A Conservative Re-Envisioning Of The Health Care Overhaul

Today's post was shared by Kaiser Health News and comes from capsules.kaiserhealthnews.org

Tired of hearing policy experts and politicians debate the 2010 health care law?  What if you took the Affordable Care Act out of the conversation?  If you could scrap the nation’s current health care system and build a new one, what would it look like?

A group of health care experts from Stanford University, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the University of Southern California, among other institutions, has compiled a report with their answer to that question.  Funded by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute’s National Research Initiative, the document offers a variety of ideas that its authors say would achieve universal coverage, protect the poor and the sick and restrain health care cost growth, among other priorities.

“In many ways, the ACA has been a distraction, because people think that all of the health care debate boils down to ‘do you support the ACA or do you oppose it?’ ” said Darius Lakdawalla, one of the authors and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, as well as a  professor of pharmaceutical economics in the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy. “To us, that is really a very narrow and misleading question.”

The report’s proposals include allowing health insurers to charge premiums that reflect consumers’ health care costs and providing generous subsidies to help the poor obtain...

[Click here to see the rest of this article]