John C. Goodman

Beginning in 2015, Goodman helped House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) develop a replacement plan for Obamacare. The plan calls for a universal tax credit for health insurance, personal and portable health insurance for employees and a flexible Roth HSA. In a post at the Health Affairs Blog, Sessions, Cassidy and Goodman argue that their plan is not only better than Obamacare, it would create universal coverage.

In Priceless (2013), Goodman's approach to health economics was even more radical. He portrayed the health care system as a complex system that cannot be understood with conventional economic tools such as supply and demand curves. In doing so, he rejected the approach of every major health economics textbook on the market. Even so, the book won praise from people in and out of government and across the political spectrum—including Peter Orszag, who was chief economist for President Barack Obama at the time.

In his 2012 book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, Goodman asserts that empowering both patients and caregivers to control healthcare decisions produces greater patient satisfaction at substantially lower costs. The book emphasizes the importance that patients, payers, and providers each operate according to economic incentives that encourage them consider both the costs and benefits of care, innovate to improve outcomes and lower costs, and provide subsidies that do not arbitrarily benefit one group (like workers at companies that provide insurance) at the expense of other groups (like workers at companies that do not).

One of Goodman's reform ideas is to replace all the ways government currently subsidizes health insurance through tax and spending programs with a universal, refundable tax credit—essentially giving every citizen a fixed number of dollars for health insurance. That idea was elaborated with Mark Pauly in Health Affairs and it became the core health insurance plan endorsed by John McCain in his presidential run against Barack Obama in 2008. The legislative version of the McCain approach was introduced by Tom Coburn and Richard Burr in the Senate and Paul Ryan and Devon Nunes in the House of Representatives.

Goodman's most important policy success has been the adoption of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). They allow people to manage some of their own health care dollars in tax-free accounts. The idea was first introduced to the public policy community in Patient Power, but HSAs were initially opposed by every major health and business lobby. For that reason, they did not become available to most Americans until 12 years later—in 2004. As of 2016, 40 million American families had HSAs. A majority of large employers now offer high-deductible health plans, with savings accounts attached, to their employees and these types of plans are the fastest growing product in the health insurance marketplace.

In 1994, Hillary Clinton failed in a major effort to reform the health care system. In his book Whitewash: What the Media Won’t Tell You About Hillary Clinton, Brent Bozell says that Goodman was one of three people who were most responsible for the defeat of Hillary Care. (The other two were Sen. Phil Gramm and commentator Bill Kristol.)

With Richard Rahn, chief economist for the US Chamber of Commerce, Goodman produced five pro-growth tax ideas that became the tax policy core of the 1994 Contract with America. These ideas included the Roth IRA and allowing seniors to keep working beyond the retirement age without losing their Social Security benefits—ideas that later became law.

Goodman's interest in health economics began with his study of the British National Health Service. It was the first time anyone had used public choice theory to explain all the major features of British medicine. He followed with a study of the 150-year history of the suppression of markets in health care at the urging of the American Medical Association. Regulation of who could practice medicine, regulation of medical schools, regulation of hospitals and regulation of health insurance all followed the AMA agenda, according to the study. In 1992, Goodman wrote Patient Power with Gerald Musgrave. The book shaped right-of-center thinking on health policy—from Newt Gingrich to Paul Ryan—for many years. Its thesis: patients should be empowered in the medical marketplace the way consumers are empowered in other markets. This ran counter to the thinking in virtually all health policy circles, however. The dominant view at the time was adherence to managed care, under which decisions are made by experts, typically following formal practice guidelines.

Goodman appeared about two dozen times as a guest on William F. Buckley's PBS Firing Line program in the 1990s. About a half dozen of these were two-hour debates that pitted Goodman, Buckley and two colleagues against four opponents. They covered such topics as the flat tax, school vouchers, Social Security privatization, Health Savings Accounts and privatizing the welfare state. This was the first time these ideas had ever been aired on national television.

With his colleague Phil Porter, Goodman published three articles extending the theory to the fields of regulation, the production of public goods, and welfare economics. Their article on regulation won the prestigious Duncan Black Prize awarded by the Public Choice Society in 1989.

In 1989, a series of NCPA studies of taxes on the elderly led to the repeal of the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, an attempt to extend drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries. This was the first repeal of a major federal welfare program in more than 100 years. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, the editors of The Wall Street Journal and many others credited Goodman and his coauthors with the change, citing NCPA studies and its communications efforts as the primary reasons for the policy reversal.

In 1983, he founded the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a think tank that was the source of such policy ideas as Health Savings Accounts, Roth IRAs, automatic employer enrollment in 401(k) plans and allowing seniors to continue working without penalty after they begin receiving Social Security benefits.

Goodman received a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1977 and has taught and done research at Columbia, Stanford, Dartmouth, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Dallas.

John C. Goodman (born 22 May 1946) is president and CEO of the Goodman institute for Public Policy Research, a think tank focused on public policy issues. He was the founding chief executive of the National Center for Policy Analysis, which operated from 1982 to 2017. He is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute. The Wall Street Journal and The National Journal have called Goodman the "father of Health Savings Accounts."

Born on May 22, 1946, Goodman grew up in Waco, Texas. In high school, he won several statewide tournaments. This experience served him later in life when he became a TV debating partner of conservative polemicist William F. Buckley.