Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a public policy research organization that she founded in 1995 to promote an informed debate over free-market ideas for health reform. She speaks and writes extensively about incentives to promote a more competitive, consumer-driven marketplace in the health sector.
She also is founder and facilitator of the Health Policy Consensus Group, which serves as a forum for analysts from market-oriented think tanks around the country to analyze and develop health policy recommendations.
Grace-Marie recently completed a three-year term as a member of the National Advisory Council of Healthcare Research and Quality and served as a member of the Medicaid Commission, charged with making recommendations to modernize and improve Medicaid.
The Galen Institute has been instrumental in promoting ideas that transfer power and control over health care decisions from bureaucracies to doctors and patients.
When I served on the Medicaid Commission from 2005-2006, one of the messages we frequently heard from Medicaid recipients who testified was that they wanted the dignity of private health insurance. Many felt confined to a Medicaid ghetto where they had the promise of generous medical benefits on paper, but in practice, they had difficulty finding any private physicians who would see them. Too many of them were forced to go to hospital emergency rooms to get even routine care. Why on earth would we want to expand this program to confine millions more people to this substandard access? The Medicaid… Read more
About 16 million previously uninsured people seemed to have vanished during President Obama’s speech before the joint session of Congress. "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage," he said. In every other speech he has given, he has cited Census Bureau numbers showing about 46 million people uninsured. The latest numbers show the number little unchanged. It's not clear what the president subtracted to come up with the 30 million number. Legal and illegal immigrants account for about 10 million and therefore would not be classified as "American citizens." About 10 million more… Read more
Sen. Kennedy was both respected and liked by colleagues on both sides of the aisle during his remarkable 47 years in the Senate. While he always was firm in his liberal views and we seldom agreed with him, Sen. Kennedy did listen to his Republican colleagues and worked to forge compromises. That bipartisan spirit has been markedly missing during his absence from the Senate this year. The health reform legislation making its way through Congress is rigid and aggressively liberal, without any evidence of bipartisanship, and it is rightly facing a firestorm of opposition. Sen. Robert Byrd has asked that… Read more
Len Nichols says there would be a level playing field between a new government health plan and private plans if “all rules of the marketplace -- benefit package requirements, insurance regulations, and risk adjustment processes -- apply to all plans equally, whether public or private.” But this is a false assurance because Washington can continue to change the rules that dictate how the private marketplace must operate. A statement to be released this week by members of the Health Policy Consensus Group will explain that, “While there may be initial assurances of a level playing field, the NHP would have… Read more
Former RAND researcher Benjamin Zycher, in a study published by the Manhattan Institute, finds that administrative costs for public health plans would actually be 25% if all costs were properly measured, disputing Jason Rosenbaum’s claim that Medicare and Medicaid have lower administrative costs than the private insurance industry. And it is the fee-for-service parts of these public programs, not the privately managed care plans, that are an open invitation to fraud, as The New York Times discovered in its in-depth study of Medicaid fraud in New York. Private plans invest in fraud detection to make sure that premium dollars are… Read more
President Obama says that reforming government entitlement programs will be "a central part" of his administration’s efforts to control federal spending. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer echoed the pledge last week, saying that the health reform process must cast a very wide net to include Medicare and Medicaid. “We can no longer afford to think of health reform and entitlement reform as two separate issues,” he said recently. How, then, is it wise to include a massive, unprecedented expansion of Medicaid in the stimulus bill without a single hearing to explore the implications or to incorporate reform measures? The stimulus… Read more
People purchasing health insurance in the individual market face double-jeopardy: Unless they are eligible for the self-employment tax deduction, they must pay for coverage with after-tax dollars, and they also face the full plethora of state insurance mandates and regulations. Despite these encumbrances, the individual market functions much better than conventional wisdom assumes. Lifting burdens on the individual market – rather than adding new ones – could enable it to become an important base for expanded health coverage. Policy changes that are needed include allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines to create a more competitive market, strengthened… Read more
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