Healthcare Reform 2019-2020

Healthcare Reform

Healthcare issues are increasingly important to many Americans, who a majority rank healthcare as either the first or second most important policy concern heading into the 2020 elections. This high level of concern has driven the debate over healthcare reform to the front of many presidential campaigns in the 2020 democratic party primaries. The following selection of articles address what are considered the most important dimensions of the emerging healthcare reform debate at this point. We will continue to monitor the debate as it evolves over the next several months and update our selection of articles at regular intervals. We will also offer our own commentary on the topic especially as it affects older people and the disabled.

The articles are organized into 2 groups. The first is a selection of articles that describe and analyze the major forces driving perception of crisis in the US healthcare system. The second group of articles deal with the Medicare for All, or single payer approach to healthcare reform. You can find an even more expansive list of articles in our archive.

We begin the series of articles with a PowerPoint presentation we prepared to provide an overview of the information we think is useful in helping gain an informed perspective on the health care debate. We will modify the PowerPoint as the debate evolves in the months ahead.

Forces Driving the Healthcare Crisis

An Early Look at the Potential Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Health Insurance Coverage (The Commonwealth Fund)
Trump promised to pay for Covid care. But patients with long-term symptoms see huge bills. (Politico)
Coronavirus and hospital bills: Medicare v. private health insurance (just care)
Covid-19 unmasks what cancer patients have long known: The world needs a better and more equitable health system (CNN)
Pandemic upends Trump’s plans to shrink health care safety net (Politico)
A majority of Americans fear pharma will use Covid-19 as an excuse to raise prices (STAT)
Our Next Crisis Will Be Caring for Survivors of Covid-19 (The New York Times)
We’re in a pandemic. Why have we stopped talking about Medicare-for-all? (The Washington Post)
Hospitals are busier than ever — and going out of business (STAT)
Patients cancel care over high-deductible concerns (Modern Healthcare)
Millions Have Lost Health Insurance in Pandemic-Driven Recession (The New York Times)
The Health 202: Coronavirus proves U.S. needs Medicare-for-all, its advocates say (The Washington Post)
Another Problem on the Health Horizon: Medicare Is Running Out of Money (KHN)
27 million Americans may lose health insurance coverage: Report (ABC News)
How COVID-19 is exposing — and widening — cracks in the US health system (ABC)
Coronavirus exposes major flaws in health care system, experts say (NBC News)
America’s Health-Care System Has Never Looked Sicker — or Harder to Cure (New York Magazine)
How Private Equity Is Ruining American Health Care (Bloomberg)
On Medicare and Medicaid’s 55th Birthday, Let’s Expand Benefits—Not Cut Them (LA Progressive)
Free Clinics Try To Fill Gaps As COVID Sweeps Away Job-Based Insurance (KHN)
Why People Are Still Avoiding the Doctor [It’s Not the Virus] (The New York Times)
When the Covid-19 pandemic is over, health care must not return to business as usual (STAT)
Medical Staffing Companies Cut Doctors’ Pay While Spending Millions on Political Ads (ProPublica)
Medical bills pile up for coronavirus treatment. ‘I was trying to do the right thing.’ (The Sacramento Bee)
New Survey Finds Americans Suffering Health Coverage Insecurity Along with Job Losses (Commonwealth Fund)
How Rich Investors, Not Doctors, Profit From Marking Up ER Bills (ProPublica)
Missouri voters latest to approve Medicaid expansion (Politico)
Almost half of cancer patients in the US deplete entire life assets by second year of treatment (World Socialist Web Site)
Help protect patients like me from crippling co-pays (Tallahassee Democrat)
Private equity firms are increasingly buying up doctors’ offices. What does that mean for doctors — or for patients? (STAT)
Fundamental health reform like ‘Medicare for All’ would help the labor market (Economic Policy Institute)
For People Living with Disabilities, Medicaid Block Grants Have Devastating Consequences (Center for Consumerist Engagement in Health Innovation)
Senior confusion about Medicare Advantage creating headaches for patients, providers (Modern Healthcare)
San Francisco Bay healthcare: A story of the haves and have nots (Modern Healthcare)
5 questions about Joe Biden’s healthcare plan (Modern Healthcare)
Culinary Workers Bucked Their Leadership by Backing Bernie Sanders in Nevada. Here’s What They Knew. (Portside)
Colorado unveils hospital rates for its public-option plan (Modern Healthcare)
Proposed Medicaid rule threatens state flexibility (Modern Healthcare)
The risks of private equity in health care (Axios)
There are clear, race-based inequalities in health insurance and health outcomes (Brookings)
The American Health Care System Costs Four Times More Than Canada’s Single-Payer System (naked capitalism)
The Culinary Health Insurance Is Not That Great (People’s Policy Project)
Q&A: Billy Wynne talks examining public option in Washington, Colorado (Modern Healthcare)
Health politics: 2020 hopefuls differ on more than insurance coverage (Roll Call)
Trump claims he wants to protect seniors. He’s actually their worst enemy (The Washington Post)
Governors warn Trump rule could lead to big Medicaid cuts (Modern Healthcare)
