Sally Satel and Ryan Streeter | AEI event
On Tuesday AEI welcomed Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and a panel of experts to discuss “The Numbers Behind the Opioid Epidemic,” a report from the Joint Economic Committee’s Social Capital Project. Sen. Lee offered an overview of the crisis, highlighting both the intensity and the scope of its impact
By Michael Vigil, The Cipher Brief: “Americans are facing one of their deadliest foes in recent history: not ISIS, but opioids, painkillers that are highly addictive and killing thousands of Americans annually. Drug overdoses took the lives of 64,000 people in 2016, with two-thirds related to opioids.”
Benedic N. Ippolito | The HillBenedic Ippolito addresses the recent report from Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) that shows list prices for the most common Medicare drugs have risen at nearly 10 times the inflation rate over the past five years. Ippolito explains that the true “price” of a pharmaceutical is not always clear -- in fact pharmaceutical list prices have increasingly diverged from actual payment rates. Ippolito believes that the discussion surrounding pharmaceutical prices must begin with acknowledging the US health care system’s opaque and bewildering pricing system.
Disentangling Medicare’s two functions
James C. Capretta | Real Clear Health
James Capretta argues that to consider more far-reaching changes to Medicare, Congress must first consider what purpose the program is intended to serve. Capretta explains that Medicare serves two distinct purposes: First, it is a community-rated insurance plan; second, it is a social-insurance, tax-and-transfer program, modeled on Social Security. Capretta proposes that Medicare’s costs would be much lower if the workers who paid their entire health insurance premium while working were also asked to pay for most of their Medicare coverage in retirement. Although it is an improbable reform, the federal government’s fiscal outlook is deteriorating, and Medicare is a big part of the problem.