Health

Health Savings Accounts: Answering the Critics, Part II

Consumer-driven health care (CDHC) allows patients to manage some of the dollars they spend on health care. Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) are a mechanism for them to do so.
Health Savings Accounts: Answering the Critics, Part I

Critics of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) have a litany of complaints. They are essentially the same complaints critics made a decade ago, at the dawn of the consumer-driven health care revolution. We…
Medicaid Empire: Why New York Spends so much on Health Care for the Poor and Near Poor and How the System Can Be Reformed

Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program for the poor and near poor, is the largest single expenditure by state governments today. At the rate the program is growing, it is on a course to…
Personal and Portable Health Insurance

One of the peculiarities of the U.S. health care system is that the health plan most of us have is not a plan that we chose; rather, it was selected by our employer. Even if we like our health plan, w…
Bush's Answer to Hillarycare

In his State of the Union address, President Bush devoted only a few sentences to health policy. But as the president was speaking, the administration released a five-page document describing health p…
Making Health Insurance Portable

One of the strange features of the U.S. health care system is that the health plan most of us have is not a plan that we chose; rather, it was selected by our employer.
Time, Money and the Market for Drugs*

Americans spend more than $234 billion a year on legally purchased chemical entities. Although the expense is a small part of our nation's $1.8 trillion health care bill, the dollars involved are subs…
Patients' Right to Choose

These are turbulent times for the Food and Drug Administration. The almost daily barrage of headlines questioning the safety of marketed drugs is probably depleting regulators' personal stocks of aspi…