March 23, 2012
Video: The Whole Truth (About Obamacare from AmericanDoctors4Truth.org)Charts: ObamaCare In 5 Pictures--ObamaCare & Things the Federal Government Can’t Do – The left circle lists things ObamaCare does. The right circle lists things the federal government cannot do. The individual mandate? Both circles.
March 15, 2012
CBO: 4 million to lose employer insurance by 2016--White House Dossier A new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office states that by 2016, Obamacare will result in 4 million people fewer people getting health insurance coverage from their employers. The estimate is a vast increase from the CBO prediction just a year ago that 1 million would no longer obtain coverage from their employers. The estimate is a vast increase from the CBO prediction just a year ago that 1 million would no longer obtain coverage from their employers. And it raises substantial questions about the veracity of one of Obama’s key pledges in selling the health care law — that everyone who wants to keep their current health insurance plan and doctor could do it.
New CBO health law estimate shows much higher spending past first 10 years
Side Effects: Doctors Fear Obamacare--The American public doesn’t support Obamacare, and a new survey shows that doctors have an even worse opinion. No one has a better grasp on the state of the health care system than physicians, and according to the Doctors Company survey, 60 percent of them believe that Obamacare will have a negative impact on overall patient care. This survey is consistent with the findings of another doctor survey taken in October 2010, which also showed doctors’ lack of confidence in Obamacare. The survey was conducted to unveil physicians’ concerns about health care reform. The Doctors Company, which is the largest insurer of physician and surgeon medical liability in the nation, received more than 5,000 surveys, including all specialties and every region in the country. The results weren’t good for the President’s signature piece of legislation.
March 8, 2012: The 10 Terrible Provisions of Obamacare You May Not Have Heard Of Obamacare includes such a variety and volume of negative policies that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Here is a list of 10 terrible provisions that every American should be aware of:
1. It increases taxes on families earning over $250,000. [2] In 2013, the employee portion of the Medicare payroll tax will increase from 1.45 percent to 2.35 percent for families earning $250,000 or more and individuals earning $200,000 or more. The income threshold is not indexed for inflation, so more and more middle-income families will be hit by the tax hike as time goes on.
2. It adds a new tax to investment income. [2] The increased payroll tax rate is also applied to high-earners’ investment income for the first time beginning in 2013. It will hit capital gains, dividends, rents, and royalties, discouraging investment and harming economic growth.
3. It puts new limitations on those with HSAs and FSAs. [3] Starting in 2012, Obamacare restricts the products that consumers may purchase with a Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Savings Account (FSA)—such as over-the-counter medications—and increases the penalty for such non-qualified uses of HSAs. It also limits the amount taxpayers may deposit into an FSA to $2,500 a year in 2013.
CONTINUED: January 25, 2012: Obamacare: Obama Ends Medicare As We Know It FACTSHEET From the Heritage Foundation
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/03/07/the-10-terrible-provisions-of-obamacare-you-may-not-have-heard-of/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Heritage%2BHotsheet
JANUARY 25, 2012: ObamaCare Ups Premiums $1300
We Need Medicare Reform, but Not Obamacare
Obamacare Ends Traditional Medicare, but the Wrong Way: Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the health law protects Medicare. The truth: Obamacare makes massive changes to the program. Obamacare contains more than 160 provisions for Medicare that increase government’s control over the delivery of care, hit doctors with unsustainable payment cuts, and leave taxpayers with higher deficits.
Obamacare Continues an Outdated Model for Reform: Obamacare expands central planning and tightens price controls on providers. These recycled mechanisms have yet to show any success in driving down costs without harming patients’ access and quality of care. Even the program’s chief accountant says many Medicare providers cannot survive the cuts.
Obamacare Undermines the Doctor–Patient Relationship: On top of the severe payment cuts facing physicians that will threaten seniors’ access, the law weakens the doctor–patient relationship by linking payment not to patient outcomes but to adherence to government protocol.
FOR MUCH MORE CLICK HERE!
A cheery op-ed in a recent Washington Post by Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is titled, “The Affordable Care Act: helping Americans curb health-care costs.”She claims that ObamaCare is helping to lower health costs “in three ways: by increasing insurance-market competition, assisting those who can’t afford coverage, and tackling the underlying cost of medical care.”
The law is doing exactly the opposite. The president repeatedly promised the American people he would cut a typical family’s premium $2,500 a year before the end of his first term. But costs are rising now even faster than before the law was enacted in March 2010.
A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that premiums for a family policy topped $15,000 a year in 2011, increasing an average of $1,300 in the last year — three times faster than the year before.
The many ObamaCare mandates to come will raise premiums even further. Health insurance is consuming a bigger share of employer budgets, pre-empting pay raises and pushing higher costs onto employees, the Kaiser survey found.