Why Would A Union Oppose Medicare For All? (Health Over Profit)
Beyond Burnout: Docs Decry ‘Moral Injury’ From Financial Pressures Of Health Care (Kaiser Health News)
The disabled are not welfare cheats (Modern Healthcare)
On health care, is Trump malicious or just incompetent? Yes. (The Washington Post)
Are Tax Credits The Best Way To Subsidize Long-Term Care Costs? (Tax Policy Center)
Democrats face uphill battle against Trump’s Medicaid overhaul (The Hill)
Trump Medicaid Overhaul Will Spark Furious Election-Year Fight (The Fiscal Times)
Why Home Health Care Is Suddenly Harder To Come By For Medicare Patients (Kaiser Health News)
Medicaid block grants would allow states not to cover some drugs (Modern Healthcare)
How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk (The New York Times)
The Health 202: The Trump administration calls it ‘Healthy Adult Opportunity.’ Critics call it less Medicaid (The Washington Post)
9 things Americans need to learn from the rest of the world’s health care systems (Vox)
The Trump administration’s cruelty knows no limits. Here’s the latest (The Washington Post)
It’s the insulin, stupid: How drug pricing’s simplest case study became a top issue for 2020 Democrats (STAT)
Despite ACA coverage gains, more people can’t afford care (Modern Healthcare)
Trump poised to kick off election-year fight over Medicaid (The Hill)
Medicaid’s Dark Secret (The Atlantic)
More than a third of U.S. healthcare costs go to bureaucracy (Reuters)
The Impact of CEOs in the Public Sector: Evidence from the English NHS (naked capitalism)
What the Health Care Debate Still Gets Wrong (Boston Review)
The U.S. Spends $2,500 Per Person on Health Care Administrative Costs. Canada Spends $550. Here’s Why (Portside)
New international health care price reports shows US pays too much (Just Care)
Program meant to curb repeat hospital stays fails big test (Modern Healthcare)
What Is The Status Of Research On Low-Value Care? (Health Affairs)
Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt (The New York Times)
Scenes From the Ragged Edge of American Health Care (The New Republic)
More Americans Delaying Medical Treatment Due to Cost (Gallup)
Trends in Employer Health Care Coverage, 2008–2018: Higher Costs for Workers and Their Families (Commonwealth Fund)
The American Health Care Industry Is Killing People (The New York Times)
This Doctors Group Is Owned by a Private Equity Firm and Repeatedly Sued the Poor Until We Called Them (ProPublica)
Medicaid covers sick or dying children. But it takes ‘going to battle’ to get it (STAT)
The Hidden Costs of Healthcare (Institute for New Economic Thinking)
Family caregivers need support: Medicare should cover in-home care aides (The Hill)
Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds (The New York Yimes)
Financial Hardships Of Medicare Beneficiaries With Serious Illness (Health Affairs)
My family faces an impossible choice: caring for our mom, or building our future (The Washington Post)
The Role of Private Equity in Driving Up Health Care Prices (Harvard Business Review)
Payer cost control moves swamped by provider consolidation: study (Modern Healthcare)
What the Health Care Debate Still Gets Wrong (Boston Review)
The Huge Waste in the U.S. Health System (The New York Times)
How the Erosion of Employer-Sponsored Insurance Is Contributing to Medicare Beneficiaries’ Financial Burden (The Commonwealth Fund)
Private Equity and Surprise Medical Billing (Institute for New Economic Thinking)
Shifting the Burden? Consequences Of Postacute Care Payment Reform On Informal Caregivers (Health Affairs)
Americans’ struggles with medical bills are a foreign concept in other countries (LA Times)
Commentary: Behind-the-scenes decision making limits doctor-recommended treatments for sickest Americans (Modern Healthcare)
Poor and middle-class Americans are much less likely to survive into their 70s than the wealthy, federal report says (The Washington Post)
1 big thing: Medical costs drive millions into poverty (Axios)
Tracking the rise in premium contributions and cost-sharing for families with large employer coverage (Kaiser Family Foundation)
Insurers Running Medicare Advantage Plans Overbill Taxpayers By Billions As Feds Struggle To Stop It (Kaiser Health News)
Where 2020 Democrats stand on Medicare-for-all (The Washington Post)
Surprise medical bills becoming more frequent and costly (Modern Healthcare)
Inside the high-deductible insurance revolution that is transforming U.S. healthcare (L.A. Times)
How the Erosion of Employer-Sponsored Insurance Is Contributing to Medicare Beneficiaries’ Financial Burden (The Commonwealth Fund)
The Real Costs of the U.S. Health-Care Mess (The Atlantic)
Charity becomes a lifeline even for Americans with health insurance as deductibles soar (LA Times)
Health care is gobbling up your wages (Axios)
Health Insurance Churn in the US Is a Nightmare (People’s Policy Project)
Medicare Advantage plans unaccountable for billions in overcharges (Just Care)
How pharma, under attack from all sides, keeps winning in Washington (STAT)
Seven reasons commercial insurance cannot meet our health care needs (Just Care)
‘Urgent needs from head to toe’: This clinic had two days to fix a lifetime of needs (The Washington Post)
Testimony: The Growing Cost Burden of Employer Health Insurance for U.S. Families and… (The Commonwealth Fund)
Are You Sure You Actually ‘Like’ Your Private Health Insurance? (Portside)
As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Health insurance deductibles soar, leaving Americans with unaffordable bills (The LA Times)

