Advocates of mental health parity assume that all health care should be paid for in the same way. Federal law already requires that any cap on private health insurance benefits (e.g., a limit on the amount of total spending) must be the same for physical and mental health services.
Utilization of medical care has risen dramatically since Medicare began in 1965. In that year, health expenditures accounted for 5.7 percent of the nation’s output.
Medicare currently pays only five percent of the cost of prescription drugs used by Medicare beneficiaries. Proposals to add a comprehensive prescription drug benefit to the program could shift as much as two-thirds of senior drug costs to Medicare.
A new survey sheds light on the relative merits of the health care systems in five English-speaking countries. This is the latest in a series of studies conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Commonwealth Fund in New York City.
The essential problem in our health care system is that consumers are divorced from the cost of the services they consume. We have become so dependent on third-party payment that patients pay directly for only about 15 percent of total health care services, down from 56 percent in 1960.
Ever since Hillary Rodham Clinton's failed attempt to restructure the nation's health care system, members of Congress have been reluctant to propose any major health care reforms, sticking instead to reform by small steps.
When the threat of anthrax became a widespread concern, the Canadian government said it had serious doubts that Bayer, the owner of the patent for the anti-anthrax drug Cipro, could meet Canadian needs. Canada ignored the patent and ordered generic copies. In the United States, Sen. Charles Schumer expressed the same concerns and proposed that the U.S. government do the same. After Bayer said it could meet the needs of both nations, and after other drugs that are effective against anthrax were identified, Canada reversed its decision, and the issue was dropped in the United States for the time being.
The reasons managed care has not worked as a national policy in addressing the concerns of cost, access, quality and patient satisfaction are the same reasons Medical Savings Accounts and other consumer-driven programs are attractive.
Congress has before it several bills to help newly laid-off workers from the airlines and other industries affected by the terrorist attacks on America. President Bush has proposed – and members of Congress from both parties have offered bills – helping these workers to retain their health insurance coverage and avoid joining the ranks of the uninsured.
Virtually every child in a low-income family is eligible for either Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), but a recent fact sheet from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured reports that 24 percent (or about 7.7 million) of the 32 million children in low-income families remain uninsured.
Physicians for a National Health Program and other groups advocate a single-payer health care system as a way to improve quality and increase access to health care. The idea may be appealing to many physicians, frustrated by constraints on their medical practices that may reduce the quality of patient care. However, rather than improving the conditions physicians face under our current system of multiple payers, national health insurance would make matters worse.
For decades, advocates of socialized medicine in the United States and Canada have maintained that health care systems financed by taxes and under government control are more efficient than private sector models in their ability to control costs and maintain quality of health care.
Congress is considering several versions of a Patients Bill of Rights. In the Senate, the "bipartisan" McCain-Kennedy-Edwards bill is going to duke it out with the "propartisan" Breaux-Frist-Jeffords bill and others. In the House, Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.), declaring that he was tired of waiting for the White House to compromise, prepared to move ahead with his own legislation. Meanwhile, Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff, announced that the President will veto any legislation that goes too far.
In our society, people who choose not to pay for insurance know that they are likely to get health care anyway – even if they can't pay for it. The reason is that there is a tacit, widely shared agreement that no one will be allowed to go without care. As a result, the willfully uninsured impose external costs on others – through the higher taxes or higher prices which subsidize the cost of their care.
The idea behind Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) is that individuals are able to own and control some of their own health care dollars. Instead of turning all the money over to an employer or insurance company, part of the funds are placed in an account from which patients pay directly for medical services. Further, individuals ultimately get to keep any MSA funds they do not spend
Congress is poised to pass a law specifically designed to encourage litigation against health plans. Advocates of the so-called Patients' Bill of Rights are selling this legislation as necessary to permit members of health maintenance organizations to sue their plans. However, this is not an accurate description of the bill:
Here we go again. Another round of health insurance rate hikes. This time premiums are going up anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent and more. And health care costs generally are rising at two to three times the rate of inflation.
The Health Care Financing Administration (the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid) can waive some federal requirements for Medicaid eligibility to allow states to experiment with new ways of delivering health care to the poor. Near the end of the Clinton administration, HCFA granted waivers to Maine and Vermont for programs allowing many people ineligible for Medicaid to get Medicaid prescription drug coverage.
Patients are lined up in the hallway, stretcher after stretcher. There are so few chairs that anxious relatives stand by the gurneys for hours. A woman with a migraine sits with her hands pressed to her ears. She waits like this for a couple of hours, perhaps longer.
The two major presidential candidates, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush, are offering competing proposals to deal with the gap in prescription drug coverage.
The principles of the American political process were slowly being fonnulated in the decades before the American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution of the United States of America. The sources were largely English and had a profound impact on Americans of the 18th century. The Framers left us with an intellectual heritage in which rights flow from one's nature as a human being. By adherence to the rule of law, private property and individuals are protected from the potential tyranny of the many (democracy) and the totalitarianism or authoritarianism of the few (central control, collectivism). To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, Liberty requires continuous diligence to preserve freedom.
Many employers are concluding that it is time to rethink the way they provide health insurance benefits for their employees.
Physicians and patients in the United States have better access to innovative treatments than do those in any other developed country. And the U.S. has become the world leader in biotechnology, including the development and manufacture of new drugs. The main reason is the lack of price controls. In almost every other industrialized country, choice of and access to the most effective new drugs are limited by drug price controls and other government restrictions.
Policy analysts and health care advocates often lament the plight of those Americans who lack health insurance. Yet most overlook the reasons why people do not have health insurance. If income were the only determinant, a simple income-based subsidy might alleviate the problem. Further, if all people valued health insurance equally, those families who qualify for public programs like Medicaid would enroll if they could not afford insurance. However, the matter is far more complex, as can be seen by examining five myths about health insurance in the United States.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 4.8 million of the 19.6 million Texas residents – about one in every four – are not covered by health insurance. Moreover, the proportion of uninsured has changed little in the past 10 years. However, in many cases the uninsured are uninsured by choice. And lacking health insurance does not mean lacking health care in Texas.