Hoover Institution (Washington, DC) — The Hoover Institution recently hosted a conference in its Washington, DC, office titled Key Priorities for the New Administration, focusing on critical healthcare reform issues.
The event on October 8 brought together leading experts from academia and think tanks, along with former government officials, to discuss pressing challenges and potential solutions in the US healthcare system.
In his opening remarks, Dr. Scott Atlas, Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, set the stage by emphasizing the need for healthcare reform in the United States. He highlighted the growing challenges of increasing costs due to the expanded role of government, an aging population, and a substandard government Medicaid program that fails the poor, but he stressed that care in the United States is vastly superior to that provided by more centralized systems in other countries.
“The policy goal of US healthcare reform should be to broaden access for all Americans to high-quality medical care, to ultimately have better health,” Atlas told attendees on October 8. “Not just ending with ‘well, we’ve increased the number of insured.’”
The first panel, “Improving Medicare, Medicaid, and Medicare Advantage,” featured Hoover Visiting Fellow Charles Blahous, Brian Blase of Paragon Health Institute, and Nina Schaefer from the Heritage Foundation. They discussed the unsustainable growth in costs of programs like Medicare and Medicaid, with projections of insolvency for Medicare hospital insurance by 2036. The panel explored potential reforms to these programs, including changes to reimbursement structures and ways to introduce more market-based elements into Medicare Advantage.
The second session, “Regulations, Private Insurance, and Value,” included Blase, Michael F. Cannon from the Cato Institute, and Joe Grogan of the Leonard D. Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service at University of Southern California. This panel delved into the complexities of health insurance markets, discussing the need for more consumer-directed options and increased price transparency. Participants debated reforms to the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance and explored regulatory changes that could increase competition and consumer choice in health insurance markets.
The final panel, “Prescription Drugs and Innovation,” featured Daniel Heil from the Hoover Institution, Casey Mulligan from the University of Chicago, and Tom Philipson from the University of Chicago, former acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. This session tackled the contentious issue of drug pricing, with panelists expressing concerns about the potential negative effects of price controls on innovation. They also discussed the role of pharmacy benefit managers in negotiating drug prices and managing benefits. A significant portion of the discussion focused on obesity as a major health issue and the potential impact of new obesity drugs, along with concerns about their pricing and access.
Throughout the conference, speakers emphasized market-based solutions and expressed caution about government overreach in healthcare. The event provided a platform for in-depth discussions on complex health policy issues, offering insights that could shape future reform efforts in the US healthcare system.
