Tag Archives: US health care

The US is a global anomaly. This is the kind of "exceptionalism" one wants, other than those that are profiting from it.Conversable EconomistHealth Care Headed for One-Fifth of US EconomyTimothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase are working with the e-commerce giant. Game-changer?Recode Amazon is creating a health care company with the help of Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase Jason Del Ray ht Brad DeLong at Grasping RealitySee also The e-commerce giant is muscling its way into a number of businesses that banks have long dominated. American BankerHow Amazon is shaking up financial services Keven Wack

A new review in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that America spends about twice as much as other high-income countries on healthcare.  At the same time, the health outcomes, or how well people fare with their health, aren't any better and are often worse than countries that spend half as much on healthcare as the US does. The study's authors concluded that the main reason the US spends so much has to do with the prices of labor, goods (like pharmaceuticals), and...

The American system relies to a surprising extent on foreign medical graduates, most of whom are citizens of other countries when they arrive. By any objective standard, the United States trains far too few physicians to care for all the patients who need them. We rank toward the bottom of developed nations with respect to medical graduates per population.… Although many feared that coverage expansions from the Affordable Care Act might lead to an overwhelmed physician work force, that...

Opponents of single payer health care frequently claim that such a system might be wonderful in theory, but getting there would be too disruptive. Many Americans, the argument goes, have private health insurance coverage and the transition to a government plan would be jarring. “Half of America gets their health insurance coverage on the job,” American Hospital Association lobbyist and former Connecticut Democratic congressman Bruce Morrison told The Intercept last month. Single payer...

Noah Smith on Greg Mankiw and John Cochrane. Mankiw actually comes off quite well. Cochrane, not so much. I think that Noah has it right. Health care is not as much an economic (positive) issue as it is a moral (normative) one. This is the ground on which it will ultimately be decided politically.NoahpinionHandwaving on health careNoah Smith | Bloomberg View columnist

In a sudden change of heart that kills senate Republicans’ effort to pass a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare before a rule allowing Republicans to circumvent a Democratic filibuster expires at the end of the month, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is now saying he won’t support the Graham-Cassidy Obamacare repeal bill. Cruz, who revealed his position during a panel discussion at a Texas Tribune conference in Austin, suggested that the proposal also lacks the vote of Sen. Mike Lee, according to...

Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy plans to use the most recent effort to repeal and replace portions of the Affordable Care Act to push an amendment that would bar states from enacting their own single-payer systems, he told reporters on Monday. When asked by The Intercept on Tuesday about the status of his legislation, Kennedy said that the bill’s co-sponsors, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., told him that the measure already bans single payer, but that he was...

Sen. Bernie Sanders has unveiled a new single-payer healthcare plan which would provide all Americans with government-sponsored health coverage. Sanders’s plan, supported by some 16 Democrats in the Senate, calls for an overhaul of the healthcare system with what would essentially be a tweaked and revitalized version of Medicare-for-all. “Today we say that a function of a rational healthcare system is to provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way,” declared Sanders, an independent...