offer a better alternative. Give people a deposit to a Health Savings Account if they agree to be responsible for all preventive care, all primary care, chronic care management, or some other area of care.
The model is Cash and Counseling, the Medicaid program for the home-bound disabled – a highly successful program that has been around for several decades. More
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Goodman says the Trump Administration’s proposal to permit non-network health plans “promises to solve two problems: extreme differences in actual prices for the same service because of a lack of price competition, and narrow networks that are denying patients access to the best doctors and medical facilities.” More.
In contrast to a moral approach to taxation, some argue for an immoral, or at least amoral, approach. The most prominent among them is former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. His approach to taxation of the rich is the same approach a petty thief would take to garden-variety robbery: grab whatever you can get. Krugman guesses that the revenue-maximizing tax rate for someone like LeBron James could be as high as 90 percent. Slaves on southern plantations were able to consume a 9-times-greater share of their output than Krugman would allow for James. More.
One reason why the two parties can’t reach some sort of compromise is that neither party has been willing to tackle the three biggest problems that afflict the market the Affordable Care Act created. On the buyer side, we have been trying to force people to buy insurance they would never buy with their own money. On the seller side, we have been trying to force insurers to enroll people they do not want to enroll. And on both sides of the market, we have created perverse incentives that cause costs to be higher and quality lower than would otherwise have been the case. More
In the battle for liberty, we lost a warrior last week. But Ed Crane left us a legacy that will endure for a long, long time.
Why both parties missed an opportunity to reform Medicaid. Why they missed an opportunity to reform the Obamacare exchanges. Why partisanship is the biggest obstacle to sensible health reform.
Watch Dr. Goodman’s talk to the Public Affairs Luncheon Club in Dallas.
To our knowledge, the Goodman Institute is the only public policy think tank that has called for the complete inversion of the Food Pyramid, and we first did it under the Biden administration. In his latest post, John Goodman reviews the food wars – going back more than 160 years – and concludes that on this issue RFK Jr. appears to have the better argument.