Movement in Congress to increase hospital competition and lower prices

Bills to increase hospital competition introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives: This summer, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R., Ind.) introduced a series of bills aimed at restoring competition among large hospital monopolies, targeting a nationwide problem that limits options for care and drives up prices for patients. The legislation would improve oversight of anticompetitive behaviors by non-profit hospitals, require transparency and eliminate abuses in hospital billing, increase patient choice, and more. These are reforms based on years of FREOPP research and work, going back to briefings FREOPP staff held with Rep. Spartz when she was a state legislator, and they are an important step toward increasing access to affordable health care for all Americans.

And the wins keep coming. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin cited student loans as a reason for reducing cosmetology licensing requirements. In his path-breaking research on the return on investment for college degrees, FREOPP Senior Fellow Preston Cooper found that the vast majority—a whopping 86%—of cosmetology programs do not increase their students’ earnings enough to justify the cost of tuition. As Preston has long argued, including in the context of cosmetology licensing, requiring people to get degrees and training that don’t pay off is a key driver of student debt and adds financial burdens to students who can least afford them. More states should follow Virginia’s lead and reduce or eliminate these unnecessary and counterproductive requirements.

→ Meanwhile, House Republicans dropped a new higher education reform bill this week that includes caps on graduate lending. As Preston has described at working group meetings with members of Congress and their staffs and elsewhere, these loans tend to favor high-earning professionals while directing huge amounts of taxpayer money to degrees of questionable value. Although the best course would be to end federal grad school loans entirely, a cap would be a significant move in the right direction.

The urgency of rethinking U.S. nuclear energy regulation: Even with record-high fuel prices driving more Americans to try to conserve energy, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that U.S. electricity needs will increase—not decrease—in the coming years. Failing to prepare to meet these needs will lead to ever-increasing prices and other consequences that will fall the hardest on lower-income Americans. In a new paper, FREOPP Visiting Fellow Grant Dever proposes a solution: nuclear power. Unfortunately, rather than embracing nuclear as an opportunity for abundant, affordable, reliable, low-carbon electricity, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has taken a posture that effectively shuts it down. Congress should change this and incentivize a safe, functional nuclear infrastructure by tying increases in the agency’s budget to increases in nuclear energy capacity and better aligning the NRC’s regulatory science with the empirical evidence regarding the safety of nuclear power.

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