Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: 5 Steps to a Better Health Care System, Second Edition (Hoover Institution Press Publication)

In this second edition of their 2005 work, the authors offer market-based alternatives to recent health care reforms that center on tax changes, insurance market changes, and the redesign of Medicare and Medicaid. They show that, by promoting cost- conscious behavior and competition in both private markets and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, we can slow the rate of growth of health care costs, expand access to high-quality health care, and slow down runaway spending. Health care in the United States has made remarkable advances during the past forty years. Yet our health care system also has several well-known problems: high costs, significant numbers of people without insurance, and glaring gaps in quality and efficiency--and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is not the answer. This second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise details a better approach, offering fundamental reform alternatives centering on tax changes, insurance market changes, and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid. The book proposes five specific reforms to improve the ability of markets to create a lower-cost, higher-quality health care system that is responsive to the needs of individuals, including increasing individual involvement, deregulating insurance markets and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid, improving availability and quality of information, enhancing competition, and reforming the malpractice system. The authors show that, by promoting cost-conscious behavior and competition in both private markets and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, we can slow the rate of growth of health care costs, expand access to high-quality health care, and slow down runaway spending 1. The challenge: obtaining high-quality, affordable health care. The good : innovation ; The bad : high costs and and a large uninsured population ; The ugly : backlash against markets and the misguided policy response 2. Five policy reforms to make markets work. Increase individual involvement in health care decisions ; Deregulate insurance markets and redesign Medicare and Medicaid ; Expand provision of health information ; Control anticompetitive behavior ; Reform the malpractice system ; Study the tax preference for nonprofits 3. Impacts of proposals on health care spending, the uninsured, the federal budget, and the distribution of tax burdens. Effects of reforms on health care spending ; Effects of reforms on the number of uninsured ; Effects of reforms on the federal budget ; Distributional impact Conclusion Appendix A. Estimating the impact of policy reforms on health care spending Appendix B. Estimating the impact of policy reforms on uninsurance Appendix C. Derivation of the elasticity of total health care spending with respect to the after-tax price of out-of-pocket spending Appendix D. Estimating the impact of policy reforms on the federal budget.