THCB 20th Birthday classics: A Brief History of Price Controls by Annoyed Republican Administrations

By UWE REINHARDT One of the greatest pleasures of running THCB has been to get to know and host the writings of some of my health policy heroes. This week I have already published work from Jeff Goldsmith, and Ian Morrison & Michael Millenson among others will be featured next week (as the party won’t quite stop). Perhaps one of the most amazing things was that the doyen of health economists, Uwe Reinhardt, offered to write some original pieces for THCB…prodded by former editor John Irvine. This is one of my favorites, riffing on a talk I heard him give in (I think) 1993 about how HCFA was like the Kremlin and how free market Reaganite Republicans had made it so. This piece is from Jan 2017 and Uwe sadly died that November.–Matthew Holt Although, unlike most other nations, the U.S. has only two parties worth the name, their professed doctrines compared with their actions strikes me as more confusing than the well-known S.sky Decomposition which, as everyone knows, can be derived simply from a straightforward application of Kramer’s rule to a matrix of second partial derivatives of a multivariable demand function. The leaders of the drug industry, for example, probably are now breaking out the champagne in the soothing belief that their aggressive pricing policies for even old drugs are safe for at least the next eight years from the allegedly fearsome, regulation-prone, price-controlling Democrats. My advice to them is: Cool it! Follow me t...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy Price controls Uwe Reinhardt Source Type: blogs