PRI Health Care Alert

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The Obamacare Proponents Who Cried Wolf
National Review | November 1, 2024 | Sally Pipes

Democrats just unveiled legislation that would make permanent the generous pandemic-era subsidies for health insurance sold through Obamacare’s exchanges.

Illinois representative Lauren Underwood (D.), the bill’s lead sponsor in the House of Representatives, said that extending the subsidies beyond their scheduled expiration at the end of next year would mean the “difference between families having coverage and going without it.”

That’s almost certainly an exaggeration. Policy-makers have been making erroneous predictions about Obamacare since it became law 14 years ago. This time will be no different. A new study from the Paragon Health Institute gives us an idea of how hard it has been to make such predictions.
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The 340B Drug Discount Program Is Well-Intentioned, But Must Be Reformed
Daily Bulletin | Wayne Winegarden | October 31, 2024

Most government support programs provide benefits directly to people, whether it is SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), or housing voucher benefits. But when it comes to healthcare, our government provides healthcare benefits by paying institutions, not patients. Shouldn’t funds follow the patient – not the system?

An example of this unique approach are the discounts given to hospitals rather than patients under the 340B drug discount program. The program, which requires manufacturer discounts on most drugs administered in outpatient settings to help safety-net providers, is under intense scrutiny in Congress.

All sorts of adverse incentives arise because the healthcare system prioritizes intermediaries over patients.
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Left's Medicaid Fixation Harms Patients
Newsmax | Sally Pipes | November 6, 2024

Over a three-month period last year, Medicaid enrollment declined by roughly 2 million, a new study in the journal Health Affairs reveals. The sudden contraction was mostly the result of a wind-down of COVID-19-era policies that prevented states from removing people from the program, even if they were not legally entitled to it.

At the time, Democrats portrayed this stark reduction in Medicaid’s rolls as a humanitarian crisis and urged states to delay the unwinding. “I am deeply concerned with the number of people unnecessarily losing coverage,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra told governors in June of last year.

But judging from the new analysis, that crisis never materialized. For the most part, people who left Medicaid got coverage elsewhere.
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