It may pay to shop around for health care. New legislation requiring transparency in health insurance coverage allows price comparisons between hospitals, across hospital systems, and with different insurers. In a new issue brief, Vivian Ho and co-author Evelyn Li compare quality and analyze pricing data from Houston area hospitals.
A comparison of the prices at three major Houston hospitals — Houston Methodist, St. Luke’s Health and Memorial Hermann — associated with Blue Cross Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare PPO health plans finds wide-ranging costs for services.
Vaccination policies are a cornerstone of public health, but anti-vaccine activists have been adamantly pushing for legislation that would weaken and dismantle the public health infrastructure, the authors write. In this issue brief, they examine vaccine policy challenges leading up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the future of vaccine legislation in Texas and the United States.
The authors identify key themes that emerged from anti-vaccine testimonies during the 2021 Texas legislative session and consider the implications of these discussions as the next legislative session draws near.
Information and cyber action have been important but ancillary components of the Ukraine war since its outbreak on February 24, 2022. We offer a set of observations:
Christopher Bronk, Gabriel Collins, Dan WallachSeptember 6, 2022
This brief estimates the costs of regulatory bank compliance under the Dodd-Frank Act, passed after the 2008 financial crisis to reduce risk-taking by banks.
Despite the period of very low interest rates since the 2008 financial crisis, bank lending has failed to recover. In this issue brief, public finance fellow Thomas L. Hogan explores the potential causes of this post-crisis decline in bank lending.
By Marwan Muasher, Ph.D., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The author explores reform efforts and identifies challenges in Jordan following the Arab Spring.
The brief is part of a two-year project is generously supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
By Courtney Freer, London School of Economics
Cross-ideological movements uniting Islamist and secular groups have increasingly focused on sweeping political reforms instead of social policies and ideology in post-Arab Spring Kuwait, writes the author.
This brief is the second of four resulting from a May 2018 workshop held in Kuwait by the Baker Institute in partnership with the Alsalam Center for Strategic and Developmental Studies. This work is part of a two-year project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York on “Building Pluralistic and Inclusive States Post-Arab Spring.”
This issue brief summarizes the debate over regulatory complexity, outlines a proposal from the Federal Reserve that would simplify bank capital regulations and another from the OCC that would push the financial regulatory system toward greater complexity, and recommends reforms to help improve financial stability.
