What’s to be done about skyrocketing health care costs and the growing number of New Yorkers without health insurance? Two new op-ed pieces by Manhattan Institute senior fellows suggest an answer to that question.
In today’s New York Post, Prof. Regina Herzlinger of Harvard Business School challenges the view that the solution lies in more government intervention. As things now stand, she notes,
…government-controlled health insurance is so expensive that nearly 40 percent of New York’s non-elderly uninsured are middle-class families, with annual incomes at least double the poverty level. The uninsured rate is well above the national average in the state’s wealthiest region — New York City and its suburbs.Why can poor people afford to buy cars while middle-class people can’t afford to buy health insurance?
Her answer: the auto industry is consumer-driven, responding to the same market forces that could shape a better, less expensive forms of health insurance.
E.J. McMahon reaches a similar conclusion his Syracuse Post Standard piece. Government, he points out, is a big part of the problem.
For example, the tax burden on health insurance sold in New York has been steadily increasing … In 2005-06, the state will collect roughly $2.1 billion in taxes and assessments from private health plans. In fact, private health insurance plans now rank as the Empire State’s third largest source of non-federal revenue, behind the personal income and sales and use taxes. It’s axiomatic, of course, that when you tax some thing more, you get less of it — at a higher price.A second big problem is the state’s insistence on requiring all health insurance policies to cover a large array of treatments, conditions and providers. New York imposes 43 health insurance mandates — among the most of any state and well above the national average.
The issue will be explored in more detail by Prof. Herzlinger and other speakers at the Empire Center’s health policy forum at the State Capitol in Albany on Thursday, May 26.
About the Author
You may also like
While New York’s Medicaid Budget Soared, Public Health Funding Languished
Four years after a devastating pandemic, the state has made no major investment to repair or improve its public health defenses.
While funding for Medicaid over the past four years Read More
A Medicaid Grant Recipient Sponsors a Pro-Hochul Publicity Campaign
While much of the health-care industry is attacking Governor Hochul's Medicaid budget, at least one organization is rallying to her side: Somos Community Care, a politically active medical group in the Bronx that recently r Read More
Loss of Patients and Revenue Foreshadowed Downsizing for SUNY Downstate
The SUNY-owned hospital in Brooklyn facing a newly announced downsizing plan has seen its patient volume and revenue plunge over the past decade, according to a review of its financial reports.
Read More
New York’s post-pandemic Medicaid binge
As state budget preparations head into their final weeks, a confrontation is brewing over Medicaid, the state-run health plan for the low-income and disabled.
Governor Hochul has holding the state’s $36 billion share of Medicaid funding essentially Read More
How a Medicaid Program To Improve Nursing Home Care Ended Up Paying for Union Benefits
New York State's budget-making process sometimes works like a closed loop, as interest groups on the receiving end of state spending reinvest a portion of their proceeds to lobby Albany for still more money.
Read More
Testimony of Bill Hammond to the Assembly Hearing on the Health Care Workforce
Testimony of Bill Hammond
Senior Fellow for Health Policy, Empire Center for Public Policy
Before the Committees on Health, Mental Health, People with Disabilities, Higher Education, and Labor
De Read More
Despite Lingering Shortages, New York’s Health-Care Workforce Is Bigger Than Ever
The state's health-care workforce is recovering unevenly from the pandemic, with persistently lower employment levels in some areas and robust growth in others.
This mixed pattern c Read More
The Wacky Math of New York’s Essential Plan
Thanks to an absurdly wasteful federal law, New York's Essential Plan is expected to continue running billion-dollar surpluses even as state officials more than double its spending over the next several years.
Read More