Newsletter

One of the vitally important jobs of public health experts is to locate the source of disease impacting public health to contain the spread and guard against future outbreaks.  Recall the famous story of physician John Snow who isolated the source of a serious cholera outbreak in London in 1854 to a single contaminated town well, the Broad Street pump, and convinced local … [Read more...] about Shouting in the Senate

It’s refreshing to be able to write about positive, bipartisan developments in health policy. In a new paper, Galen Senior Fellow Brian Blase explains that Biden Seeks To Build On Many Of Trump’s Health Care Policies via a new executive order issued on Friday. Brian was, of course, President Trump’s senior health policy adviser in the White House from 2017-2019 and launched a number … [Read more...] about What? Bipartisan Agreement on Health Reform?

I’m so tired of hearing that conservatives/Republicans have no plan for health reform. The narrative has persisted since Congress failed—by one vote—to get repeal-and-replace legislation over the finish line in 2017. There are lots of reasons why that happened, but it’s more productive to look instead at plans now and for the future. You know, of course, about the work of the Health Policy … [Read more...] about Ideas that work

Supreme Court: It took the court more than six months to decide (7-2) that plaintiffs didn’t have standing to challenge Obamacare’s individual mandate. The accurate headline would be “SCOTUS punts,” but instead we read, “Supreme Court upholds Obamacare for the third time.” Sigh. Since Congress had set the individual mandate penalty at zero in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the … [Read more...] about Three Quick Takes

Today we are focusing on the latter in an article just published in The Hill, written by leading long-term care expert Steve Moses and Galen Senior Fellow and Medicaid expert Brian Blase. The title says it all:  “Using Medicaid to protect inheritances.” Here’s the issue: Many affluent Americans are hiring lawyers to protect their estates so they don’t have to spend their own … [Read more...] about Taxpayers Protecting Inheritances

I boarded an airplane Tuesday for the first time in 18 months to attend an actual, real-life, in person conference in Austin.   How great it was to see friends and colleagues in person and not on Zoom. Bringing the third dimension back into play somehow sparks energy, enthusiasm, and creativity in conversations and makes everything feel real and right again. The occasion was the … [Read more...] about A New Breath of Freedom

Many of you know that a key project of the Galen Institute since our inception is facilitating the work of the Health Policy Consensus Group, an affiliation that has grown to include more than 275 leaders in the free-market health care and health policy space. And this month, we welcome Laura Trueman to bring her extraordinary expertise in consensus-building and outreach to the Galen team … [Read more...] about Welcome, Laura!

While Congress failed to pass legislation in 2017 that would chart a new path for health reform, the Trump administration made important progress through administrative actions to give consumers more affordable choices for health insurance and offer states more options to take care of vulnerable patients with high health costs.The Biden administration is working to pull the plug on many of these … [Read more...] about Undoing Progress