Catalyst for Payment Reform

Webinar #4: Policies for Low-Intervention States & Policies to Protect Competition

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, Director 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.

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Webinar #3: Policies to Regulate Prices

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.

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Webinar #2: Policies to Prevent/Punish Bad Behavior and Empower Market Balancers

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.

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Mythbuster: Purchasers Can’t Fight the Wave of Provider Market Power

on is a massive wave fueled by provider consolidation, increased expenses, and pent-up demand for services (resulting in higher utilization), and it appears ready to break over the industry, bringing with it higher health care prices and [even more] unfavorable market dynamics for employer-purchasers and health plans. Against this wall of provider market power, purchasers may feel powerless with no way to protect themselves but there are both preventive actions and countermeasures they can take to mitigate the impact.

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Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working: The Case for State Policy Intervention in Health Care, as told through a parable about toddlers and swimming lessons

younger daughter Dylan was three, she emphatically declared that she hated swimming lessons. Unfortunately for her, she has a mother (me) who believes with equal conviction that learning to swim is a safety issue and therefore non-negotiable.  Thus, Dylan and I were at an impasse, except that one of us (me) believed that she could convince the other (Dylan) to relent through a combination of authority and influence (and also bribery). One afternoon at our local pool, I found myself pleading, cajoling, promising sweets and screen time (and threatening their removal), if Dylan would just allow me to help her into her bathing suit.  “You don’t even have to go in the water!” I lied.  Dylan didn’t buy it and was expressing her mistrust in a 9-alarm screaming toddler melt-down. It was at that moment that another woman – likely old enough to have grown children of her own – paused and offered the following counsel: whatever you’re trying to do, she said, it isn’t working.

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