You Get Medicare and You Get Medicare! Everyone Gets Medicare!

Adam E. Block, PhD is currently an Assistant Professor of Public Health at the School of Health Sciences and Practice at New York Medical College. He is a health economist with deep experience in the hospital, health plan and government sectors. His research is focused on how individuals make decisions in health care markets including patient choice of hospitals, physicians and insurance plans. 

We discuss the new push for “Medicare for all.”  First, we discuss what Medicare is, what it covers and doesn’t cover, then get into House Bill 1384, the Medicare for all act of 2019.  We discuss why this could be financially problematic for physicians and lead to a physician shortage for patients.  Ultimately, we discuss that for political reasons, we really don’t need to worry about this on a national level, but it could happen on a state level.

Prior to joining New York Medical College in 2017, he worked developing contracting models for value-based purchasing for a major hospital system and has worked extensively performing financial analysis and evaluation of medical management programs for a large Medicaid managed care plan.

Before that, Dr. Block spent several years developing the legislation on the Affordable Care Act as an economist at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and subsequently wrote regulations and regulatory impact analyses for key parts of the Affordable Care Act as Division Director of Health Plan Policy in the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at CMS.  In July, 2018 Dr. Block founded Charm Economics, LLC a translational economics consulting group.  His consulting work focuses on managed care contracting and pricing optimization of new technology and data analytics.  Dr. Block received his PhD in Health Policy from Harvard and undergraduate degree in neuroscience from Amherst College.