Daily Policy Digest
Health Issues
| Unnecessary Regulations that Increase Prescription Drug Costs Sixty percent of all Americans take a prescription drug in any given year, and nearly all seniors do, says Devon Herrick, a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| Whether States Should Expand Medicaid Is a Tough Decision Medicaid already accounted for nearly 24 percent of state budget expenditures in 2011 and costs are projected to rise by more than 150 percent over the next decade... |
| ObamaCare Creates Moral Dilemma The burden of deciding which medical procedures are standard or culturally acceptable has been transferred from individuals and employers to the government under the Affordable Care Act... |
| Restricted Growth of Home Health Agencies Hurts Patients In the District of Columbia, the district's State Health Planning and Development Agency has rejected 46 of the 49 home health applications submitted... |
| Study Questions Widely Used Risk-Adjustment Methods The sickness of patients explained between 10 percent and 12 percent of the discrepancy between places with high mortality rates and those with low mortality rates... |
| Foreign Discount Generic Drugs Lacking in Quality and Oversight Fifty-four percent of Americans distrust Indian drugs and 70 percent distrust Chinese drugs... |
| The Future of Free Market Health Care There is a way to use health insurance exchanges to both reform our health care entitlements and reduce premiums for those with private insurance... |
| Digital Shift Swells Profits for Electronic Medical Record Industry Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, a firm that lobbied heavily for government support of digital medical records, witnessed its annual sales more than double from $548 million in 2009 to $1.44 billion in 2012... |
| Federal Government Releases List of Health Benefits Insurers Must Offer The Affordable Care Act sets out 10 benefit categories that must be covered by most individual and small-group insurance plans at the same level as a typical employer plan, ranging from hospitalization to prescription drugs to maternity and newborn care... |
| Hospitals Chase Medicare Performance-Based Bonuses A 2008 study of Massachusetts doctors revealed that doctors who receive incentives to improve the overall health of their patients saw no better results than doctors who received no bonuses... |
