John Goodman’s Commentaries
Obamacare’s Dirty Little Secret
When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act of 2010, President Obama and lawmakers made the same claim over and over: The act would make good, affordable health insurance available to people with pre-existing conditions. The actual result has been the opposite. Obamacare makes health insurance as good as possible for the healthy and as bad as possible for the sick.
From John Goodman’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal (Paid gateway)
Can the Left and Right Agree on Health Reform?
A new book calls for universal health insurance coverage, but with no increase in government spending. It’s getting a lot of attention in progressive circles. Yet a bill that would go a long way toward implementing Finkelstein’s proposal has been introduced in Congress by a conservative Republican. More
Who Are the Real Authoritarians?
A Republican Alternative to Medicare for All
It’s been 15 years since John McCain ran for president with a plan to completely revamp our healthcare system. In the interim, Republicans have attempted a nip here or a tuck there, but nothing really big. Fortunately, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and his colleagues have come to the rescue with a reform plan that is a pro-patient, pro-family, pro-free enterprise alternative. It is based on three fundamental values. More
Against Medicaid Expansion
Expanding Medicaid to the relatively healthy might make sense if it improved general health. But there is little evidence it does. In Oregon, for example, a first-of-its-kind controlled trial tracked individuals who applied for Medicaid through a lottery. After two years, there was no discernible difference in the physical health of the winners and losers. More
Liberating the Doctors
For the past half century, virtually every major attempt to reform the health care system has involved people who don’t practice medicine telling the doctors who do practice medicine how to manage their affairs. Yet none of these solutions appears to work. Costs keep rising. Quality of care is not measurably improving. And, access to care (as measured, say, by per-capita doctor visits or the length of time needed to see a doctor) seems to be getting worse. So why not try something different? Why not allow the folks who practice medicine and who are in the best position to eliminate waste, improve quality and expand access to care to solve the very problems no one else seems able to solve? More
It’s Time to Retire the Labor Law
The emergence of Uber and similar ride services and the pandemic-induced phenomenon of working from home are radically changing the nature of work. The idea of “an hour of work” for a single employer is increasingly a meaningless concept. But without that metric, you can’t make sense of “minimum hourly pay” or “overtime” and other features of 85-year-old labor law. Moreover, millions of people no longer want to be traditional “employees.” To facilitate that desire, we need to let independent contractors have all the tax advantages employees have with respect to health insurance, retirement pensions and other benefits. More.
Medicare’s Future
Charity Without the Welfare State
We can have a safety net that meets the needs of people who experience misfortune without creating a permanent class of nonworking dependents who behave in socially undesirable ways.
What to Know About Pete Sessions’ Health Reform Bill
With the help of scholars at the Goodman institute and Americans for Prosperity, Congressman Pete Sessions and his colleagues have introduced the Health Care Fairness for All Act. Among its other features, the bill would do the following: 1. For the first time in the...