Category: Special Publications

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, or Obamacare) includes provisions to cut spending within the Medicare and Medicaid programs by about $455 billion over 10 years, according to the original cost estimate produced by the Congressional Budget Office at the time of enactment. (This CBO estimate of the aggregate savings from the spending reduction provisions excludes the large spending increase associated with the law’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility.)

I.  Good Ideas We Should Adopt Even If the Economy Wasn’t Hurting Permanently extend current tax policy. Predictable, consistent tax policy will eliminate needless uncertainty in the business sector. Eliminate …

There is no more urgent task than getting people back to work and improving the prospects for economic progress of all Americans — especially the poor. Consider this: As of May 2011, 9.1 percent of Americans were unemployed and looking for work. But workers who are minorities, less educated and inexperienced face greater employment challenges than others. Among ethnic minorities, for example, the Hispanic unemployment rate was 11.9 percent and the African American unemployment rate was 16.2 percent. Unemployment of college graduates was half the overall national rate and one-third the unemployment rate of workers with less than a high school education. Among teenagers 16 to 19 years old, more than one in five was unemployed, and among black teenagers, more than four in 10 was unemployed.

To confront America’s health care crisis, we do not need more spending, more regulations or more bureaucracy. We do need people, however, including every doctor and every patient. All 300 million Americans must be free to use their intelligence, their creativity and their innovative ability to make the changes needed to create access to low-cost, high-quality health care.

Over several decades, employer-provided pension plans have played a diminishing role in employees retirement incomes. ?”Defined benefit” plans provide a post-retirement income based on a worker’s earnings history and tenure. But defined benefit pensions now cover only 20 percent of private-sector employees – just half the rate of three decades ago.

Former Comptroller General David M. Walker, NCPA Senior Fellow Thomas R. Saving and NCPA President and Kellye Wright Fellow John C. Goodman held a briefing in Washington, D.C. on September 8, 2010.

The NCPA occasionally produces Special Publications focusing on health care, such as briefing books, conference proceedings and co?publications with other institutes. Topics include, but are not limited to, medical tourism, …

Welcome to Future World, where the average income is $100,000 a year and people need only a 20-hour work week to earn it. Since the present day, medical science has progressed even faster than income.

To confront America’s health care crisis, we do not need more spending, more regulations or more bureaucracy. We do need people, however, including every doctor and every patient. All 300 million Americans must be free to use their intelligence, their creativity and their innovative ability to make the changes needed to create access to low-cost, high-quality health care.

Health care reform is definitely at the top of the domestic policy agenda. But before we move ahead on significant changes in the health care markets in the United States, it is critical that we flesh out our understanding of one of the leading rationales for reform. The argument goes something like this. Health care spending varies dramatically from region to region without producing commensurate variation in health outcomes. Indeed, higher health care spending per capita is not consistently associated with better health outcomes. The observed disconnect between health care spending and outcomes suggests that through a more efficient use of health resources, spending could be cut substantially.

Spending on Medicare and Social Security is expected to grow considerably in coming years, commanding an increasing share of the nation's output. This study begins by comparing the long-run forecasts for Medicare and Social Security made by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the forecasts presented in the respective trustees' reports.

In the history of politics, there is only one fundamental, abiding issue: It is individualism vs. collectivism. Do individuals have the right to pursue their own happiness, as Thomas Jefferson thought and as the Declaration of Independence deemed self-evident? Or do we have an obligation to live our lives for the community or the state, as most societies have claimed throughout most of history?

On October 3, President Bush vetoed a bill passed by Congress to expand funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) by $35 billion, paid for with a $0.61 tax on cigarettes.  The House passed the bill by a vote of 265-159 and it passed 67-29 in the Senate. 

The NCPA occasionally produces special publications, such as Briefing Books, Conference Proceedings and Copublications with other institutes. Studies by NCPA scholars published elsewhere are included by permission.

Government at all levels in the United States currently spends about 7.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid.  Yet Christian Hagist and Laurence J. Kotlikoff have shown that if benefits expand at the rate of the past 30 years and if the population ages the way demographers predict, government health care spending will equal one-third of national income by mid-century, when today's college students reach the retirement age.

This covers the goals, needs, and background of the Medicade Reform Service Center.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush devoted only a few sentences to health policy. But, to coincide with the speech, the Bush administration released a five-page document proposing health-policy reforms so sweeping and bold as to merit comparison to the scope — though certainly not the content — of Hillary Clinton's plan of a decade ago. If the White House is able to see its proposals through, it will leave a lasting and positive mark on American social policy.

Economic Freedom of North America 2005 Annual Report

Prior to the 20th century, classical liberalism was the dominant political philosophy in the United States. It was the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence and it permeates the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and many other documents produced by the people who created the American system of government.

This report has been written to help you and to enlist your help in correcting a deadly situation that kills an estimated 103,000 people in this country each year-as many deaths as from AIDS, breast cancer, and auto accidents combined.

Where does it kill? In our hospitals. What is it? Hospital infection.