Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| Hospital Mergers May Increase Prices The number of hospital mergers and acquisitions has increased by more than 50 percent since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's passage; consolidations in the 1990s caused market prices to climb by as much as 40 percent in some markets... |
| Health Care Spending Among Privately Insured For privately insured under-65 year olds, outpatient and inpatient services represent 59 percent and 20 percent of total spending, respectively; this contrasts with 39 percent and 43 percent, respectively, within the Medicare age 65 and over population... |
| Many States Take a Wait-and-See Approach on New Insurance Exchanges Research by the Urban Institute found that 14 states had made significant progress in creating health insurance exchanges, 16 had made little or no progress and 20 were somewhere in between... |
| The Political Economy of Medicaid: Evidence from Five Reforming States In 2010, annual Medicaid spending totaled nearly $375 billion, constituting more than 15 percent of national health expenditures, and covered more than 51 million people... |
| Competitive Bidding Can Help Solve Medicare's Fiscal Crisis Implementation of competitive bidding in Medicare would create savings of $339 billion over the next 10 years... |
| The Myth of Runaway Health Spending Health care spending increased continuously into the last decade, however, this trend has since turned negative with the rate dropping almost every year since 2002, reaching a low of less than 4 percent in 2009... |
| Amid Shortages, Rules Force Hospitals to Trash Scarce Drugs Hospitals and pharmacies across the country face a growing issue of chronic drug shortages... |
| Medical Innovation: How the United States Can Retain Its Lead About 80 percent of life-sciences CEOs surveyed don't believe that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulatory approval process "is the best in the world"... |
| Affordable Care Act Tax Will Hurt Patients and Destroy Jobs Medicare's chief actuary estimates that the medical devices tax, along with various fees, will push national health care costs higher by $18.2 billion in 2018 and $17.8 billion in 2019... |
| High-Risk Insurance Pools Short on Enrollees About 45,000 people have signed up for the federally funded high-risk insurance pools -- well short of the 375,000 the Medicare actuary had predicted for the end of 2010... |
