The COVID-19 pandemic made state and federal lawmakers acutely aware of how state‐​based regulation of clinicians contributes to the overall shortage of health care providers and obstructs their rapid response to public health emergencies. Governors tacitly acknowledged this when they issued executive actions temporarily suspending most of these regulations. Policymakers should learn from this. States should reform health care practitioner licensing laws to allow providers to move more quickly to areas where they are needed, which will allow patients better access to health care. State medical licensing laws block a large pool of experienced and motivated health care practitioners from other countries who are eager to come to America and provide health care. On August 5th, join the conversation online in our policy forum.

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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 told 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 commented in this web‐​only event.