Health Care Solutions Week!
We're kicking off the launch of Healthcare Solutions Week, a week-long national conversation to pave a better way forward for health care policy, with a few of our most popular posts on Health Care Reform from the last year.
Beyond Obamacare: It's time to take on the Great Society
by John Davidson
Many Republicans have spent the last four-and-a-half years crowing about how they will “repeal and replace” Obamacare, believing it to be anathema to the Constitution, the American way of life, and human liberty itself. A number of politicians and candidates also seem to believe that vowing to repeal and replace the federal health care law was and is necessary to survive primary challenges, win elections, or position themselves for future campaigns.
All of that is fine, as far as it goes. But it is not very helpful from a policy standpoint, in part because it implies that Obamacare upended a long and fine tradition of free-market healthcare in our country that was humming along perfectly well until President Obama and Congressional Democrats came along and changed everything, which simply isn’t true. [CONTINUED]
Reform for a Healthy Future: Expanding Scope of Practice for Nurse Practitioners in Texas
by John Davidson
Texas suffers from a shortage of primary care providers and overly-restrictive scope of practice laws for nurses. It’s time to change both.
How States Can Offer an Obamacare Alternative
by John Davidson
Enrollment on the Obamacare health insurance exchanges reached 7.1 million Monday, the last day (more or less) of open enrollment, exceeding the administration’s goal and prompting the president to declare that “the debate over repealing this law is over.”
That might not be quite true (on Wednesday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal unveiled a plan to repeal most of the Affordable Care Act and replace it with conservative-minded reforms), but it seems clear that the enrollment numbers have prompted a separate debate about what they mean and whether or not they prove the law has been successful.
As many observers noted this week, we don’t know how many of the 7.1million were previously uninsured, (an unpublished RAND Corporation study says it’s only about a third, and a McKinsey survey in February put the share at 27 percent). As Forbes’ Avik Roy pointed out, “The Congressional Budget Office, in its original estimates, predicted that the vast majority of the people eligible for subsidies on the exchanges would be previously uninsured individuals.” [CONTINUED]
Close Texas' Troubled Centers for People with Disabilities
by John Davidson
Earlier this year, Sean Yates, a 35-year-old resident of the state-supported living center in Corpus Christi, climbed the center’s fence and walked away. Nearly a month later, his body was found in the ship channel near the Harbor Bridge in Corpus Christi.
Yates had been living at the Corpus Christi facility for a decade. He was one of about 3,600 Texans with intellectual and developmental disabilities who live at 13 different state-run residential institutions, formerly known as state schools, scattered throughout the state. [CONTINUED]
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