Medicare For All

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare (Politico)
Medicare Advantage for All, Perhaps? (JAMA)
No, Italy Is Not the Case Against Medicare for All (The Nation)
Sanders/Jayapal Bill Provides ‘Medical Care for All During Pandemic’ (Portside)
The NAM and the Quality of Health Care — Inflecting a Field (The New England Journal of Medicine)
Medicare-for-all would be a boon to the American labor market, study finds (The Washington Post)
Following Warren Exit, Dying Medicare for All Activist Ady Barkan Says, “I’m All In” for Bernie Sanders (Common Dreams)
Op-Ed: Without universal healthcare, coronavirus puts us all at risk (Los Angeles Times)
In Every Super Tuesday State With Exit Polls, Majority of Democratic Voters Support Eliminating Private Health Insurance (portside)
Medicare for all would save 68,000 lives a year (Just Care)
Medicare’s Private Option Is Gaining Popularity, and Critics (The New York Times)
Americans Don’t Really Want Medicare for All — They Want Japanese Health Care (Medium)
The Health 202: Democrats seize on Sanders’s tensions with Nevada union to attack Medicare-for-all (The Washington Post)
The Health 202: Bernie Sanders’s most persuasive Medicare-for-all argument: The status quo is worse (The Washington Post)
Would ‘Medicare For All’ Cost More Than U.S. Budget? Biden Says So. Math Says No (The Fiscal Times)
Culinary Union Suggests Sanders, Warren, Asking Union Members to Trade Health Plans for “Promises” (Portside)
The Health 202: How Pete Buttigieg’s health-care strategy helped him gain traction in the Iowa caucus (The Washington Post)
The Surprising Origins of ‘Medicare for All’ (Time)
First Meeting of the Healthy California for All Commission: A Step Toward State by State Single Payer, Medicare for All? (Portside)
Sanders’ Medicare-for-All Plan Would Boost Life Expectancy, but Its Cost Is Highly Uncertain: Report (The Fiscal Times)
U.S. life expectancy ticks up as drug fatalities and cancer deaths drop (The Washington Post)
Medicare-for-all is the wrong debate (Medium)
Why a Medicare for All public option won’t work (The Charlotte Observer)
What Medicare for All Really Looks Like (The American Prospect)
In Historic Shift, Second Largest Physicians Group in US Has New Prescription: It’s Medicare for All (Common Dreams)
Warren’s Attempt to Turn Her Greatest Weakness Into a Strength (The Atlantic)
The Netherlands has universal health insurance — and it’s all private (Vox)
How to End the Democrats’ Health Care Demolition Derby (Washington Monthly)
Medicare for all would save $600 billion a year in administrative costs (Just Care)
Medicare For All Would Improve Hospital Financing (Health Affairs)
The Army Built to Fight ‘Medicare for All’ (Politico)
Americans have questions about Medicare-for-all. Canadians have answers. (The Washington Post)
The Health 202: Not sure about Medicare-for-all? Visit Canada. (The Washington Post)
Executive Order, Other Administration Actions Would Weaken Medicare (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)
The Virtues and Vices of Single-Payer Health Care (The New England Journal of Medicine)
