And expert in statistics and probability....
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/index.html#/v/3892355461001
Colleague of ObamaCare architect (Hsiao) explains ‘stupid’ comments
Fellow economist attempts to explain what Jonathan Gruber really meant by his repeated references to the ‘stupidity’ of American voters in past remarks about ObamaCare. #GruberGate #ObamaCare
http://ldihealtheconomist.com/he000015.shtml
Meet The Architect of Vermont’s Single-Payer Plan
Harvard’s William Hsiao Zigs as Rest of Health Care Zags
By Hoag Levins... | ...November 1, 2011 |
PHILADELPHIA — In the mid-1990s, Harvard health economist William Hsiao abandoned the U.S. health system as an area of study to focus his efforts on the health systems of other countries. The switch was motivated by frustration. “I gave up on the United States,” said the 75-year-old China-born scholar who emigrated to this country as a teenager. “I did not do any more work on the U.S. because Washington politics were so driven by ideology, and money played such an important role in policy making, that I really couldn’t contribute to it any more. The research I did just got pushed aside.”
Hsiao, a professor of economics at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, subsequently went on to become one of the world’s leading authorities on national health care systems, providing analysis and consulting services to 30 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. He played a major role in reorganizing the health care systems in nine of those nations.
‘Incoherent and incongruent system’
Through it all he retained his dim view of America’s health care system and the lobbyists and partisan politics that control its destiny. In a recent interview in Health Affairs magazine he said the U.S. has “put on so many Band-Aids [on health care] that it has become an incoherent and incongruent system that causes much waste, inefficiencies and poor quality health care.”
And so, Hsiao’s history and attitude make it all the more noteworthy that last year, after a 16-year hiatus, he again focused on U.S. health care and became the architect of a new law establishing Vermont as the first state to adopt a “single-payer” health insurance strategy. He recently discussed that experience in a University of Pennsylvania seminar co-sponsored by the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Center for Public Health Initiatives.
“Vermont and the U.S. face common problems: the uninsured, the underinsured, cost escalation and an uneven quality of care,” he said. “If you’ve read the Commonwealth Fund’s reports, you know the U.S. has some of the best quality care in the world and some of the really not-so-good care. It’s highly uneven. Vermont has the ambition to solve all these problems with a single-payer system.”
Around the world
The single-payer approach is now widely used in other areas of the world including Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland. The model varies widely from country to country but, generally speaking, is a state-run, taxpayer-funded insurance program that standardizes administrative procedures, claims processing and payments across a broad population of patients. That unified system collects all the money, pays all the bills and sets the rates and rules for care.
Called “Green Mountain Care,” the single-payer system outlined in the 203-page Vermont plan that became a 102-page law in May is a public-private hybrid. It envisions a state-organized system of universal coverage for all residents funded by payroll taxes and administered under contract by a large private enterprise, probably an insurance company.
To prepare the plan, Hsiao, who has been a Harvard faculty member for 32 years, led a team that included Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Steven Kappel, the head of Vermont’s Policy Integrity organization; and a group of Harvard health policy analysts. Their work was funded by a contract from the Vermont legislature and a grant from the Commonwealth Fund.
(snip)
Hsiao’s team even helped the new governor “sell” the plan to voters and legislators. “You have to frame the issue to capture the public’s imagination and attention so they can resonate with it quickly,” he said. “We used ‘the current system is broken’ because it was a statement that people could all relate to in his or her own way. What we were doing was not economics but rather political economics.”
Using Jonathan Gruber’s microsimulation model, Hsiao’s team analyzed Vermont’s health care economy and identified 16 hurdles that had to be overcome to craft a viable plan. “Then we talked to all the payers; state government, businesses large and small, workers, households,” said Hsiao. “They all told us, ‘I can’t afford another penny for health care. If your proposal requires me to pay more, I’m going to oppose it.’ At the same time, providers were telling us, ‘If you decrease our net income by a penny, we will oppose you.’”
(snip)
http://pnhp.org/blog/2010/06/29/vermont-joint-fiscal-committee-approves-single-payer-study/
Vermont health reform panel recommends analyst
By Nancy Remsen
Burlington Free Press
June 29, 2010
The Health Care Reform Commission recommended Monday that the Legislature hire the Harvard economist who helped Taiwan revamp its health-care system for a six-month, $300,000 health research project for Vermont.
“He’s not some consultant who’s in this for the money,” Richter says of Hsiao, who declined personal payment so he could use all $300,000 allocated by the state to assemble a team with required expertise.
Prominent among the team’s 20 members is MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber, who helped draft the blueprint for the far-reaching Massachusetts reform. Hsiao also lauds the work of Steve Kappel, a Montpelier-based health policy analyst who was holed up in Hsiao’s office last Saturday night in a nondescript building on Mt. Auburn Street, a few blocks from snowbound Harvard Square.
“I didn’t need to do this,” says Hsiao in a face-to-face interview, conceding he’s “more exhausted than excited” by the prospect of presenting his plan for a single-payer health system in Vermont. “I’ve got millions of dollars in research projects on my plate around the world. I travel constantly in addition to teaching.”
And expert in statistics and probability....