Focus on healthcare costs

Fifty percent of Americans believe that reducing health care costs should be the government’s top health care priority. And 39% of voters say they are willing to cross party lines to support a candidate whose top priority is reducing health care costs, according to a survey by West Health/Gallup. .

While conservatives have avoided health reform like the plague (during the plague), it may pose either a threat or an opportunity for them in 2024.

Government programs directly fund half of our countries’ annual health spending, more than $4.3 trillion, with the remainder funded by private payments, primarily through employer-sponsored insurance. , which projects a 7% increase next year.

Democrats can always be counted on to take the offensive with new government programs and policy initiatives that impose more price controls, excessive mandates, and counterproductive regulations. The more their policies distort the market with higher costs and worse outcomes, the more determined they are to come up with more of the same solutions!

Former Representative Ann Marie Buerkle writes in Its the Cost of Healthcare, Stupid that there should be a litmus test for conservatives on health care: Would this policy allow the private market to reduce overall health care costs? If the answer is yes, consider moving forward; if not, pump the brakes.

She argues that conservatives should overhaul the Food and Drug Administration, encourage rather than punish innovation, fight hospital monopolies and increase competition on drug prices. She says states need to examine their voluntary provider and certificate of need laws, which stifle competition and drive up prices.

If we stay on the path of price controls and government control, the system will continue to decline, giving Senator Bernie Sanders and other proponents of socialized medicine the upper hand. We’re seeing the trend across our healthcare industry.

Doctors are currently faced with a 2 percent reduction in Medicare payments after two decades of flat payments, which, after inflation, means a 26 percent reduction in payments since 2001, explains Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) in Price Controls on Doctors are a Pathway to Socialized Medicine.

Starving doctors is not a sustainable solution, he writes. Government price caps and controls have many harmful consequences. Unable to make ends meet, they sell their practices to hospitals, which can then double, triple, or even quadruple their prices for the same services.

Just look at rent control, Winegarden writes, which has effectively destroyed once-beautiful American cities.

Government-ordered doctor pay cuts will inevitably also lead to destruction, starting with a shortage of up to 124,000 doctors, too few by 2023, which in turn will lead to lower quality and rationing of doctors. care. How much time did your treating doctor spend with you during your last visit?

Conservatives in the House have focused on health care, including the first hearing in four years held by the Energy and Commerce Committee to determine how much Medicare pays doctors. Lawmakers have proposed 23 separate bills to determine the best path forward toward a system that rewards health care providers who provide high-quality care to patients.

The Misnamed Inflation Reduction Act is another example of massive market distortion. Pharmaceutical companies are already stopping research into new and better treatments and cures due to the government’s unprecedented attack on their industry.

Obamacare is another dismal failure in its promise to reduce health care costs for American families.

The Paragon Health Institute has released a new paper that shows the shortcomings of the ACA exchanges: far fewer enrollments at a much higher cost.

Covering each additional new person enrolled in private insurance cost taxpayers $36,789 per year in 2021, they write. (The CBO had projected that the annual cost would be less than a third of that $10,538.) And that’s for policies with massive deductibles and very limited doctor networks.

So what is the government doing? Put more money into the program, of course, to the tune of $64 billion in enhanced Obamacare subsidies through 2025. And for what? Three million more people have private coverage, instead of the 20 million CBO predicted, while Medicaid enrollment climbed by 17.4 million.

Over the past decade, Democrats have become the nation’s leading providers of poor-quality and expensive health coverage. They are the ones endangering health care in the United States, writes Sally Pipes, president and CEO of PRI, in Will Dems Ever Own Up to Obamacare Failure?

Sally sees the future better than the rest of us because she grew up in Canada in a socialized health care system. Unless conservatives embrace liberal healthcare reforms, we will continue to slide toward socialism in the United States as well.