David Balat is the director of the Right on Healthcare initiative at the Texas public Policy Foundation. He has broad experience across the healthcare spectrum with special expertise in healthcare finance. He is a former congressional candidate in Texas’ 2nd Congressional District and a seasoned hospital executive with more than 20 years of healthcare industry leadership and executive management experience.
Reduced competition, shortages, and unaffordable options in healthcare are symptoms of middlemen running amok. These middlemen are the healthcare administrators, who rarely touch the product or interface with patients, yet control significant healthcare dollars behind the scenes. Lawmakers must keep these middlemen in mind as they seek to address the inflation of drug prices. A proposal by...
Proponents of Medicaid expansion are predictable, though it’s not completely their fault. For more than a decade they’ve had to rely on a single talking point—one statistic—to make their case. Expanding eligibility for Medicaid would increase the number of Texans who have insurance. That’s it. That’s the whole argument. A million formerly uninsured Texans would...
As the federal government is seeking to expand the Obama Affordable Care Act by extending subsidies and giving more people coverage, bankruptcies linked to medical debt have not fallen. Instead, they have risen. Most Americans filing for bankruptcy over medical bills have medical insurance. The Affordable Care Act failed to cure medical bankruptcies. A 2019...
Despite what seems like an unrelenting flow of disagreements on political and public policy issues, it is important we come together to solve important problems — especially when it involves the most vulnerable among the next generation. While our organizations, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Texans Care for Children, do not always agree on every policy issue, we do...
At its invention, the stethoscope was revolutionary—the first non-lethal way of exploring a patient’s internal anatomy. It opened a new world to physicians. That’s the goal of the bipartisan Pharmacy Benefit Manager Transparency Act—a measure that is completely non-invasive, but that opens up a world of information about how our health care system delivers prescription drugs and...
Two former Trump administration officials have taken to the Wall Street Journal to defend the practices of pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen who negotiate drug prices with the manufacturers on behalf of the insurers. The authors are perplexed as to why fellow Republicans would be concerned about these middlemen using their leverage to extract “rebates”...
Prescription drugs are the difference between life and death for millions of Americans each day, yet their costs are far too often unaffordable. Heavily influencing these prices are Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs). These are the third-party middlemen who negotiate prescription drug rates with pharmaceutical manufacturers on behalf of insurance companies. Earlier this month, the Federal...
Congressional Democrats are desperate for legislative victories heading into an ominous election season. They think they’ve seized on a winner with a bill that passed the House of Representatives this month to cap the patient cost of insulin at $35 per month. The Affordable Insulin Now Act taps into American diabetics’ frustration with runaway insulin bills. Nearly...
A California lawmaker has pulled down his own bill that would have created a single-payer healthcare system in the Golden State—even before a vote was scheduled. Even with the Democrats’ supermajority in the California capitol, he couldn’t round up the votes. According to the Sacramento Bee, the bill by San Jose Assemblyman Ash Kalra “threatened the existence of...
The Democrats are obsessed with forcing one-size fits all health care on to the country – no matter who it hurts. Despite overwhelming evidence that Medicaid is a poorly performing program for people already on it and expansion would blow up state budgets, Democrats are intent on making states bow to their demand to put...
Today, dedicated platforms search dozens of airlines for destinations and prices and allow consumers accessibility to their results even as conveniently as from their personal phone. A few clicks puts consumers in control. They decide the airline, the destination and what they’ll spend. It wasn’t always this way. And that’s why it’s a good lesson...
Vox wasn’t supposed to say this part out loud. But in a 2020 piece celebrating Britain’s National Health Service, Vox co-founder Ezra Klein explained that the NHS is forced to ration care. “It has embraced the idea we fear most: rationing,” he wrote. “There is, in the UK, a government agency that decides which treatments...