Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| How Health Reform Increases Unemployment The $2,000-per-employee tax on businesses employing 50 workers or more if they fail to make available government-approved health plans will amount to 15 percent of average annual earnings in the food and beverage industry and 9 percent in retail trade... |
| Why Planned Cost-Saving Measures Will Reduce Your Health Care Options Medicare Actuary estimates that Medicare payment rates will eventually be driven below Medicaid rates under the Independent Payment Advisory Board's budget assumptions... |
| Why Health Reform's Medicaid Expansion Will Reduce Health Care Access Three-quarters of physicians receive lower fees for serving Medicaid patients than they do for the uninsured, because many people without health insurance are still able to pay out-of-pocket for routine health expenses... |
| The Truth about Health Insurance Exchanges: Why Lawmakers Shouldn't Rush Implementation While a number of people are urging states to immediately create a health insurance exchange, the reasons are based on myths, not facts... |
| Computer Access to Patient Test Results Does Not Decrease Cost or Curtail Test Ordering Physicians with computer access to test results were 44 percent more likely to order basic screening and 103 percent more likely to order advanced screening than physicians without access... |
| Renewing the Prescription Drug User Fee Act The average research and development cost of bringing a drug to market from discovery to late stage jumped from $830 million in the 10-year period finishing in 2010 to $1,048 million in the decade finishing in 2011... |
| Medicare Hospital Quality Reporting Brings Little or No Mortality Improvement Medicare's seven-year public reporting initiative for hospitals, Hospital Compare, had no impact on reducing death rates for two key health conditions and just a modest effect on a third... |
| The "Doc Fix" Dilemma Calls for Immediate Medicare Reforms While Congress has not allowed scheduled Medicare cuts to go into place since 2003, delays only compound the problem by making the next round of cuts more drastic to keep up with budget projections... |
| The Politics of Health Care Rationing The requirements imposed by the individual mandate and new entitlements will compromise the government's ability to control cost growth... |
| Research on Savings from Generic Drug Use The total savings that have accrued to the U.S. health care system from substituting generic drugs for their brand-name counterparts was more than $1 trillion between 1999 and 2010... |
