Medicare is facing a future financial collapse. By the time today's college students reach retirement age, workers will have to pay Medicare taxes equal to one out of every seven dollars earned, just to pay for benefits currently promised.
This week the Senate begins debate on the Democrat's Patient's Bill of Rights proposal, which seeks to substitute the opinions of Congress for the outcomes of the market and give trial lawyers a new feeding trough. Odds are the Senate will end the week by passing the Republican version, which is almost as bad.
Under a pilot program passed by Congress three years ago, tax free Medical Savings Accounts are available in the United States to the self-employed and firms with 50 or fewer employees. The act explicitly excludes large companies that have been on the cutting edge of change in health plan design.
Should parents be able to choose the school their children attend? While politicians from Florida to Arizona debate this issue, opponents of choice continually ignore the fact that America already has a de facto system of school choice; one that works well if you're not poor.
The new Social Security reform proposal put forward by Congressmen Bill Archer and Clay Shaw has a worthy aim: to secure future retirement benefits for today's young people without increasing taxes on workers or reducing benefits to retirees.
Should parents be able to choose the school their children attend? While legislators in Austin are debating this hot topic, many are pretending not to know that Texas already has a de facto system of school choice, and it works reasonably well so long as you're not poor.
The number of Americans without health insurance is 43 million and rising. Unwise government policies are mainly to blame.
As voters go to the polls on August 9 to vote on a property tax reduction, it will be a good time to reflect on how we pay for the public schools and why we do it that way.
With Medicare teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, President Clinton is proposing to add more beneficiaries and more costs. Under the president's new proposal, all Americans ages 62 to 64 (the Medicare eligibility age is 65) would be able to join Medicare in exchange for a monthly premium of $300.
The reality of modern medicine is the traditional doctor-patient relationship has been all but destroyed. Whereas doctors once functioned as agents of their patients, today they are more likely to function as agents of third-party payer bureaucracies.
Outside New York City and Hollywood, it's hard to find a liberal these days. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who will admit to ever having been a liberal.
While the private sector seems to have gotten health care costs under control, the same is not true of Medicare – the federal program that pays medical bills for the elderly.
A bill before Congress would allow the federal government to regulate the health care plan of every American citizen who has private insurance. It would raise costs, and therefore premiums, and cause millions to be uninsured. And although the bill's purpose is to raise the quality of care patients receive, in all likelihood the quality would go down, not up.
This dialogue grows out of Michael Kinsley's article "Eight Reasons Not to Cut the Capital-Gains Tax," which appeared in SLATE.
Only a few years ago, the Clinton Administration was touting the joys of managed care. That sentiment was echoed by big business, big insurance and on Capitol Hill by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Had the Clinton health plan become law, we all would be enrolled in HMOs by now.
A funding crisis, an insurance crisis and a quality crisis. All three require fundamental changes in federal policy.
The number of Americans without health insurance at any one time has risen steadily over the past decade and now totals more than 40 million, nearly 10 million of them children. Unwise federal policies contribute to this trend.
Ron Anderson normally has sensible views on most topics, especially issues involving health care. But his recent endorsement of the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill currently pending before the U.S. Senate is way off base.
As part of the recent budget agreement, President Clinton and Congressional leaders agreed to spend $16 billion over the next five years on health insurance for children. What's the best way to spend the money?
Twenty-one years and two months have passed since the last American helicopter left Saigon, leaving behind a war-torn country in the wake of a humiliating U.S. military defeat. For Americans who lived through that era, the casualty statistics are still haunting: more than 58,000 names grace the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in our nation's capital and Vietnamese casualties may have exceeded two million.
Most people think the next four years on Capitol Hill will be relatively uneventful, as Republicans reach an accommodation with a lame duck president. I predict that in the area of health care things will not be peaceful, however.
After more than 30 years of the War on Poverty, the federal government has proven one thing: it does a bad job of dispensing welfare. Hardly anybody is happy with the result. Now is an appropriate time for a better alternative: taxpayer choice.
The War on Poverty was launched to create a social safety net. Yet today the private sector provides the real social safety net, helping people whom government programs simply do not reach.
A group of scientists made a pronouncement about mammograms the other day, and it's causing great consternation. After much study and deliberation a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it could not recommend regular mammograms for women in their 40s. Instead, the panel said, women under 50 should decide for themselves if and when to have a mammogram.
Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) are designed to give individuals and their doctors more control over health care spending. Instead of a low-deductible health insurance policy, legislation before Congress would let employees and their employers choose high deductible insurance and put the premium savings in a tax free personal account to pay small medical bills. Employees could keep any money in the MSA at the end of the year, or roll it over to pay future medical expenses.