Webinar #1: The Case for Multifacted State Policy Intervention
NEWSFLASH: HEALTH CARE MARKETS ARE BROKEN
Everyone is tired of hearing about how broken our health care system is. We know: prices keep rising, hospitals keep merging, quality falters, disparities widen. And over the next few years, the outlook remains bleak. Experts predict that health care premiums will jump 5.6 percentage points over the previous year.
It’s become painfully apparent that well-meaning, market-based interventions (price transparency, consumer-driven health plans, innovative care delivery models, even provider payment reform) cannot exert enough pressure to right this capsized ship. At this level of dysfunction, we need a more powerful force to referee the marketplace and level the playing field. We need government intervention – specifically, state government intervention.
This Webinar, the first of four, lays out the case for combinations of state policy interventions designed to place downward pressure on commercial prices and rebalance market power.
Featuring Gloria Sachdev, President and CEO of the Employers’ Forum of Indiana, and Christopher Whaley, health economist at the RAND Corporation and professor at the RAND Pardee Graduate School.
Recorded March 14, 2023
Webinar #2: Policies to Prevent/Punish Bad Behavior and Empower Market Balancers
In consolidated health care markets (which comprise 90% service areas) powerful health systems can leverage their market power to further stymie competition and skew the playing field. This webinar, second in a series of four, focuses on policies to prevent would-be monopolists from engaging in anticompetitive behavior, impose penalties on those that continue to do so, and protect and preserve the independent actors that remain.
Featuring Aditi P. Sen, Director of Research and Policy at the Health Care Cost Institute and Erin Fuse Brown, the Catherine C. Henson Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law, Health, and Society at Georgia State University.
Recorded March 21, 2023
Webinar #3: Policies to Regulate Prices
For some states, the best and most viable path to improving health care affordability may be the direct route: regulating provider prices. That doesn’t mean that the only option on the table is to exert complete price control through all-payer rate setting. States might alternatively consider establishing price caps, or applying controls to select sites of service, markets or circumstances. By placing a selective clamp on health care prices, policymakers and regulators hope to create an environment where negotiations between payers and providers proceed on a more even playing field.
This webinar, third in a series of four, focuses on policies for price regulation, organized according to the degree of state oversight, resources and sophistication required to administer them.
Featuring Anna Doar Sinaiko, Assistant Professor of Health Economics and Policy at Harvard University, Robert A. Berenson, an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, and Robert Murray, President of Global Health Payment, LLC.
Recorded March 28, 2023
Webinar #4: Policies for Low-Intervention States & Policies to Protect Competition
Some states may lack the resources to pursue complex policy interventions; others may operate in political climates inhospitable to government intervention; a small few may have health care markets that function reasonably well and don’t require major fixes.
This webinar, the final in the series of four, focuses on policies, which, if plotted on a spectrum of “degree of intervention” would land on the lower end of the scale. It also offers strategies for states to protect the erosion of market competition by bolstering and broadening antitrust oversight. Featuring Josephine Porter of the Institute for Health Policy and Practice at the University of New Hampshire and Jaime S. King, the John and Marylyn Mayo Chair in Health Law at the University of Auckland.
Recorded April 4, 2023
Download the corresponding issue briefs here.
CPR’s white paper profiles five scenario-based policy menus, designed to help state policymakers, advocacy organizations and other stakeholders navigate through the multitude of policy intervention options and identify those best suited to meet their unique circumstances.
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