Contributor
John C. Goodman, President and CEO, National Center for Policy Analysis, and Kellye Wright Fellow
Related Link:
http://www.john-goodman-blog.com/
Biography provided by participant
John C. Goodman, Ph.D. founded the NCPA in 1983 and has served as President since the center's inception. The Wall Street Journal called Dr. Goodman "the father of Health Savings Accounts," and National Journal declared him "winner of the devolution derby" because his ideas on ways to transfer power from government to the people have had a significant impact on Capitol Hill.
Dr. Goodman is the author of nine books, including Lives at Risk: Single-Payer National Health Insurance Around the World; Leaving Women Behind: Modern Families, Outdated Laws; Economics of Public Policy, a widely used college textbook, and Patient Power: Solving America's Health Care Crisis, the condensed version of which sold 300,000 copies and is credited with playing a pivotal role in the defeat of the Clinton administration's plan to overhaul the U.S. health care system.
He has authored numerous editorials in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and many others.
Dr. Goodman regularly appears on television, including PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN, CNBC and the Fox News Channel. He was a debater on several of William F. Buckley Jr.'s Firing Line shows, and has appeared on a number of two-hour prime time debates, including debates on the flat tax, welfare reform and Social Security privatization.
He regularly briefs members of Congress on economic policy issues and frequently testifies before congressional committees. He is author/co-author of more than 50 published studies on such topics as health policy, tax reform and school choice. Dr. Goodman has an active speaking schedule and has addressed more than 100 different organizations on public policy issues. He received the prestigious Duncan Black award in 1988 for the best scholarly article on public choice economics.
Dr. Goodman received a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. He has taught and done research at several colleges and universities including Columbia University, Stanford University, Dartmouth University, Southern Methodist University and the University of Dallas.
Recent Responses
January 31, 2012 05:10 PM
Repeal and Replace: 10 Necessary Changes Fortunately, this question was answered a year ago at a Capitol Hill briefing with representatives from the National Center for Policy Analysis, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and other organizations. Here is a brief summary: There are 10 structural flaws in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Each is so potentially damaging, Congress will have to resort to major corrective action even if the critics of the ACA are not involved. Further, each must be addressed in any new attempt to create workable health care reform. 1. An Impossible…
Read moreJanuary 24, 2011 02:23 PM
An Employee's Point of View Look at it from the employee’s point of view. The new law says that an employee must have insurance costing, say, $15,000 for family coverage in 2016. Remembering that employee benefits are a dollar-for-dollar substitute for wages, that implies that a previously uninsured $30,000-a-year worker will get a 50% cut in pay. Further, the only help this worker will get from Uncle Sam will be the ability of the employer to pay the premiums with pretax dollars. That’s worth about $2,000. On the other hand, if this worker can get the same insurance through…
Read moreNovember 18, 2010 03:47 PM
Wrong Way to Reform Medicare As the Medicare actuaries have reported, the Accountable Care Act’s scheduled cuts in Medicare fees to doctors and hospitals will seriously undermine access to care. By the end of this decade Medicare will pay less than Medicaid. Seniors will line up behind low-income families at community health centers and safety net hospitals as they are closed out of the market for private physician services. A better way to control costs is outlined in my paper, A Framework for Medicare Reform. Providers would be free to renegotiate the way they are paid, provided the cost to…
Read moreNovember 3, 2010 12:35 PM
The Morning After The health care reform law apparently had a huge impact on yesterday’s elections. See the Wall Street Journal here for some anecdotal evidence. Very few candidates defended the bill. Just about every Republican candidate and a great many Democrats campaigned against the bill. So going forward the lesson is clear. Certainly through the next election cycle, and possibly through many more, Obama Care will be an albatross around the necks of those who support it and an electoral advantage for those who do not. See my blog post today on how to rescue us from a reform that…
Read moreOctober 4, 2010 04:36 PM
Great Potential I agree with Ken Thorpe. The cost-saving potential in Medicare is great. But not if we adopt a command-and-control approach manipulated from Washington. We need two reforms: 1. For the short-run, providers should be free to repackage and re-price their services and Medicare should accept any offer so long as the cost to the taxpayer goes down and quality of care goes up. Done correctly, we could have a competitive environment in short order – with providers vying with each other to find ways of reducing taxpayer costs. 2. For the long-run, we must convert Medicare from chain letter finance to a…
Read moreSeptember 13, 2010 04:25 PM
The GOP Should Go For Real Reform What we have in ObamaCare is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will make our most important problems worse: costs will be higher, quality will be lower, access will be more difficult, insurance will not be portable and government subsidies will be more arbitrary and unfair than ever. So given the opportunity, what should Republicans do? 1. Get rid of all the mandates. 2. Give everyone the same health insurance subsidy, regardless of where insurance is obtained. 3. Encourage portable insurance that travels from job to job. 4. Encourage Health Savings Accounts and special needs…
Read moreSeptember 7, 2010 02:42 PM
Putting Lipstick on the Pig These poll numbers represent a major shift from past polling results. Traditionally, people have always trusted Democrats more than Republicans on health -- if for no other reason than the fact that Republicans tend to ignore health care altogether. The problem the Democrats now have is that the health reform law is a very bad bill. People don't like it for very good, objective reasons. (Do you know anyone who really likes the bill? I don't.) So I predict that no matter how much the Democrats spend, they will not be able to convince people…
