Last week’s seven-candidate debate hosted by the Fox Business Network once again found much to discuss in terms of national security issues, immigration law enforcement, even a little economic policy, and, of course, the latest round of character attacks and counter-attacks. Still missing in action: at least the first subcutaneous probe of where the respective candidates stand on health policy issues.
Based on recent performance, it’s questionable whether health policy has attracted sufficient interest among the media and Republican primary voters to command more than a few seconds on the debate stage. But it’s not for lack of potential lines of inquiry.
Here are some questions to the candidates from Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute that still await new rounds of oversimplified, evasive, or (one might hope) thoughtful answers.
Moving to single-payer in the U.S. would require massive new taxes that would stifle growth, and consolidating all power over the health system in the federal government would lead, in time, to second-rate health care for many millions of people. Democrats praise Medicare’s simplicity, but giving the Medicare bureaucracy the power to set prices for all medical services in the U.S. would lead to the misallocation of billions of dollars.
The federal government has no good way to know what the proper price should be for the thousands of different services provided to patients, and thus would overpay for many while underpaying for many others. The result of applying this kind of mindless regulation system-wide would be impaired access to many needed services and the slow exodus of the nation’s best and brightest out of medicine and into other pursuits.
A Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chairman wants the federal government to disclose how much money taxpayers lost because of the rapid-fire financial collapse of 12 Obamacare health insurance co-ops, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
Sen. Ron Johnson demanded in a Jan. 19 letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that federal officials provide full accounting for the losses. A part of the Department of Health and Human Services, CMS oversees the experimental co-op program.
The U.S. government will limit a process that allowed people to sign up for health insurance under ObamaCare outside of the normal enrollment period. Typically, individuals have from about November to January to purchase insurance under ObamaCare. In some cases, though, they’re allowed to sign up outside that period, such as when they have a child.
The government is also tightening an exception that let people sign-up when they moved, by clarifying that people can’t get coverage based on a short-term or temporary relocation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a blog post on Tuesday. It also plans to more tightly enforce other limits on enrollment by making sure people are qualified to sign-up in the remaining special circumstances.
Sen. Sanders claims he can provide free health care for all Americans even while saving $6.3 trillion over the next 10 years. In truth, the actual cost of the Sanders health plan will be at least 40% more than he claims. In the worst case, it will be 49% higher.
Moreover, the increase in federal taxes required to fund his plan will not be the $13.8 trillion claimed by the economics professor who is advising Sanders, nor even the $28 billion estimated by fellow Forbes colleague Avik Roy: the new federal taxes required to fund the Sanders health plan will be $36.3 trillion!
In short, the Sanders health plan would require a 71% increase in federal spending over the next decade.