Browse by Media Hit and Health Care

If uniform rules, alone, were enough to ensure a broad array of competitors, you might expect to see many insurers participating. But that does not seem to be the case. “Just because a good affordable policy is available in another state doesn’t mean that I would be able to get the network of physicians and the good prices that are available in that other state," said IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews. 

Prior to the passage of Obamacare, allowing the sale of birth control over the counter would have been hailed by liberals as a great achievement for women, says Merrill Matthews. It would have improved access to care by lowering out-of-pocket costs and eliminating the need to spend time and money to see a doctor for the prescription, which is a bigger burden for hourly workers and lower-income women, he said.

aily, In a column for Investor's Business DGrace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute and Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation highlight some of the same problems with cost and quality, but they also add important insight about how Medicare has caused rising health care costs.

President Obama cut $500 billion from Medicare spending over 10 years in order to claim that Obamacare was "paid for." A better option, writes IPI's Merrill Matthews, "would have been to aggressively target Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which could have provided the same amount of savings." 

According to IPI's Merrill Matthews, Ph.D., taxpayers would have saved $700 billion over the course of the next 10 years due to the existence of fewer insurance subsidies.

Obamacare opponents see a potential silver lining in a Supreme Court decision that would end tax credits for many of those using the federal marketplace. To fill the coverage gap, insurance companies might look to sell bare-bones "limited-benefit" plans that don't meet Obamacare's minimum coverage requirement but are less expensive, suggested Merrill Matthews. 

Several mostly blue states jumped on the health insurance exchange bandwagon as a way of showing support for Obamacare, says IPI's Merrill Matthews, and something similar happened in 1993 and 1994 with Clintoncare, Matthews says. “Those universal-coverage dreams turned into financial nightmares, and every one of those states eventually dramatically modified, scaled down, or eliminated their plans,” Matthews said.

Writing for the Institute for Policy Innovation, Merrill Matthews has a must-read article about an unintended consequences of Obamacare. He starts with a very sensible point about the effect of third-party payer.

Merrill Matthews says AH’s struggles are unfortunate but were predicted by nearly everyone—except the company’s CEO.

“The whole goal of Blue Cross is to go to a global budget with fixed prices,” Matthews said, adding that there is nothing wrong with a global budget as long as the prices are being set by the provider, but in this case the prices are being set by Blue Cross and the hospitals.