Dr. John Garen, the chairman of the Bluegrass Institute’s Board of Scholars, appeared on KET’s ‘Kentucky Tonight’ as part of a panel discussion about the federal budget.
(click on the image below to view the video)
Bluegrass Institute partnered with Mercatus Center today for one great event
April 5, 2013 By 5 Comments
Today, the Bluegrass Institute partnered with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University for the second time in as many years to host its Citizen Education Seminar. The event took place at the spacious Crowne Plaza Hotel where both Bluegrass Institute and Mercatus scholars discussed some of the most pertinent issues facing Kentucky today.
Speakers at the event included Mercatus’ distinguished visiting scholar, Maurice P. McTigue, their senior research fellow, Matthew Mitchell, as well as the chair of the Bluegrass Institute’s Board of Scholars, John Garen, Ph.D., an economics professor at the University of Kentucky.
Garen’s talk was especially timely as Kentucky now faces a cross-roads in its efforts to recover from financial instability, due to a $34 billion pension crisis. According to Garen, there are two routes Kentucky can take in an attempt to attain real economic recovery and competitiveness with its neighboring states: focus on productivity, or focus on making Kentuckians – and the commonwealth itself – increasingly dependent on bigger government.
As Garen notes, becoming more competitive with our neighboring states is a hugely important issue for Kentucky. In almost any relevant category one can think of – levels of education, health, GDP per capita, or even transfer payments – Kentucky only outranks West Virginia. Kentuckians expect and deserve more.
The feds are not much help here as they’ve lured Kentucky into what Garen described as a “dependency trap.” As the feds continue to offer services to Kentucky – and every other state in the nation – for far less than Kentuckians could purchase them otherwise, denizens of the commonwealth rush to consume them. The only problem is that the feds are doing the same thing for each and every other state in the union, and Kentuckyians are paying for that too.
The end result of this trap, according to Garen, is that we’re “flushing ourselves right down the toilet.”
All speakers focused on the same message: economic recovery is not attained by states out-lobbying each other, but by increasing productivity – a true positive sum-game.
As legendary economist F.A. Hayek famously wrote,
“The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate ‘given’ resources—if ‘given’ is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these ‘data.’ It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know.”
And that’s the key to Kentucky’s economic recovery.
Stay tuned as the Bluegrass Institute will soon post exclusive video of the event.
Court’s ruling upholding Obama’s health care policy could deepen the nation’s – and Kentucky’s – debt hole
June 28, 2012 By 1 Comment
(BOWLING GREEN, Ky.) – Today’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) – President’s Obama’s health care law – could exacerbate the nation’s health-care woes by offering a “spate of bad incentives,” said University of Kentucky economist John Garen, Ph.D., who also chairs the Bluegrass Institute Board of Scholars.
Garen warned in a recent Bluegrass Institute policy brief that the President’s plan would:
- Create state-based exchanges that force the healthy to overpay for insurance to subsidize the less healthy, in effect “taxing” one group’s health insurance to subsidize another group’s coverage.
- Subsidize the use of the exchange by low- to middle-income workers, creating another entitlement that taxpayers must pay for.
- Financially incentivize health insurers, who will make money off the healthy and lose it on the sick to serve the former, but not the latter.
- Increase Medicaid spending, putting cash-strapped states in an even greater predicament.
- Cut Medicare funding and, as a result, services.
“We need market-led rather than government-driven reforms,” Garen said. “The President’s plan fails to address the inefficiencies that drive up costs while worsening the healthcare entitlement crisis. The latter is an important cause of the nation’s debt crisis and threatens our ability to reach the truly needy with healthcare assistance.”
News alert: Bluegrass Institute releases new policy brief discouraging costly state health exchange
June 6, 2012 By 2 Comments
(LEXINGTON, Ky.) – A new policy brief released today by the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank, recommends that the commonwealth not move ahead with its costly – and controversial – health insurance exchange.
Even though the federal “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” does not force states to create their own exchanges, Gov. Steve Beshear insists on spending the $67 million in federal grant funding – more than any state except New York – from the federal government to set up an exchange.
