NOTE: It is likely that few Quote of the Day subscribers read this 2007 message on John Nyman’s new theory of moral hazard and welfare gain because it is long and terribly wonkish. It is being reprised here because current trends in health care payment reform violate these important concepts, thereby resulting in further impairment [...]

The Effects of Medicaid Coverage — Learning from the Oregon Experiment By Katherine Baicker, Ph.D., and Amy Finkelstein, Ph.D. The New England Journal of Medicine, July 20, 2011 Working with a team of researchers, we have taken advantage of an unprecedented opportunity to gauge the effects of Medicaid coverage on low-income, previously uninsured adults, using [...]

These are patients with incomes below the federal poverty level. Requiring a co-payment before access to care is permitted causes many of these individuals to go without medical care. It is appropriate that the Court of Appeals panel ruled that the HHS Secretary was “arbitrary and capricious” in approving the waiver that authorized the imposition of co-payments.

Although this policy failure of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was touched on briefly in a recent message, it is elaborated on here because of its great importance to families.

How many individuals continue in the same employment for their entire careers, with the same employer-sponsored health plan, with the same network of health care providers, with the same…? Well, we can stop there. Nobody does.

This Canadian study provides a great example of how we, in the United States, “think up” policies to control health spending while improving quality, and then apply those policies simply because they “should work.” Many of these policy decisions are used to divert our attention from much more effective measures such as a single payer national health program.

March 5, 2006 “When you’re sick, you present your medicare card, not your credit card. New Democrats will not stand idly by. We will be fighting each and every day for our precious medicare system.” Jack Layton (July 18, 1950 – August 22, 2011) http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Quotes+Jack+Layton+words/5289596/story.html And.. Letter from Jack Layton, MP, Député Toronto – Danforth [...]

Employers are reducing the transparency of the massive shift of health care costs to their employees by using many different methods that individually do not look too onerous, but cumulatively have a major impact.

As John Goodman said in this same article in an entirely different context, “It’s so bizarre that not even J.K. Rowling could make up a story like this.”

We are inundated with nonsense about how private health insurance competition in the marketplace brings us higher quality at lower costs when compared with government-administered programs. This study by the Inspector General of Health and Human Services provides an enlightening test of that theory by controlling for quality while measuring the differences in cost. Both Medicaid (government) and Medicare Part D (private) use the same brand-name drugs with identical quality, so cost becomes the sole variable.