Today is the six-month anniversary of the passage of President Obama’s signature legislation, what has come to be known as ObamaCare.  The White House is feting this semi-anniversary, but few Americans are in a mood to join the celebration.

Obama, who can be thin-skinned when people disagree with him, was downright irritated when the early polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed his health care “reform” bill.  On April 1, he criticized the polls as premature, saying “So before we find out if people like health care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place.  Just a thought.”

The problem with his argument is that the more Americans find out what is actually in this monstrosity of a bill, the less they like it.  Polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports show that 55 percent of the public supported the repeal of ObamaCare on March 25, just two days after its passage.  Today, a half-year later, the number of those favoring repeal has grown to 61 percent.

I am not one to call the President a liar.  I have too much respect for the office held by giants like George Washington and Ronald Reagan for that.  But I do believe that much of what Obama has said about his own health care bill is simply not true.  He claimed in Maine that people could keep their own health insurance, in Maryland that people could keep their own doctors.  In Washington, DC, he promised that his plan would cut costs but would not lead to the rationing of care.  He has consistently claimed that it would not fund abortions, and that its “end-of-life visits” would not lead to euthanasia.

(more…)

Aside from breaking her word to the AMA and physicians across the country, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has effectively demolished doctor reimbursements for most of the healthcare industry.  The 21.2% Medicare fee schedule cut has taken effect, but what most do not realize is that the Medicare fee schedule is the gold standard for provider reimbursement fee schedules across the nation.

Essentially, where Medicare goes, insurers follow for the guidelines in covered services and baseline physician fee schedules for private payers as well as worker’s compensation and automobile insurance companies in most states, as well as Medicaid and Medicare itself.

What Pelosi has effectively done is saved the insurance companies who use the Medicare fee schedule millions of dollars of payouts to physicians on their claims–regardless if the patient is a Medicare patient.  I’m not seeing the insurance lobby out there right now, are you?  However, on the provider side, the doctor’s lobby groups are outraged at Pelosi’s failure and the damage this inaction will cause physicians–especially private–and force them to layoff employees to make up for the loss in reimbursements to cover their enormous monthly overhead costs.

(more…)

President Obama’s nomination of Donald Berwick as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is a gathering far less attention than a certain other nominee — but it will be getting more attention in the weeks to come, given his particularly radical agenda when it comes to health policy — an agenda that includes support for massive government rationing and his support of using health care bureaucracy to redistribute wealth.

Berwick is a leading Ivy League academic and technocrat – he’s graduated from Harvard not once, but three times – and is the founder of a Cambridge-based think-tank, the Institute for Health Care Improvement. Yet the job of running CMS is hardly the same as running a small think tank or talking in broad terms about the nature of health care – CMS is essentially the world’s second largest insurance company after the United Kingdom’s NHS, covering over 98 million people and overseeing roughly $800 billion annually in taxpayer-funded health care expenditures.

Berwick is a great fan of the NHS, and worked as a consultant on the project under Tony Blair. Berwick will have the opportunity to apply the ideas he gained through that experience with the power of the CMS position, which means that his nomination holds massive ramifications for Medicare and Medicaid recipients, hospitals and doctors and, under Obama’s law, all Americans.

Berwick: Health Care Must Redistribute Wealth

Key to understanding Berwick’s views on the NHS is a speech he gave as part of a presentation offered two years ago, in which he shared his thoughts on the NHS and health care generally. You can watch the full speech here. The full video shows several lines from Berwick that are notable. He decries private sector solutions to health care problems, dismissing the “invisible hand of the market” as an “unaccountable system.” He also states:

“I am romantic about the NHS; I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”

(more…)

To achieve the goal of a universal, single-payer health system, the White House must secure the power it needs by amending the Social Security Act to transfer pivotal controls from Congress to the executive branch.  This transfer of power would ultimately give the President and the majority party, in this case the radical left Obama White House and Pelosi-Reid led progressive Democrats, the authority to frame and manipulate new policy, coverage options, and reimbursements, ultimately reshaping the future US health care system into a something unrecognizable in this country.

The deliberate setup for the White House power grab is built into the each of the health care bills and, if they fail, little-known twin bills called “MedPAC Reform of 2009” are waiting in the wings.  The bills, S.B. 1110 and H.R. 2718, craftily amend the Social Security Act and transfer the Medicare guideline and rule setting processes, from the legislative branch to the executive branch.  These bills offer cover to one another in case one doesn’t pass the House or Senate, respectively.  Remember, Democrats need to gain executive branch authority by amending the Social Security Act over Medicare regulations and physician fee schedules to transform the health care system in a single-payer, socialized system.

More importantly, Medicare’s regulations and physician fee schedules are the keystone to developing payer systems and reimbursement models across the entire health care industry.  And where Medicare goes, insurers follow.

To underscore the far-reaching power, a bulk of the states already reference or utilize the Medicare guidelines and fee schedules in determining policy, coverage, and payment, which impacts certain state-specific plans, including, but not limited to, self-funded plans, automobile insurance payers, and state workers’ compensation funds and plans – affecting even Big Labor.   For the executive branch to have such authority over Medicare regulations with little oversight is alarming.  This raises further issues of the powerful impact these federal mandates could potentially have on the states in stripping them of their own management of their respective insurance industries.

(more…)

Richard Foster, Chief Actuary for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, released this week to several Congressional offices a financial analysis of HR 3200, the House version of ObamaCare. He reached some inconvenient conclusions for President Obama and Congressional Leadership:

-“Total national health expenditures under this bill would increase by an estimated 2.7 percent in 2019…”

 -“The additional demand for health services could be difficult to meet initially with existing health provider resources and could lead to price increases, cost-shifting, and/or changes in providers’ willingness to treat patients with low-reimbursement health coverage.”

-More than half of the expansion in coverage (18 million out of 34 million) would be from increased Medicaid coverage.

-12 million people would lose employer-sponsored coverage.

-The productivity adjustments to Medicare are “unrealistic” and providers “might end their participation” because the cuts would make serving Medicare beneficiaries unprofitable.

-Medicare Advantage enrollment would decrease by 64 percent (from a projected level of 13.2 million to 4.7 million under the proposal).

As of today, HHS still hadn’t published the analysis on their website, even though it was written by its own staff. We have a feeling it may never find a home there. So, we’ve brought it to you directly. Full financial analysis below.  

CMS OACT – Memo on Financial Impact of H R 3200 09-10-21 –