John Goodman’s Commentaries
Why Trump lost the Election: Health Care
The editors of the Wall Street Journal, the editor of National Review (Rich Lowry) and John Goodman all agree: Trump didn’t endorse the plan outlined by Goodman and Heritage Foundation scholar, Marie Fishpaw.… Oops…. Trump actually did the things Goodman and Fishpaw recommended, including allowing people to talk to their doctors by phone, email, and Skype; allowing employees to have access to 24/7 primary care as an alternative to the emergency room, and allowing employer-provided health insurance to be personal and portable. But Trump never talked about any of this. So, he didn’t get credit for any of it.
Tax Reform on the Ballot in Georgia
A new study of the 2017 federal tax cuts has found that, although controversial when adopted, the tax reform law will lead to lower taxes and higher wages as the average Georgia household will enjoy more than $39,000 in economic benefits over their lifetime. That’s the conclusion of a new study by Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff and funded by the Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research. An earlier study by Kotlikoff and economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimated the gain at $22,676 because of personal income tax cuts. The new study adds the impact of lower corporate taxes.
Four years of Argument Ad Hominem
Donald Trump is probably the most consequential president of our lifetime. Yet in the four years of his presidency, I can recall very few instances where one of his major policy changes was rationally discussed on the editorial pages of the New York Times. Instead, it’s been four years of a steady stream of name calling.
Q & A on the Labor Market
Finance and accounting are probably the easiest health care services to outsource. But the potential list is growing. It’s estimated that one-third of all physician visits could be replaced by consultations using Zoom, Skype or Facebook – and the incidence of such remote consultations is soaring.
In the future, your doctor could be in India. So could your accountant, your lawyer and dozens of others who produce goods and services you consume.
Worthless Heirs
According to The New York Times article “Silver-Spoon Socialists,” there are legions of young people who want to use their trust fund money to destroy the very system that made their trust fund possible: capitalism. The Democratic Socialists of America has recently been transformed from a fringe group of older leftists to a national organization 100,000 strong – with most of its members under 35 years of age – according to the article.
Bipartisan Health Reform
Avik Roy’s think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), has produced a health reform proposal that has been introduced as a bipartisan bill in Congress. There is a lot of overlap with proposals you will find in the document (endorsed by more thatn 70 representatives of think tanks and public policy organization) and many of these ideas are being implemented buy the Trump administration.
Q & A on Prescription Drugs
Until recently, every patient with the coronavirus in the United States for the past ten months has been treated with a non-approved drug. What allows doctors to do this? They have always been able to do it.
In medicine, the use of non-approved drugs is ubiquitous. In fact, medical science couldn’t progress without it. In treating a patient with a brand-new condition (like Covid), for example, doctors often experiment with drugs that have worked for related conditions. They compare notes. They trade data on outcomes. They discard less-promising therapies for more promising therapies – in a trial and error process.
How Trump is Changing Health Care
Writing at National Review, Marie Fishpaw (Heritage Foundation) and John Goodman say that little noticed health policy changes are revolutionizing the health care system. These are changes that are almost never mentioned in the mainstream media, are largely ignored by the heath care media and are rarely mentioned by the candidates themselves – including the President and the Vice President. They include virtual medicine, allowing employees to have around the clock primary care from a doctor of their choice and allowing employees to obtain individually owned health insurance with employer money.
Public Option health plans don’t save money
Presidential candidate Joe Biden and other Democrats have proposed creating a government-run plan to compete with private insurers in the (Obamacare) health insurance exchanges. They say the result will be lower premiums. Yet writing at National Review, Ed Haislmaier and John Goodman say there are several public options” available already in some exchanges and they are not saving consumers any money. Similar to public options, 23 health insurance cooperatives were created under Obamacare, and supported with government subsidies. Of those 23 co-ops, only four still survive — a 79 percent failure rate.
Solutions for Pre-Existing Conditions
The best position on pre-existing conditions is not to argue that the problem is small, although it certainly is, writes John Goodman at Forbes. Our argument should be that many – perhaps most – people who come to the individual market with a pre-existing condition are worse off because of Obamacare than they would have been under the old system. And that there is a conservative approach that is much better.