Linda Ramsey — The US spends twice as much on healthcare as other developed nations and gets worse outcomes — and the reasons why show what it’s going to take to reform healthcare

• A new review in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that America spends about twice as much as other high-income countries on healthcare. 

• At the same time, the health outcomes, or how well people fare with their health, aren't any better and are often worse than countries that spend half as much on healthcare as the US does.

• The study's authors concluded that the main reason the US spends so much has to do with the prices of labor, goods (like pharmaceuticals), and administrative costs — not how often Americans get certain procedures, which was no more than any other country. 

Explains the higher cost but not poorer outcomes.

Business Insider
The US spends twice as much on healthcare as other developed nations and gets worse outcomes — and the reasons why show what it’s going to take to reform healthcare
Lydia Ramsey

Beowulf — Health is the War of The State

The first step of any political reform, I’ve always believed, is to figure out how to achieve the desired goal with the minimum number of changes to the existing legal structure. [Beowulf if a lawyer.] As I’ve written before, Obama’s healthcare plan should have simply been a universal plan similar to Medicare (if not Medicare itself) that covered every American from the day they were born instead of when they turned 65. It would have been faster, cheaper, more universal (as in 100%) and more popular. It was a mistake Obama didn’t take that route and unlike Bill Clinton, he didn’t have an excuse for it....

Beowulf tells how to get there with Pete Stark's Americare and why the Democrats Medicare for All bill (HR 676) is a non-starter the way it is written.

As a lawyer, Beowulf thinks of policy in terms of the actual bills that would need to be passed into law. This involves getting from here (status quo) to there (desired objective), along with what it would take politically to do so. This is something that economists and a lot of public policy people miss.

Monetary Realism
Health is the War of The State
Beowulf

Jared Bernstein — It’s harder than Trump thinks to pull a thread or two out of the ACA.

But speaking of wonkery, let’s take a shallow dive into Trump’s softening on health care, which in at least one key aspect, doesn’t make much sense. He reports that in his meeting with President Obama, the President convinced him that parts of the Affordable Care Act are worth preserving, including the requirement that insurers cover those with pre-existing conditions.

But for that part of the law to work, you need healthy people to subsidize sicker people, as the latter must be covered. That implies mandates and if you mandate coverage, you must have individual subsidies and “community rating” (no individual underwriting; some variation within geo-areas allowed based on age and tobacco use). Without such provisions, the pre-existing condition requirement is meaningless, as insurers will offer unaffordable care to such persons.

In other words, there are lots of interacting, moving parts to the ACA, and it’s hard to pull out one thread…

There are only two simple solutions. Private markets and rationing by risk and price, or single payer. This is one case where the eluded middle holds.

All other solutions are convoluted, which is way health care reform has been so difficult.

On the Economy
It’s harder than Trump thinks to pull a thread or two out of the ACA.Jared Bernstein | Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Jo Biden in the Obama Administration