Micah Weinberg: All Related Content

Californians are struggling to pay their health insurance bills while insurance companies' profits are on the rise. One apparent fix is Assembly Bill 52 authored by Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, that would allow state regulators to reject excessive rate increases. However, the recent experience of Massachusetts suggests that this California bill may not go nearly far enough.

The California Health Benefit Exchange held its third meeting today at an auditorium in downtown Sacramento. It was an opportunity for the Exchange staff to update the broader health policy community – many of whom were in attendance or watched the webcast – on progress toward planning the development of this new portal to coverage for the state.  The substantive focus was on integration with existing state programs and systems.

Leveling Up

Senior Research Fellow Micah Weinberg recently delivered a talk about the impact of the Affordable Care Act on medical innovation and health care cost containment at the University of Southern California’s new Leonard Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.  He explained that it was much more important for industries engaged in medical innovation to look forward to the next ten years -- in which cost containment will continue to be a major issue -- rather than to focus on the provisions of the ACA that left them largely unscathed.  Attempting to water down the current attempts at controlling costs and improving medical system efficiency, he argued, will only lead to more difficult cost containment decisions in the future. 

This article is cross-posted at newamericamedia.org.

The Republican majority has passed a bill out of the House of Representatives to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law last year by President Obama. Though the vote itself is symbolic, the hostility to the law is very real.

Here are the three most important things to understand about the “repeal” effort.

The repeal ain’t gonna happen...yet. The full-scale repeal bill is extraordinarily unlikely even to come up for a vote in the U.S. Senate as Democrats maintain a majority there.  However, this may no longer be the case after the elections in 2012. If the Republicans gain a majority in the Senate and win the presidency, all bets are off. The major provisions of the bill aren’t implemented until 2014, so there would still be plenty of time for the Republicans to “repeal and replace” much of federal healthcare reform. Between now and then, they will hold a series of oversight hearings and advance small initiatives designed to defund and otherwise handicap the process of implementing the bill.

The Republicans have named their healthcare bill, "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." This is very good news. I am henceforth naming prime rib with creamy mashed potatoes a "weight reducing meal."  I am also going to name watching the Sacramento Kings on television "strenuous cardiovascular exercise."

It turns out, of course, you cannot change the nature of something just by changing its name. And many analysts, the New America Foundation included, have concluded that the healthcare reform bill will create jobs, not destroy them.

Economic analysis, though, is an inherently flexible exercise and a great deal depends on one's assumptions.  The claim that we can be certain that healthcare reform eliminates jobs, though, has no justification. It's not an irrational position, but there is vastly stronger justification for the claim that it will create jobs than that it will eliminate them.

The more an analysis drills down into the actual dynamics of local industries and economies, the more accurate it is likely to be.  Recently, we released an in-depth economic analysis of the impact on healthcare reform on the economy of the state of Colorado that we conducted in conjunction with the Center for Colorado's Economic Future (full report here). Our research team on this project was headed up by Dr. Len Nichols, a respected health economist, now the director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University.  This report, funded by the Colorado Trust and the Colorado Health Foundation, projected that reform would both increase economic activity in Colorado and reduce the rate of growth of healthcare costs.

Researcher Micah Weinberg of the New America Foundation said the claim that the 2010 reform kills jobs "has no justification." A study by the nonpartisan ...

... so it's not about what states should cut but what states can legally cut," said Micah Weinberg, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. ...

Jordan Rau of Kaiser Health News has penned a must-read on rapidly rising hospital prices in California that lays out in compelling detail some of the factors that drive sharp differences particularly within local communities. If you are concerned about provider costs continuing to rise in the wake of reform (as you must be if you care about health policy) you should go over and read the whole thing.  

One of the things that jumped out for me was further documentation of the connection between market share and payment rates. We hear a lot about this issue as it relates to differences across regions but this dynamic plays out within local communities as well:

... "People have asked me: when is healthcare reform going to kick in?" said Micah Weinberg, senior research fellow at New American Foundation. "And I don't have the answer they want to hear." ...

Original article

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is deciding whether to sign legislation that would create the "California Health Benefit Exchange," a key piece of federal health care reform. This is the perfect time, therefore, to clear the air about what the exchange will and won't do. A clear-eyed account of the facts about the exchange shows it to be the exact kind of moderate solution that the governor has pushed for throughout his tenure, one that combines a concern for the public good with the power of the private market.

It’s time for some straight talk about plans to “repeal” health care reform.

Republicans might engage in some budgetary maneuvers in an attempt to “defund” the health reform law but they are extremely unlikely to rollback enormously popular provisions such as the ban on pre-existing conditions exclusions or the small business tax credits.  They will, of course, push for many significant changes.  Democrats, however, know that they too will have to make changes. Health reform is and always will be a process, not a destination.

The legislation passed in March was one historic part of that process, but building a higher quality, lower cost health system will take at least a generation and will require everyone’s attention and effort.