Assuming that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) exchange system will continue to exist, policymakers should try to fix obvious problems with rules quickly, then do what they can to keep the rules the same for at least a few years.
I’ve been trying to do some interviews with people involved with setting up and running the public exchange system.
One thing that’s striking is that the PPACA players have a hard time even expressing what they’ve experienced in any kind of detailed words fit for publication on a respectable website.
I think the theme behind what people are telling me is, “Please make the shaking and spinning stop. My stomach hurts.”
Three health care economists — Ralph S.J. Koijen, Tomas J. Philipson and Harald Uhlig — have provided relevant data on the effects of unpredictable changes in government health policy on the health care market in a working paper published behind a paywall on the National Bureau of Economic Research website.
The gist of the article: Because publicly traded medical research and development firms are so vulnerable to government whims, investors demand a risk premium of 4 percentage points to 6 percentage points to invest in those companies’ stocks.