Read moreAugust 10, 2010 12:48 PM
Colliding With Reality The main cost control device in the health reform law is not new. It has been tried unsuccessfully in this country (e.g., the SGR formula) and in other countries. The government’s threat: if doctors don’t become more “productive (which means lower the government’s trend line cost) acting as individual agents, then the government will punish all doctors collectively with across-the-board fee cuts. This doesn’t work because the individual doctor has the same incentives he had before: to maximize against the government’s reimbursement formula. If he shows restraint, he mainly benefits other doctors. Only 1/800,000 of his “productivity” improvement redowns…
Read moreJuly 26, 2010 12:24 PM
Squeezing the Providers is No Answer The only cost control device advocates of a public plan have ever proposed is racheting down the fees paid to providers. In this case, they apparently intend to pay Medicare plus 5%, and since Medicare rates are going to plummet under the recently passed legislation, we are talking about fees way below what the private sector will pay. Two problems: (1) Squeezing the providers does not control costs, it shifts costs from patients and taxpayers to doctors, nurses, physicians assistants, etc. But why should the people who provide our health care be singled out…
Read moreJuly 12, 2010 11:28 AM
Shameful Deed I agree with Gail Wilensky. There is an enormous amount of confusion around the country about the new health reform act. Adding to that confusion is Don Berwick’s praise of the British National Health Service – a system that not only rations care, but systematically denies medical services to people who lack political connections or the ability to pay out of pocket. I can’t think of an occasion in which there was a greater need for a confirmation hearing than this one.…
Read moreJuly 6, 2010 02:08 PM
The Future Does Not Look Good Recent news from Massachusetts should serve as a warning for the country as a whole. Costs are out of control; emergency room visits are higher than ever; and the legislature has put all efforts to reform the reform on hold. And remember, even the President said this was the model for the recently passed national reform.…
Read moreJune 28, 2010 10:50 AM
Absolutely Except it will not be a two-tier system. It will be a multi-tier system. We already ration by waiting in this country and the rationing (access to care) problems are about to get much worse. If the CBO forecast is accurate, there will be 32 million newly insured people. If the economic studies are correct, these 32 million will try to double their consumption of medical care. But since the health reform law makes no provision for any new medical personnel, access to care will be worse than ever. My advice: try to avoid any health plan that pays…
Read moreJune 21, 2010 07:46 AM
Half Of Workers Can’t Keep Their Plan If you listened to the campaign rhetoric during the 2008 election you could be forgiven for thinking that health reform would mainly mean insuring people who cannot afford insurance on their own; in the process there would be no tax increases or benefit cuts for the middle class; and, “If you like the plan you are in, you can keep it!” Turns out, the reality is very different. Take, for example, health plans that were supposed to be “grandfathered,” and thus immune from onerous, cost-increasing regulatory burdens. A draft of the proposed regulations shows…
Read moreJune 14, 2010 02:53 PM
Bad News for Small Businesses If you think the administration is going to be kind to small businesses, see the document they released this morning on proposed rules on which plans will be grandfathered and thus escaped onerous, cost- increasing regulations. Whereas large companies with unions who are in self-insured plans can switch their third-party administrator at will and still be grandfathered, small businesses will lose their immunity if they switch insurers (say to keep costs down). The document predicts that up to 80% of small businesses will not be grandfathered in just three years (by 2013).…
Read moreJune 1, 2010 09:17 AM
What is an ACO? An ACO is an HMO on steroids.…
Read moreMay 24, 2010 07:22 AM
Huge Opportunities Every study has shown that Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) are effective ways of controlling health care costs. Since nothing else seems to work and since cost control was the Obama Administration's main criteria for accepting the bill Congress offered up, you would think the Administration would explore ways to expand the adoption of consumer driven health care (CDHC) plans. There are huge opportunities, for example, in applying the concept to chronic illness. Currently, nearly one-in-ten workers has a CDHC plan. Because these workers are in a position to choose between health care and other…
Read moreMay 10, 2010 09:26 AM
Manage Your Own Preventive Care It is too bad that the new health reform law will require all insurance to cover preventive services with no cost sharing. This is the exact opposite of sound policy. With few exceptions (e.g., childhood immunizations), third party insurance should not pay for these services at all. Instead, patients should make their own decisions, managing their own health care dollars in a Health Savings Account. The reasons: (1) there is overwhelming evidence that preventive care adds to total health costs rather than reducing costs, so there is no legitimate third-party interest in subsidizing this kind…
Read moreMay 3, 2010 11:18 AM
Of Course its' a Big deal Is Rick Foster's report a big deal? Of course it is. Here is my brief summary of the Chief Actuary's findings: http://www.john-goodman-blog.com/obama-administration-report-is-a-devastating-critique-of-obamacare/ Comments by David Cutler, Karen Davis and Uwe Reinhardt are technically interesting, but they miss the wider poilitical point: The most credible source within the US govenment on these matters is completely undermining the all-gain-no-pain propaganda coming out of the White House and from the leadership on Capitol Hill and from their apologists (who seem to be everywhere).…
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