The Healthcare Symposium

Healthcare policy seems to get worse by the day in America. It’s one of the more frustrating sectors that the federal government chooses to regulate comprehensively, admittedly, a long list. We were told on incontrovertible authority that more spending and regulation in the Patient Care and Affordability Act (Obamacare) would solve our healthcare woes. Predictably, it hasn’t, but it has made us more comfortable with even more government control of healthcare. Should we just go all the way? After all, the disparity in knowledge between patients and healthcare providers practically cries out for more government direction of the industry, right?

Yet the basics of healthcare, like any industry, service, or business model, turn on prices for services, drugs, labor, equipment, and infrastructure. How are those prices formulated? What incentives and knowledge do they reflect? How has federal regulation impacted healthcare resources from the standpoint of consumers, i.e., patients? And what’s the path forward?

To answer these questions and more, we’ve asked James Capretta, Sally Pipes, and Avik Roy to opine on the future of healthcare policy in America.