Does the Affordable Care Act Discriminate against the Sick?
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) guarantees access to care regardless of preexisting conditions. Yet Christopher Briggs has struggled for years to find an ACA plan that covers his seven‐year‐old daughter’s leukemia treatment. The law’s preexisting‐conditions provisions include government price controls that impose both a price floor that increases health insurance premiums for healthy consumers and a price ceiling that reduces premiums for the sick. Economists warn that the latter type of price control can reduce quality. To prevent the ACA’s preexisting‐conditions provisions from reducing the quality of coverage available to the sick, the law’s authors created insurer subsidies whose purpose is to counteract those effects. But are those subsidies working? On July 28, Briggs will tell his story to Harvard Medical School professor Timothy Layton, PhD, Associate Professor of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School and Cato Institute director of health policy studies Michael F. Cannon, who will comment in this web‐only event.
Kicking the Habit: The Opioid Crisis and America’s Addiction to Prohibition
There is no single cause of America’s opioid crisis, but overprescription of opioids has undoubtedly contributed. The federal government has responded predictably, criminally prosecuting doctors who prescribe opioids to the drug dependent. The approach may seem sensible, but it is as wrongheaded as our century‐old drug war. In a new paper, Josh Bowers and Daniel Abrahamson examine the roots of the modern American drug war and offer their own public health prescription: a set of pragmatic harm‐reduction responses to prohibition and its counterproductive and often deadly effects.
- “Kicking the Habit: The Opioid Crisis and America’s Addiction to Prohibition,” by Josh Bowers and Daniel Abrahamson
COVID-19 and the Regulatory Burden on Health Care
Much of the initially flat‐footed response of public health officials to the coronavirus pandemic was due to cumbersome, inflexible, and outdated regulations controlling the development and distribution of drugs and tests. It is important that policymakers recognize the regulatory obstacles that have accumulated over the years that make our system less nimble in responding to unexpected events, and work to reform those laws.
- “To Help Solve the Surgical Mask Shortage, Get the FDA out of the Way,” by Paul Matzko
- “Coronavirus Testing Delays Caused by Red Tape, Bureaucracy and Scorn for Private Companies,” by Jeffrey A. Singer
- “Health Care Scope of Practice Laws Reveal Another Weakness in Response to COVID-19 Pandemic,” by Jeffrey A. Singer
- “From Spirits to Sanitizer,” by Jeffrey Miron and Erin Partin
Experts
