Harvard Policy Researcher Says Obamacare Will Inadvertently Break Fee-For-Service Model

In Washington, Amitabh Chandra stood before a roomful of economists, policy makers and health care experts earlier this month. As director of Health Policy Research at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he closed a presentation about the slowdown in health care spending over the last decade by citing an article in The New York Times.

“Changes in the way doctors and hospitals are paid — how much and by whom — have begun to curb the steady rise of health care costs in the New York region,” the article declared. “Costs are still going up faster than overall inflation, but the annual rate of increase is the lowest in 21 years.”

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FDA Needs Reform Or The Market Might Not Innovate Life-Saving Drugs.

Okay, maybe those doctoral economists will come in handy. Jokes aside, bringing life-saving drugs to market will never be cheap – and it will require government participation.

However, there’s a difference between red tape syphoning better-spent dollars to line the pockets of insurance companies who DON’T actually care for our population, and making sure a drug company developing an Alzheimer’s treatment can recoup their billion dollar investment.

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Spending Someone Else’s Money Is Inefficient. So Why Does Healthcare Insist On Doing It Like That?

Jeffrey Singer, M.D., or Dr. Singer, is a general surgeon in Arizona. He’s also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

He claims that healthcare costs are too damn high—and they’re only getting worse. He’s got every reason to make that claim. Turns out that last week, researchers at Harvard and Dartmouth released a report estimating that healthcare costs will continue to grow faster than the economy for at least the next two decades.

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