Author Archives
Austin Frakt, PhD, is a health economist and Assistant Professor at Boston University’s School of Medicine and School of Public Health.
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JAMA Forum: Are Health Insurers’ Administrative Costs Too High or Too Low?
There are few minutiae of health care economics that policy wonks love to fight about more than insurers’ administrative costs. These are costs for things like management and marketing that are not directly related to care delivery. Are they too… Read More ›
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JAMA Forum: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Projected Medicare Spending Growth
By Austin Frakt, PhD In January, Richard Kronick and Rosa Po published a policy brief on projected Medicare growth for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), which advises the US Secretary for Health and Human… Read More ›
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JAMA Forum: The Mandate Penalty May Be Large Enough
The health care law’s individual mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty has been through the political wringer and tested in the Supreme Court. Despite the mandate surviving those battles, some still worry it is… Read More ›
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JAMA Forum — Can We Get Back to Health Policy Now? Looking at Health System Efficiency
By Austin B. Frakt, PhD Like many people, I was tired of the presidential campaign well before it concluded. Now that it is over, I’d like to refocus on health policy at a high level and consider various means of… Read More ›
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JAMA Forum — You Can/Can’t Take It With You: Obama and Romney on Portability of Health Insurance
In a recent JAMA Forum post, I compared President Obama’s and Governor Romney’s approaches to health insurance tax policy. In this post, I will contrast their vision on health insurance “portability.”
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JAMA Forum — The Tax Treatment of Health Insurance: Obama vs Romney
Outside of elite health policy circles, the tax treatment of health insurance receives less attention than it deserves. It is therefore worth considering how the 2 presidential candidates view this important issue.
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JAMA Forum: Gaming Out the New Medicaid Option
The most important policy implications from the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) pertain not to the individual mandate but to Medicaid. Although the court seems to have left the states with 2 options—accept or decline the… Read More ›
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JAMA Forum: How Medicare Solves Private Plans’ Problems and Vice Versa
For some reason, when it comes to health insurance, most people seem to think either private plans in competition are best or a government option, like Medicare, is preferable. Few seem to recognize the benefits of the coexistence of private… Read More ›
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JAMA Forum — Medicare and the Year Ahead: Opportunities for Reform
When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law in March 2010, it ushered in significant changes to Medicare. Those changes include innovations to provider payment models, including episode-based bundled payments, various new types of accountable care organizations, and… Read More ›
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JAMA Forum: What is the Economic Rationale for the Health Care Law’s Individual Mandate?
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of the individual purchase mandate, which requires most individuals to pay an annual tax penalty if they do not have health insurance by 2014. While some have portrayed the… Read More ›
