Cancer care costs are rising, and the 340B outpatient drug discount program is needlessly contributing to the increase.
Can You Repeat That … Please?
Today’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the National Park Service (NPS) included testimony by Director Jonathan Jarvis and Department of the Interior Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall. The purpose of the hearing was to examine how the NPS handles cases of misconduct and unethical behavior and it examined serious issues such as […]
Stop Making Excuses for Obamacare
The Obamacare insurance exchanges are not functioning according to plan. At the hands of insurers and the flawed six-year-old act, patients, taxpayers, and businesses have been handcuffed into paying increasingly high premiums, are facing less consumer choice in coverage, and Americans are quickly finding health care to be just what the Obama administration has fought […]
Is Obamacare Teetering?
So many things have happened to Obamacare these past couple of months, it’s like drinking from a fire hose. Insurers say “Buh Bye” In April, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, UnitedHealthcare, announced it will pull out of most of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA), or Obamacare, marketplace exchanges by 2017. Why? Because in […]
CAGW to NPS: Show Me the Data
Today, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies marked-up (read and amended) its fiscal year 2017 appropriations bill.
A New Cause du Jour: Beating Up “Big Pharma”
Beating up pharmaceutical companies is the new “cause du jour.” Even though pharmaceuticals are only 10 percent of all healthcare costs, they tend to make easy targets because it is difficult to understand why such a small pill should cost so much money.
Got Some Splainin To Do
Yesterday, May 10, 2016, the House and Energy Commerce Committee released a report, which demonstrates the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Acting Administrator Andrew Slavitt provided false testimony in a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing, “An Overdue Checkup Part II: Examining the ACA’s [Affordable Care Act] State Insurance Marketplaces.” The hearing was held December 8, 2015.
We Stand with the Competitive Enterprise Institute
Rather than tilting at windmills trying to solve problems that don’t exist, government agencies should proceed with great care before imposing technical mandates on an industry. Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appears to be taking a “shoot from the hip” approach to regulating, and currently has its sights set on abrogating intellectual property (IP) rights.
UnitedHealthcare Cries Uncle
On Tuesday, April 19, UnitedHealthcare CEO Stephen Hemsley announced that the company would be pulling out of most of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA), or Obamacare, marketplace exchanges. This announcement did not come as a surprise. On November 19, 2015, The Hill reported, “At a shareholder meeting Thursday, UnitedHealthcare cast doubt on its ability to carry plans on the healthcare law’s exchanges beyond 2016, offering a more grim financial outlook than it had previously expected. ‘In recent weeks, growth expectations for individual exchange participation have tempered industrywide,’ said Stephen Hemsley, the company’s CEO. ‘Co-operatives have failed, and market data has signaled higher risks and more difficulties while our own claims experience has deteriorated, so we are taking this proactive step.’”
Lawyering Up Over Labels
On November 13, 2013, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a proposed rule that would allow generic pharmaceutical firms to provide new safety information and update a drug’s label without first getting FDA approval, even though doing so would make it different from the reference drug’s (the original brand-name) label. If the proposed rule should go in effect, it is conceivable that several versions of labels for the same medication could exist, creating uncertainty for physicians, pharmacists, and patients.