CONTINUED: http://www.conservative.org/acuf/issue-196/issue196news3
JANUARY 24, 2012: No Death Panels? They Are Here Now. When critics of Obamacare warned of death panels, the government dismissed all such talk as scaremongering. There will never be such panels. You have the government’s word. Oh yeah? Tell it to this mother.
I am going to try and tell you what happened to us on January 10, 2012, in the conference room in the Nephrology department at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
We arrived for our regular Nephrology visit with Amelia’s doctor who has seen her for the last three years. She examines Amelia and sends us for labs. I ask about the transplant and she says we have about six months to a year until she needs one. She tells us she reserved the conference room and when we get back from labs, we can meet with the transplant team and he can tell us about the transplant process.JANUARY 18, 2012: Obamacare implementation continues to grind forward--
Obamacare is likely to find its way into the national debate continuously throughout 2012 as the Supreme Court takes the constitutionality of the law up, while the regulatory mechanisms for enforcing the law continue to be put into place.
Americans for Limited Government Foundation has put together some key upcoming dates when actions will occur that impact American’s healthcare. Some will get major news media coverage, others will be ignored in the legacy media. But all of these dates represent transformative changes that will change the way the government is involved in healthcare forever.
DECEMBER 30, 2011: AAPS News January 2012 - ObamaCare: More Power Means More Corruption -- Once big government reaches a critical mass, it may be impossible to turn back. It picks the winners and the losers. The elite in both parties have accepted the premises of the welfare state, central planning, and fiat currency—and in medicine, third-party payment. Being contrary to the laws of economics (human nature), these ideas are historical losers, leading always and everywhere to corruption, oppression, poverty, and death.
Beware of the “repeal and replace” mantra—the result might simply be a reshuffling of special interest groups, the temporary winners, while Americans lose their Republic.
Craig Cantoni suggests a frightening analogy: “Unfortunately, voters are now like capos in a Mafia family. Knowing that the other party, or family, is headed by a ruthless don, they feel they have no choice but to elect an even more ruthless don to protect their family from being plundered by the other family.” This has been the pattern throughout history, he notes, as republics “morphed into empires and then into theft rings.”
Republican and Industry Complicity
Republicans and Democrats, or industry (including the AMA) and government may do a lot of mutual finger-pointing, but the current system is based on bipartisan legislation and on public-private partnerships (a.k.a. fascism). These include the private fiscal intermediaries that administer the Medicare program, and the managed-care companies that use Medicaid as a cash cow.
The sustained growth rate (SGR), the prime target of multi-million dollar AMA lobbying efforts, is from a bipartisan (Clinton-Gingrich) deal. The Texas Medical Association, in ads reminiscent of Al Gore’s scary cartoons with greenhouse gas villains beating up on poor Mr. Sun, feature a little girl’s voice worrying about how Big Bad SGR Man is going to hurt her grandma (http://tinyurl.com/8x5ez4n). In the background we see mathematical formulas and the weird equation “beets + clock = wagon,” reminiscent of the logic behind the resource-based relative value scale (RB-RVS), implemented through AMA’s lucrative coding monopoly and secretive “RUC” committee.
Leading Republican Presidential contenders Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are trying to distance themselves from ObamaCare, but both are big-idea, big-government men (“visionaries”) and have some inconvenient history. CONTINUED.
DECEMBER 22, 2011: A List of Obamacare Abominations--President Obama says his health care “reform” will be good for business. Business has learned the truth. Three successful businessmen explained to me how Obamacare is a reason that unemployment stays high. Its length and complexity make businessmen wary of expanding. Mike Whalen, CEO of Heart of America Group, which runs hotels and restaurants, said that when he asked his company’s health insurance experts to summarize the impact of Obamacare, “the three of them kind of looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve gone to seminar after seminar, and, Mike, we can’t tell you.’ I think that just kind of sums up the uncertainty.” Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, added that Obamacare makes it impossible to achieve even basic certainty about future personnel costs: “If I was trying to get you to fund a new business I had started and you asked me what my payroll was going to be three years from now per employee, if I went to the deepest specialist in the industry, he can’t tell me what it’s actually going to cost, let alone what I’m going to be responsible for.”
DECEMBER 7, 2011: Obamacare’s MLR ‘Bomb’ Will Create Private Insurance Monopolies--My Forbes colleague Rick Ungar has caused a stir by arguing that medical loss ratio regulations contained in Obamacare have put us “on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it.” Rick’s glee at this alleged development is interesting. However, the bottom line is that Obamacare’s MLR regulations won’t deliver us a utopia of government-run single-payer health care. Instead, they will usher in a new era of private insurance monopolies and significantly drive up the cost of health insurance, things that neither liberals nor conservatives should cheer.
