Tevi Troy and I co-authored a piece for the current edition of National Review on the emerging health care plans in Congress. Although much has already been written about the structural flaws of these plans — their immense costs and excessive reliance on governmental control — their details are just as worrisome. Indeed, the more the public learns about what these plans would actually do if passed, the less they will like them. That article is available here.
Also this week, Yuval Levin and I have a piece in the Weekly Standard. In it, we point out that the costs of the bills now being considered in Congress are much higher than advertised because tens of millions of low- and middle-income Americans would be forced to sign up for costly job-based insurance, with no additional financial support from the government. That will create tremendous pressure on Congress to extend premium subsidies to even more families, which will drive costs well above current projections. Moreover, the Obama administration’s main cost-control idea — a new commission for setting Medicare payment policy — is not really a new idea at all. The current system for paying physicians under Medicare was designed by just such an expert panel twenty years ago and it has been a disaster. It was supposed to encourage and reward general practitioners, but it actually drove many new doctors to become specialists instead of primary care physicians. You can read the full article here.