"CBO and JCT estimate that enacting the American Health Care Act would reduce federal deficits by $119 billion over the coming decade and increase the number of people who are uninsured by 23 million in 2026 relative to current law."
No, this shortage of baking soda won't effect the cookies you are planning on baking.
"China is piloting the use of vending machines that sell HIV testing kits on university campuses. The goal is to reach students who may be reluctant to go to a clinic for a test because of the stigma of contracting HIV."
"The details of last week's fiasco about American health care are for my colleagues over on that desk to deal with. My purpose here is just to point out that the economic structure of health care in other places just isn't what all too many people think it is. There's a large part of the American political class insisting that this is just obvious. We should have a national, single payer, health care financing system. And the amazing thing about this is that so few countries actually do that. And most of those countries who are thought to have better health care systems than the US don't do that either.
There are indeed national health care systems out there--but they tend not to be single payer. And there are single payer systems out there, or close enough at least--but they tend not to be national. Which is something that we really ought to be thinking about, no?
Take it as read that the US system isn't as good as it could be. And also that we might want to propose something to make it better. So, we're agreeing that something must be done. My point here is just that the economics of what we should do might well not be the same as the economics of that national single payer system we're urged to implement."
"The fact is that the health-care industry, which makes up about a sixth of the American economy, isn’t like the market for apples or iPhones. For a number of reasons (which economists understand pretty well), it is riven with problems. Serious illnesses can be enormously costly to treat; people don’t know when they will get ill; the buyers of health insurance know more about their health than the sellers; and insurers have a strong incentive to avoid providing their product to the sick people who need it the most.
Since the days of Otto von Bismarck, most developed countries have dealt with these problems by setting up a system in which the state provides medical insurance directly, or else mandates and subsidizes the purchase of private insurance, setting strict rules for what sorts of policies can be sold. Obamacare amounts to a hybrid model. It supplements employer-provided insurance, the traditional American way of obtaining health care, with a heavily regulated (and subsidized) individual insurance market and an expanded Medicaid system.
It is far from perfect. But, in combining mandates with subsidies, regulation, and access to a state-administered system for the poverty-stricken and low-paid, it is intellectually coherent. (Many of the problems it has encountered arose because the mandate to purchase insurance hasn’t been effectively enforced, and not enough young and healthy individuals have signed up.) Since it leaves in place the basic structure of private insurance and private provision, Obamacare is also conservative. As is well known, parts of it resemble a proposal that the Heritage Foundation put forward in 1992."