In his policy release entitled “Insurance Exchanges in Kentucky and the Health Care Reform Bill,” University of Kentucky economist John Garen, Ph.D., describes the exchange as “essentially a website where consumers can find individual health insurance plans and prices that are available to them.”
But such exchanges are costly and unnecessary considering “a Google search quickly reveals many websites where comparison shopping for individual health insurance policies can be done,” he said.
Noting that “states really do not have much flexibility in setting up their exchanges” and “are merely carrying out the dictates of the federal government,” Garen warns that Kentucky would be responsible for “the expenses of operating the exchange” after federal funding runs for the project runs out and for enforcing the “counterproductive incentives embedded” in the exchange’s rules.
“The state will take the blame for difficulties high-risk consumers will have in getting coverage, for people dropped from employer coverage onto the exchange and for the healthy who are forced to buy overpriced insurance,” Garen writes. “Better to leave the federal government with the expense and headache of its own creation.”
Read the policy brief here.
For more information, please contact Jim Waters at 270-782-2140 or jwaters@freedomkentucky.com
‘Medicaid managed care blues’
March 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment
A recent article about Medicaid managed care in Kentucky features quotes and research by Bluegrass Institute scholar Dr. John Garen.
The article titled “Medicaid Managed Care Blues in the Bluegrass State” by Kenneth Artz is a great overview of the situation that Kentucky now faces. It is no secret that Kentucky’s Medicaid program faces significant challenges. The most notable problem is the fact that without serious reforms, the current program is simply not sustainable.
John Garen, an economics professor at the University of Kentucky and a Bluegrass Institute adjunct scholar, says that the state’s Medicaid program was unsustainable regardless of the shift to managed care.
“It’s not unlike Medicaid in other states,” said Garen. “Prices are increasing just as the numbers of eligible folks going onto the rolls are increasing. It’s been growing just a few percentage points every year, but it all adds up. With the ObamaCare mandate expected to force more companies to no longer offer employee health insurance, even more are expected to join Medicaid. This will further increase costs.
“All of this adds up to Medicaid expenditures increasing faster than economic growth,” Garen said.
Garen authored “An Unsustainable Path: The Past and Future of Kentucky Medicaid” which made numerous recommendations about how the stat’s Medicaid program could be turned around.
There’s no time to waste as this problem becomes more serious by the day!
Video: Policy impact seminar panel discussion
February 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This is the panel discussion from a recent event hosted by the Bluegrass Institute and the Mercatus Center. The panel was comprised of Bluegrass Institute president Jim Waters, Matthew Mitchell and Maurice McTigue of the Mercatus Center, and Dr. John Garen, professor of economics at the University of Kentucky.
Video: Economist John Garen on Kentucky Medicaid spending
February 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Last week, The Bluegrass Institute was fortunate enough to be able to co-host an event with the Mercatus Center which included several distinquished speakers.
University of Kentucky economist Dr. John Garen spoke about the rising costs associated with Kentucky’s medicaid policies. Garen is the author of An Unsustainable Path: The Past and Future of Kentucky Medicaid Spending, a Bluegrass Institute report released in 2011.
You can view the presentation slides that accompany this video here.
Dr. John Garen’s Herald-Leader Medicaid op-ed
July 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Author of “An Unsustainable Path: The Past and Future of Kentucky Medicaid Spending” and Bluegrass Institute adjunct scholar Dr. John Garen published an op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader. The piece discusses the need for Medicaid Reform. You can read the op-ed here.
You can also read/download the full text of “An Unsustainable Path” for more information about Kentucky’s Medicaid plight.
John Garen discusses Medicaid on ‘Coffee and Markets’
July 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
John Garen, professor of economics and Bluegrass Institute adjunct scholar, was interviewed on the Coffee and Markets podcasts about Kentucky’s Medicaid battle. Listen to the podcast here. Below the podcast you can also read a transcript of the interview.
This interview comes on the heels of the release of “An Unsustainable Path: The Past and Future of Kentucky Medicaid Spending“.
