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March 21st: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care

CWN Presents
Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care

Thursday, March 21st
Noon-1:00pm
The Petroleum Club of Anchorage
3301 C St.

Video is available online.

Click here for PowerPoint presentation.

CWN is pleased to host the authors of, Overcharged : Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care.

They argue that in order to make health care better and cheaper for all Americans, we need to change the way we pay for medical services. Our system costs too much and delivers too little because we pay for health care the wrong way. Instead of routing dollars through insurers, employers, public payers like Medicare and Medicaid, and politicians, consumers must control the money. Health care will get better and cheaper as consumers exert pressure from below—and consumers can do so only if they control the money.

Overcharged maintains that:

• Drug companies manipulate payment systems and the drug approval process, while politicians are surprised that drug companies act like monopolists.
• The rise of third-party payment—including Medicare, Medicaid, and government-regulated private insurance—has disabled the restraints consumers would normally impose on health care spending. Indeed, third-party payment inflates prices so much that the patient’s cost- sharing can exceed the cash price for some pharmaceuticals.
• Our politicized third-party payment system creates bad incentives.
• The health care sector will become more efficient and pro-consumer only when it is subjected to the competitive forces that apply to the rest of the economy.

About the authors:
Charles Silver, MA, JD, is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and holds the Roy W. and Eugenia C. McDonald Endowed Chair in Civil Procedure at the University of Texas School of Law, where he teaches about civil litigation, health care policy, legal ethics, and insurance.

His writings on class actions and other aggregate proceedings, litigation finance, medical malpractice, and legal and medical ethics have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. In 2009, the Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section of the American Bar Association awarded him the Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award for outstanding scholarship on tort and insurance law.

David A. Hyman, MD, JD, is a Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He focuses his research and writing on the regulation and financing of health care, and on empirical law and economics. He teaches or has taught health care regulation, civil procedure, insurance, medical malpractice, law & economics, professional responsibility, consumer protection, and tax policy.

While serving as Special Counsel to the Federal Trade Commission, Professor Hyman was principal author and project leader for the first joint report ever issued by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, Improving Health Care: A Dose of Competition (2004).