New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

The second theory is that Medicaid is uniquely inferior among health insurance plans, and that is what causes it to be ineffectual. The right-wing has been pursuing this theory for a while, claiming that the low reimbursement rates in Medicaid basically make it inoperative as insurance because [...]

So Mary Fallin has this thing she does where she forgets that she is governing a state, and pretends instead that she is a national political actor whose job should primarily consist of taking symbolic potshots at federal government programs that the Republican party dislikes. It is not totally clear why she does this: sometimes [...]

Healthcare costs in the US are really high relative to other countries. In 2008, the US spent over $7,500 per person on health care, nearly twice the amount of a group of similar OECD countries. As a result, the US spends 16% of its GDP on healthcare, more than 5 points higher than [...]

The Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate today. As such, I thought I would break my hiatus briefly. One of the talking points among detractors of the health care law was that it constituted a government takeover of healthcare. That is understandably a form of political rhetoric aimed at firing up a base, but it [...]

It almost goes without saying these days that America’s approach to providing health care is totally dysfunctional. The United States spends more money than any other country in the world while simultaneously insuring fewer people than every other industrialized nation. Meanwhile, it delivers poor outcomes, and the World Health Organization famously ranked it [...]