Robert J. Samuelson writes an extremely disappointing  and misleading article about health care policy in today’s Washington Post. The column starts out fine with Samuelson looking at the basic OECD data that shows America spends dramatically more on health care than any other industrialized country on earth but doesn’t get better health outcomes as a [...]

The United Kingdom and Ireland, both countries which have what could only be considered socialize medicine programs, also have the two most cost effective health care systems in the developed world according a study in the Journal of Royal Society of Medicine. From the study: The biggest ratios, indicating the greatest cost-effectiveness, were in Ireland, [...]

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has released a new report that indicates Gov. Deval Patrick’s goal of controlling health care cost by moving the state towards a global payment method is unlikely to produce real savings.

Another problem for Romney-care. Even with an individual mandate private insurers in Massachusetts costs to consumers rise faster than public plans. How much more evidence do we need that single payer health care is the only affordable way to go?

Massachusetts is still struggling with controlling health care costs since it decided to embrace health care reform by just expanding our broken private insurance system to cover more people. A problem in Massachusetts, which is common around the country, is that there are huge variances in what is paid for the same procedure. From the [...]

As you can see in this helpful chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation, America pays much more for health care than any other first-world country. There are a lot of false ideas or very minor explanations that are overstated to try to justify why we pay so much. Other countries are just evil nations that [...]

One of the worst problems with the deficit hysteria that has swept Washington, DC is that it is also accompanied by deficit solution blinders–blinders so powerful they allow the “serious people” to pretend the simplest solutions to our deficit problem literally don’t exist. The latest example is David Leonhardt of the New York Times: We [...]

When I examine any “plan” to reduce the national debt I always go straight to the section on health care, and not just because I’m an expert on health care reform. As you can clearly see from this graph from the CBO, our long-term deficit problem is almost exclusively a health care cost problem. Any [...]

The health insurance industry makes a substantial part of its profits by hanging on to premium dollars as long as possible — premiums which are established after assessing anticipated risk and expected claims. But if all claims are paid, there’s no need for managing risk by reserving premium dollars, and no need to hold reserves for investment. Getting insurers and Wall Street to give up the reserves is going to be a challenge.

This health care reform bill passed late last night and soon to be signed into law is a seriously flawed piece of legislation, for it fails to achieve the goals of real health care reform. Now that it is essentially the law of the land, the country needs to work diligently at the federal and [...]