OpenMarket: Health and Safety

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If all goes according to President-elect Donald Trump’s plan, the next Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will be Rep. Tom Price. While Price is perhaps best known for his opposition to the Affordable Care...

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The death rate increased 1.2% last year, and life expectancy fell in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available. Female life expectancy dropped from 81.3 to 81.2 years, and male life...

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In scarcely more than two dozen words, Article I, Section 1 of the United States Constitution lays out a singular idea at the root of any serious plan for Congress:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

The Framers of the Constitution vested onto one institution, Congress...

This week on RealClear Radio Hour, Drs. Debra Patt and Kerry Emanuel discuss the politics of cancer care, chaos theory, and climate science.

We open the show with Dr. Debra Patt, practicing oncologist and Vice President of Texas Oncology. Debra explains how the well-intentioned federal 340B Drug Discount Program is actually driving up cancer care costs. With preferred vendor hospitals applying their 30-50% drug discounts to all patients, not just the underserved, industry-wide prices are being forced up to subsidize the program. On the whole, however, she is optimistic about the diagnostic innovations, therapeutic success, and a drastic drop in cancer mortality rates. 

We have arrived at another divisive debate about the future of Americans’ access to health insurance and health care services and our ability to protect it. And no one can claim that the recent election provided a mandate for a specific path forward. With the flood of news about 2017 exchange pricing and Republicans working on how they can make good on their vows to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), now is a good time to examine “what might have been” in light of “what is” regarding our nation’s health care insurance and delivery system. 

The reality is unspeakably ugly—skyrocketing premiums, disappearing competition, enormous unbudgeted federal spending on the exchanges, and unappreciated second-order effects like large increases on the group market (where most people obtain health care coverage) and rising small employer costs. These rising costs depress...

Obamacare policies are unpopular, and people often dump them months later. That’s John Graham’s conclusion at the National Center for Policy Analysis’s Health Policy Blog. Taxpayers pay billions of dollars a year subsidizing policies on Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges, including an estimated $75 billion in subsidies for 2017. Yet the Obamacare exchanges are providing little lasting coverage:

There is a significant discrepancy between the four million Obamacare beneficiaries estimated by the NHIS and estimates produced by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and the Congressional Budget Office, which estimate about 11 million...

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It’s perverse to drive up the costs of someone’s health insurance...

Health care insurance premiums will increase significantly next year as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and many consumers will be left with access to only a single insurance provider, according to administration officials. Arizona will see the biggest spike in prices (a whopping 116 percent), while Oklahoma will see a spike of 69 percent and Tennessee, Minnesota, and Alabama will see spikes of around 60 percent. The national average will be about 25 percent, the administration says.

Columnist Mary Katharine Ham wrote recently about how “My Defective Obamacare Health Insurance Product Just Blew Up.” Last year, her insurance plan’s cost went up...

This week on RealClear Radio Hour, Drs. Jeremy Berg and Daniel Sarewitz discuss the politics and culture of Big Science.

My first guest this week is Dr. Jeremy Berg, Editor-in-Chief of Science and Professor of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. Jeremy unpacks the declining public trust in the $50 billion publicly funded science industry—from the replication crisis to the politicization of science. 

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Three times in the past, Senate Democrats blocked a bill that would have provided funding to fight the spread of the Zika virus, and suspended certain regulations (it would have “temporarily waived duplicative permitting requirements for anti-mosquito pesticides,”...