Summary by The Market Institute of a Center for American Progress forum. The publication of this summary does not constitute an endorsement of the positions presented. The Center for American Progress hosted a forum on Jan. 16, 2014 examining the benefits of higher cost drugs and medical devices in patient outcomes. Often physicians have to […]
Hearing Description: The U.S. House Small Business Committee recently convened to examine what impact the Affordable Care Act is having on small businesses as it relates to the employer mandate. The witnesses reported that the ACA was having a negative impact and the aggregation of multiple businesses under one owner is a big problem. Hearing […]
Heritage Foundation Issue Brief summary provided by The Market Institute. On October 16, 2013, Heritage released Issue Brief #4075 analyzing the impact of Obamacare’s Health Insurance Tax on consumers and small businesses. The Affordable Care Act imposes a tax on individuals and small businesses in 2014, by an additional 2-3%. This will lead to an […]
Visit http://theselfpaypatient.com. Sean Parnell created The Self-Pay Patient to be a resource for the tens of millions of Americans who are either uninsured, have high-deductible health insurance, or just want to escape from bureaucratic medicine and get their healthcare without either an insurance company or the government being involved in their medical treatment. These Americans […]
Big businesses may spend enormous sums to purchase political favors—such as laws or regulation to mandate purchase of their products or to hamstring their competition, writes G. Keith Smith, M.D., cofounder of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Article at: http://www.jpands.org/vol18no3/smith.pdf “Creating almost […]
The United States Supreme Court hears oral argument this Monday morning concerning the patentability of human genes, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) has urged the Court not to destroy incentives for private research. That would be the result if the Supreme Court issues a sweeping ruling in Ass’n for Molecular Pathology […]
Today the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) files an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of patents for genetic and other medical research, including isolated BRCA genes, which are important risk factors in breast and ovarian cancer. The incentives created by such patents are essential to encourage medical innovation that […]
By: G. Keith Smith, M.D., http://www.aapsonline.org/ We are accustomed to Newspeak from the federal government, in which words have the opposite of their traditional meaning. For example, there’s what I call UCA, the (Un)affordable Care Act. But now the problem is metastasizing to supposedly conservative publications and nominally free-market think tanks. In an article in […]
By G. Keith Smith, M.D.: We’re having a heat wave, and one of my sons facetiously suggested that we turn the air conditioner down to the lowest temperature and open the windows to cool it off outside. I made the comment that this would help with global warming. We all had a good laugh. Then […]
The biggest reason for the medical spending spiral is the lack of straightforward information on prices and actual costs. As Ralph Weber of MediBid explains; “This is because the “product” changed from “medical care” to “healthcare coverage” after 1965, and third-party payment with “assignment” of benefits (paying providers, not subscribers) disguises and increase costs.” Those […]