Implementing (and Improving) the ACA: A Conversation with Professor Len Nichols (September 13th)

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During this 21-minute interview, Professor Nichols discusses the reasons for the decline in health care cost growth and whether its slowing will persist, alternative payment models (to fee for service) that contribute to this decline, how worrisome or not health care market consolidation is as well as the prospect of employers dropping employee health care coverage, why Congressional Republicans (moreover House Republicans) oppose the ACA, ways of improving the law via moroever price transparency provisions and whether states, specificallly Virginia, will take advantage of the ACA and expand its Medicaid coverage in 2014.

Since 2010 Dr. Len Nichols has been Professor of Health Policy and the Director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University.  Previously, Dr. Nichols served as the Director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation, as Vice President of the Center for Studying Health System Change, as a Principal Research Associate at the Urban Institute, as a Senior Advisor for health policy at the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton Administration's health reform effort, and as Chairman of the Economics Department at Wellesley College. He has advised the World Bank and the Pan American Health Organization, as well as various state governments and departments of the US Government.  Because of his reputation as an honest and knowledgeable health policy analyst, Dr. Nichols has testified on numerous occasions before Congress and is frequently interviewed by major media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Congressional Quarterly, National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Service and ABC, CBS and the NBC's nightly news.  He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Professor Nichols most recent Congressional testimony was before the US Senate Budget Committee this past July 30th, see: http://www.budget.senate.gov/democratic/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=4dd8a8b5-c123-44e6-b13e-34b6e825c3f0

Among other noted publications Prof. Nichols co-authored (with John Bertko) in 2009 "A Modest Proposal for a Competing Public Health Plan".  See: http://www.newamerica.net/files/CompetingPublicHealthPlan.pdf

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