Obamacare’s Stealth Ambush of Senior Citizens David Freddoso The Washington Examiner, 8/18/10
Even Obamacare’s biggest cheerleaders won’t be able to ignore Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster forever. Based on current law, Foster says, seniors who rely on Medicare will replace Medicaid recipients at the bottom of the health care ladder as early as 2019, five years after the individual mandate kicks in. That’s when the fees Medicare pays to providers will be slashed below Medicaid rates, which are already well below market prices. Read more...
Survey: Big Employers Expect 2011 Health Cost Hike Tom Murphy Associated Press, 8/18/10
Large employers expect their health care benefit costs to rise 8.9 percent next year, and more will ask their employees to make a bigger contribution, according to a survey from the National Business Group on Health. The nonprofit, which works with big companies on health care costs, said Wednesday their members tell them they expect costs to rise more than the 7 percent increase they expected on average for this year. A total of 63 percent of employers who responded said they planned to increase the percentage employees contribute to their premiums. That's up from 57 percent last year. More employers also say they plan to raise the annual maximum amount employees pay for health care costs. Read more...
Overhaul Fails to Boost 'Health Care Confidence' Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Trevor Tompson Associated Press, 8/18/10
President Barack Obama's health overhaul hasn't helped Americans feel any more secure about their own medical care, according to a survey to be released Thursday by leading private researchers. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said consumer confidence spiked in April after Obama signed landmark legislation to expand coverage and start trying to control costs. But confidence levels have since fallen back to what they were last year at the beginning of an epic congressional debate. It's another sign of ambivalence over Obama's historic accomplishment as Democrats campaign to preserve their congressional majorities in the midterm elections. The ho-hum attitude may be due to the fact that the law's major benefits don't take effect until 2014, and most people's views are shaped by current experiences. Read more...
The Avastin Mugging Wall Street Journal Op-ed, 8/18/10
If there's an American precedent for the medical central planning of ObamaCare, it's the Food and Drug Administration. Witness a looming FDA ruling that may deplete the drug arsenal for terminally ill cancer patients. Last month, an FDA advisory board recommended withdrawing government approval of Avastin as a treatment for advanced breast cancer. The decision betrays a bias that puts costs above treatment, and unless the FDA leadership overrules its own experts, the 40,000 women killed by breast cancer each year will be denied an important clinical option. Read more...
Bracing for ObamaCare: Shirley Svorny on the Economics of Healthcare Regulation
Free to Choose Medicine Millions of people suffer needlessly every year from painful medical conditions and thousands die prematurely even though there are drugs that could help them. Free To Choose Medicine, by Bartley J. Madden, looks at why this tragedy occurs and what can be
done to end it. Order this book published by the Heartland Institute.
Medicare: Read the disclaimer Scott Burns The Houston Chronicle, 8/17/10
If the reports from the Trustees for Social Security and Medicare are accurate, our collective unfunded obligations shrank by a whopping $15.56 trillion when the reports were released on Aug. 5. The decrease is nearly twice as large as the entire $8.6 trillion in public federal debt outstanding. It's also larger than the $13.24 trillion in total federal debt when all governmental holdings, such as the Social Security trust fund, are considered. Read more...
Health Panel Gets McDonnell's Charge: Lower Costs Bob Lewis The Associated Press, 8/17/10
A new panel of corporate and professional health care heavyweights, political figures and medical policy experts was tasked Monday with devising "uniquely Virginia" ways to cut the cost of health care and improve its delivery. Chief among problems Gov. Bob McDonnell told the 24-member panel to address is Medicaid, the federal-state health services program for the needy, aged and disabled that will demand billions of dollars more each year from Virginia's budget. "The growth of Medicaid spending is unsustainable. I will not pass on a broken Medicaid system to another governor," said McDonnell, who began his nonrenewable four-year term in January. Read more...
Severability and Obamacare Ben Domenech Red State, 8/17/10
Several state legislators have reached out to me recently with questions about the nature of severability and Obamacare. Since some Redstaters seem to have questions as well, I thought I’d explain a bit about what this means. Most laws of large size and scope have something called a “severability clause” attached to them. Essentially, this means that if one part of a piece of large legislation is ruled unconstitutional by a court, that unconstitutional portion is “severed” from the rest of the bill — the ruling doesn’t stop the rest of the law from being enforced. The trouble for Obamacare is that it doesn’t have a severability clause. Read more...
Side Effects: Obamacare Puts States Between a Rock and a Hard Place Kathryn Nix The Heritage Foundation: The Foundry, 8/17/10
Obamacare creates a host of new federal requirements billed as consumer protections. But enacting these policies falls not on the feds, but on the states. Some of these provisions were among the more popular components of Obamacare: guaranteed issue for children; letting individuals remain on their parents’ health plan up to age 26; requiring insurers to cover federally-defined preventive services, etc. The goals behind these mandates are worthy. But they could be achieved in better ways. The approach taken here is virtually guaranteed to accelerate insurance costs. Ironically, Obamacare also requires states to review “unreasonable” rate increases. Read more...
