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Trumpcare is Dead–What’s Next for Obamacare?
The American Healthcare Act is dead, and the Affordable Care Act lives on. What will happen now?
This article won’t be an intrigue piece about how the GOP will lick its wounds and try to circle back for another run at “repeal and replace.” (And frankly I don’t think they’ll be ready for another attack anytime soon.) More interesting, perhaps, is looking at what will happen if we leave Obamacare alone. So I did some research into the Congressional Budget Office, and here’s what I found:
How Much Would Medical Malpractice Tort Reform Reduce Healthcare Spending?
We posted an article a few weeks ago about differences of data in policy debate, focusing on significantly different numbers for the total costs of defensive medicine. A few readers asked us to expand on the topic, suggesting we explore how to reduce this spending whether it’s $50 billion or $850 billion.
The most often-suggested solution to defensive medicine and medical malpractice spending is tort reform of some sort–perhaps reducing maximum awards, or other fixes. What kind of impact could tort reform have?
Data in Policy Debate: Medical Malpractice and Defensive Medicine
Medical malpractice insurance in the US is often considered a problem that needs to change to help Americans pay less for healthcare services. The Affordable Healthcare Act didn’t have any medical malpractice tort reform as part of the bill, something CNN calls a “glaring omission.”
We decided to look at the oft-considered largest category of cost to the consumer–”defensive medicine”–and came across some very interesting results! This will be the first in a series of posts in which we explore the impact of different approaches to the data in having policy debate.
Can We Adopt a “Dog Model” for Healthcare in the United States?
Some people see this and believe it’s a good idea to adopt a model like Canada or the UK.
But what if there was a model that made the same procedures (at the same quality) even less expensive? Sometimes people cite places like India or Thailand, but their health outcomes and other factors like costs of living are lower. Can we look at an alternative model that keeps things in the United States or a peer country?