What is a medical loss ratio? Investors in managed care stocks have long used medical loss ratios, or MLRs to understand the economic health of insurers. Insurers collect premiums from their beneficiaries, and then spend money paying out claims for health care expenses on behalf of those beneficiaries. The medical loss ratio is the percentage of premiums paid out in health expenses. So, if an insurer has had a bad year, in which expenses were greater than premiums collected, MLR can be higher than 100 percent. On average, depending on the type of insurance, MLRs are in the range of 70 to 85 percent.SEPTEMBER 23, 2011: Morning Bell
Next up for implosion? The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, otherwise known as the “CLASS Act,” which creates a government-run long term care insurance program too costly to sustain. At a time when entitlement programs in America have spun out of control, liberal proponents of Obamacare were pushing a new one that had no hope of staying afloat. Now, they are trying hide the fact that they were wrong as another bungling layer of Obamacare is exposed.
The per person Medicare insurance premium will increase from the present monthly fee of $96.40, rising to: $104.20 in 2012; $120.20 in 2013; And $247.00 in 2014. These are provisions incorporated in the Obamacare legislation, purposely delayed so as not to 'confuse' the 2012 re-election campaigns. Send this to all seniors that you know, so they will know who's throwing them under the bus. REMEMBER THIS IN NOVEMBER 2012 & VOTE ACCORDINGLY.
AUGUST 8, 2011: Obamacare Limits Children’s Access to Care--Last Wednesday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee released a grim report showing a reduction in the availability of child-only policies for parents looking to purchase health insurance for their children. They findings show that, “Of the 50 states, 17 reported that there are currently no carriers selling child-only health plans to new enrollees. Thirty-nine states indicated at least one insurance carrier exited the child-only market following enactment of the new health care laws.” AUGUST 8, 2011: Researchers: Obamacare cost estimates hide up to $50 billion per year- Federal payments required by President Barack Obama’s health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year because official budget forecasts ignore the cost of insuring many employees’ spouses and children, according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars during the first ten years of the new health care law’s implementation.
AUGUST 5, 2011: CATO INSTITUTE: The Individual Mandate--An Unprecedented Expansion of Federal Power-- *Before I go further, let me explain that I use the term "Obamacare" simply because people colloquially refer to it that way — probably because it's easier to say than "PPACA," "Affordable Care Act," or any other more cognate. While thought in some quarters to be pejorative, I've never understood how that is (unless said with a sneer, but by that standard anything can be pejorative). Even the leading academic supporters of Obamacare's constitutionality, such as Yale law professors Akhil Amar and Jack Balkin, use the term, as did Time magazine's managing editor Richard Stengel in his recent cover story about the Constitution. The one semi-accurate criticism I've heard is that the law was mostly written by Congress, not the White House (for which the president got plenty of heat from the left). But that just means it would be better to call it Pelosi-Reid-care, which presumably is no more or less pejorative. In any event, that ship has sailed. CONTINUED:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13512
July 21, 2011: The Future of Private Health Plans under Health Reform
The new health reform law creates incentives for state and federal politicians and bureaucrats to exert direct control over the premiums of health plans. However, because health plans largely pass through costs from medical providers, artificially limiting increases in premiums cannot actually result in lower health costs. Instead, it results in reduced access to care and threatens the solvency of health plans, says John R. Graham, director of health care studies at the Pacific Research Institute.
The health reform law also introduces at least five critical uncertainties that make it difficult to estimate future medical costs accurately, and suggest that the reform law will be much more disruptive to health insurance than the Obama administration has advertised:July 21, 2011: Healthcare law may leave families with high insurance costs -- A major provision of the healthcare reform law designed to prevent businesses from dropping coverage for their workers could inadvertently leave families without access to subsidized health insurance.The problem is a huge headache for the Obama administration and Democrats, because it could leave families unable to buy affordable health insurance when the healthcare law requires that everyone be insured starting in 2014. http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/172765-healthcare-law-may-leave-families-with-high-insurance-costs
- It encourages the establishment of so-called Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). ACOs will lead to consolidation and cartelization of medical providers, thereby increasing medical costs more than anticipated.
- Health plans must offer policies designed on a standard health plan that offers government-approved benefits. They can vary their offerings only by how much of the actuarial value of the policy is indemnified by the health plan. Even expert actuaries cannot yet agree on the actuarial value of the policy.
- The law anticipates that some Americans will receive coverage through Health Benefits Exchanges. Independent analyses, however, conclude that many millions more will be enrolled in exchanges than the federal government anticipates.
- The health reform law imposes federal control over an accounting calculation called the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR), which equals the proportion of premium that is spent on medical costs. However, there is no evidence that individuals or groups choosing health plans believe the MLR is important.
- The law, which purports to maintain a significant role for private health plans, is not the desired end-state of many of its proponents. Many proponents would prefer a so-called "single payer" government monopoly health system. It is reasonable to anticipate that as the reform law fails, these politicians will seek to shift blame and liability to the private health plans, in order to minimize their role and continue progress towards this final goal.
