Cash-Poor Governments Ditching Public Hospitals Suzanne Sataline The Wall Street Journal, 8/29/10
Faced with mounting debt and looming costs from the new federal health-care law, many local governments are leaving the hospital business, shedding public facilities that can be the caregiver of last resort. A patient and care giver at Central Peninsula Hospital in Soldotna, Alaska, where the government is considering a partnership with the for-profit LHP Hospital Group of Texas. Officials in Lauderdale County, Ala., this spring opted to transfer their 91-year-old Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital and other properties to a for-profit company after struggling to satisfy an angry bond insurer. "We were next to knocking on bankruptcy's door,' said Rhea Fulmer, a Lauderdale County commissioner who approved the deal with RegionalCare Hospital Partners, of Brentwood, Tenn, but with trepidation. She said the county had no guarantee the company would improve care in the decades to come. "Time will tell.' Read more...
Explaining Colorado Amendment 63: Right to Health Care Choice Brian Schwartz PatientPowerNow.com, 8/10/10
Barring unforeseen obstacles, The Colorado Right to Health Care Choice Initiative (Colorado Amendment 63) will be among the ballot measures Colorado voters can vote on in this November’s election -- in addition to others in Colorado politics. Some people are bound to misunderstand what the amendment would do, and not do, as Representative Diana DeGette illustrated with her statement last week. For a better understanding, I recommend first reading the the text of Colorado Right to Health Care Choice initiative (less than 300 words). Then I recommend listening to Independence Institute’s Director of Operations Mike Krause and II President Jon Caldara discuss the Colorado Right to Health Care Choice Initiative. Read more...
Consumer Power: 5 Lessons from Utah’s Heath Care Reform Gregg Girvan The Heritage Foundation, 8/19/10
Obamacare is on the march, and state policymakers must decide by 2014 how they will respond to this encroachment on states’ rights to control their own health insurance markets. The state of Utah has been on the reform path since 2005. With its system of defined contributions (as opposed to the standard defined benefits), a functioning health insurance exchange, and appropriate risk-adjustment mechanisms, Utah has given its workers the freedom to choose among many health plans with different levels of benefits, instead of remaining tied to the one-size-fits-all approach dictated by Washington. The Heritage Foundation has discerned five distinct lessons that the other 49 states can learn from Utah’s experience. The time for learning—and for action—is now. 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...
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...
Who in Massachusetts Doesn’t Have Health Insurance? Katherine Hobson Wall Street Journal, 8/17/10
Massachusetts has almost-universal health coverage — just 4.1% of its residents went without insurance in 2008. That’s way better than any other state, in terms of access. (The program, however, has been struggling with how to pay for all this expanded access, but that’s another post for another day.) Researchers from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health Access Reform Evaluation program and the Urban Institute wanted to know more about the uninsured population in the state, so they analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Their findings appear in a research brief released today. Read more...
Are Bigger Health-care Networks Better or Just Creating a Monopoly? Alec MacGillis The Washington Post, 8/16/10
Railroads put this city on the map, but the king of the domain is now health care -- or rather, the Carilion Clinic. For health-care networks, is bigger always better? Carilion owns the two hospitals in town and six others in the region, employs 550 doctors and has set off a bitter local debate: Is its dominance a new model for health care or a blatant attempt to corner the market? Carilion says it represents an ideal envisioned by the nation's new health-care law: a network that increases efficiency by bringing more doctors and hospitals onto one team, integrating care from the doctor's office to the operating room. The name for such networks, which the new law strongly promotes with pilot programs, is accountable care organizations, or ACOs -- providers joining together to be "accountable" for the total care of patients, with incentives from insurers to keep people healthy and costs down. Read more...
Mass. Mess: ObamaCare's Ugly Future Sally Pipes The New York Post, 8/16/10
“Law Will Extend Medicare Fund, Report Says,” was the New York Times headline. “Medicare Funds to Last 12 Years Longer Than Earlier Forecast, Report Says,” was the similar take of the Washington Post. Those two stories were upbeat summaries of what the latest report on Medicare’s long-term financial outlook supposedly revealed. But was that really the most newsworthy headline here? How about the fact that the person who compiled all of the data for this report, and knows its contents better than anyone else, utterly repudiated its findings? That’s right. Richard Foster, the chief actuary of the Medicare program and the man responsible for overseeing the production of the data which forms the basis of this annual report’s forecast, has advised the public — in his official “Statement of Actuarial Opinion” printed at the end of the trustees’ report — not to believe any of the modestly rosy conclusions contained within it. Read more...
Health Care Freedom Comes to Colorado Steven Moore The Wall Street Journal, 8/14/10
Add Colorado to the list of states that are saying to ObamaCare: not here, thank you. Last week the state's Secretary of State certified that the Colorado Health Care Freedom Act had qualified for the November ballot. More than 130,000 Coloradoans signed petitions seeking to exempt themselves from major portions of federal health reform signed by President Obama in March. Jon Caldara, the initiative's sponsor and president of the conservative Independence Institute, said the measure would make Colorado "a health care sanctuary state." If approved in November, citizens would be exempt from the mandate requiring them to buy health insurance or pay a penalty. They'll also be immune from government forcing them into a public or private health care plan against their will. Read more...
