What Role Does Healthcare Policy Play in Coronavirus Crisis?

April 17, 2020

How is healthcare policy affecting the federal and state response to the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis? Goldwater Institute Director of Healthcare Policy Naomi Lopez was recently interviewed by Beacon Center of Tennessee Director of Policy and Research Ron Shultis to discuss this important question.

Lopez works full-time at the Goldwater Institute, but she also serves as an adjunct scholar for allied liberty organizations including the Beacon Center, where she holds the title of senior fellow for healthcare reform and routinely provides them with advice and guidance of healthcare policy issues.

In this Beacon Center interview, Lopez briefly discusses what led her to focus on healthcare policy and why it is important. She also discusses the supply-side issues and reforms that are being used to deregulate healthcare in order to increase healthcare access and affordability, as well as the pathways to achieve these changes such as federal flexibilities and governors’ executive orders. She also discusses why telehealth and telemedicine are here to stay and what the Right to Try movement means today for federal FDA policy and medical innovation.

She and Shultis also discuss why Medicaid expansion, which is being promoted by some as a way to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, is so detrimental to the most vulnerable who rely on the program for care.

You can watch the video of this interview above.