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NEW in Health Affairs: BPC’s G. William Hoagland and Andrew Patzman join a cross-ideological group of experts—Jim Capretta, Ben Ippolito, Loren Adler, and Matt Fiedler—to spotlight four lasting health care reforms with potential for bipartisan action. 👇

Loren Adler Matt Fiedler Ben Ippolito and others at The Brookings Institution Bipartisan Policy Center American Enterprise Institute recently outlined opportunities for lowering health care costs, ensuring that health care dollars are spent more effectively, and maintaining access to needed care. healthaffairs.org/content/forefr…

Spring 2025 Journal of Economic Perspectives Freely Available Online conversableeconomist.com/2025/05/09/spr…

I am very curious how much savings CBO will assign to simply freezing provider taxes and (I think) disallowing the most aggressive MCO taxes schemes pioneered by California. Could still be a lot of money if they (reasonably) assume states quickly adopt most advantageous schemes.

Good summary of the recent JEP symposium on drug pricing. Raises the point that changes to payment policies (like external reference pricing) would occur amidst other potentially important changes, like reductions in federal R&D spending. conversableeconomist.com/2025/05/12/wha…

The end appears near for some of the most aggressive Medicaid MCO taxes which inflate federal spending and clearly violate the spirit of governing rules. I believe the Biden Administration had also indicated their concern with this as well.

CMS claims this saves $30B over the next 5 years. Once you account for likely expansion of these tactics absent a policy change, presumably federal spending reductions must be $100B+

Looks like freezing Medicaid provider taxes at their current levels is scored as saving $87 billion d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/E_and_C_Markup…

Looks like nearly $200 billion in federal savings come from reforms to controversial Medicaid financing tactics (provider taxes, upper payment limit, and MCO tax changes). Quite a bit of money given how limited the provider tax provision is.

A reminder that we never saw the full legal challenge to the Trump admin's Most Favored Nation pricing play out last time. Hammering the prices of the next negotiated drugs--including Ozempic--seems likely to become an appealing and much easier option (if less expansive)