Warren’s Medicare for All Plan Jumpstarts a Stalled Debate, Finds a Way to Circumvent the Power of Employers (Medium)
Column: Trump’s plan to ‘save’ Medicare would actually destroy it (LA Times)
As Seniors Get Sicker, They’re More Likely To Drop Medicare Advantage Plans (NPR)
The Road to Medicare for Everyone (The American Prospect)
Is America’s Health Care System a Fixer-Upper or a Teardown? (The New York Times)
Five arguments for Medicare for All (Just Care)
Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like (USA Today)
Relatively Modest Health Reform May Create More Value Than ‘Medicare for All’ (Health Affairs)
What will happen to doctors and hospitals under Medicare-for-all? It’s complicated. (The Week)
It’s Medicare’s Birthday — Let’s Improve It and Give It to Everyone (Portside)
Here are the Democrats’ three key disputes about Medicare-for-all (The Washington Post)
What Medicare-for-all skeptics are missing (The Week)
Why Seniors Should Be The Strongest Supporters Of Medicare For All (Forbes)
We Have a Dental Care Crisis. Medicare for All Could Solve It (In These Times)
Medicare for All. Single-payer. Expanding Obamacare. What’s the difference? (Salon)
The No-Brainer Case for Universal Long-Term Care (People’s Policy Project)
Why Some CEOs Figure ‘Medicare For All’ Is Good For Business (Kaiser Health News)
Nurses Know the Human Costs of Care. That’s Why Many Want ‘Medicare for All.’ (The New York Times)
There are still a lot of questions about Medicare-for-all (The Washington Post)
Lobbyist Documents Reveal Health Care Industry Battle Plan Against “Medicare for All” (The Intercept)
In-Depth Analysis by Team of UMass Amherst Economists Shows Viability of Medicare For All (Political Economy Research Institute)
‘Medicare for All’ Gets Much-Awaited Report. Both Sides Can Claim Victory. (The New York Times)
Would ‘Medicare for All’ Save Billions or Cost Billions? (The New York Times)

Reports:

The Future of American Healthcare (2000)
Surge in Opposition Lobbying and Advocacy Validates the Credibility of the Medicare for All Movement (Public Citizen)
Economic Analysis of Medicare for All (Political Economy Research Institute)
Commercial Health Care Financing: The Cause of U.S., Dutch, and Swiss Health Systems Inefficiency? (SAGE journals)
Will Health Care Costs Bankrupt Aging Boomers? (Urban Institute)
Kaiser Family Foundation/LA Times Survey Of Adults With Employer-Sponsored Insurance (KFF)
Medicare For All: An Analysis Of Key Policy Issues (Health Affairs)
Improving the prognosis of health care in the USA (The Lancet)
From Incremental to Comprehensive Health Reform: How Various Reform Options Compare on Coverage and Costs (Urban Institute)
Projected costs of single-payer healthcare financing in the United States: A systematic review of economic analyses
In New Survey Of Eleven Countries, US Adults Still Struggle With Access To And Affordability Of Health Care (NCBI)
Changes in List Prices, Net Prices, and Discounts for Branded Drugs in the US, 2007-2018 (JAMA)
Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On (The Health Foundation)

Issue Briefs:

Interactive:

Compare Medicare-for-all and Public Plan Proposals