Fix Health Care Policy

Hysterical Attack Machine in Full Force Targeting Ryan Plan

It seems like there’s a demagoguery machine working full tilt these days to churn out scaremongering from the left over House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R–WI) 2012 budget resolution passed by the House earlier this month.

Much of it focuses on Ryan’s proposal to provide premium support to Medicare enrollees, assisting them to purchase a health care plan of their choice. As Heritage’s Robert Moffit and Kathryn Nix write, it’s modeled after the plan that federal workers and employees enjoy, and it would introduce intense competition in a consumer-driven market, which has historically slowed the growth of health care costs and increased patient satisfaction.

That proposal was enough to kick the left’s demagoguery machine into high gear. Here are three examples of their heightened state of alarmist rhetoric: (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: budget proposal, demagoguery, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, Medicare, ObamaCare

Pay-for-Performance in Medicare Could Do More Harm Than Good

Liberals’ solution to rising health care costs has consistently been to take control of health care decisions away from patients and their doctors and to place it in the hands of government. Obamacare does this by allowing unelected bureaucrats to define and reward value in the Medicare program, and the President’s proposal for deficit reduction would further empower government to interfere in the practice of medicine. This is the wrong way to reduce costs, and will have severe consequences for patients, physicians, and the quality of health care in the United States.

In 2012, Obamacare will create the “Value-Based Purchasing Program” in Medicare. Using a pay-for-performance scheme, the program will reimburse hospitals and other health care providers at different rates based on how they score on performance measures chosen by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Proponents of pay-for-performance see it as a way to use financial incentives to streamline and improve the quality of health care while attempting to reduce costs. But the fact is that standardization of the practice of medicine costs patients and physicians tremendously, and evidence shows it does very little to improve health outcomes. (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: "deficit reduction", harming seniors, health care costs, Medicare, ObamaCare, pay-for-performance

Obamacare, the Supreme Court, and Recusal

Yesterday, the Supreme Court denied Virginia’s motion to bypass the appellate court and go directly to the Supreme Court in its challenge to the Obamacare litigation.

The Court’s decision not to hear the case, delivered in an order without comment, was not surprising. While the procedure exists for the Court to hear cases after a decision of the district court but before a decision of the court of appeals, it almost never does. And when I say “almost never does,” let me be clear: Playing the lottery probably has better odds.

It is black-letter law that the Supreme Court’s discretionary decision refusing to hear a case has no precedential value. All that the order signals for certain is that there were not four votes to hear the case right now. We can, however, surmise that the Court wanted to follow the ordinary course and to have the advantage of the decisions of the court(s) of appeal before they all but inevitably take the case. (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: expedited review, ObamaCare, Supreme Court

Obamacare Takes a Double Shot at the Economy and the American Dream

In a recent piece for The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Kessler, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, describes how the new health care law’s subsidy program to help low- and middle-income Americans purchase health insurance will have severe economic consequences. These will include discouraging work for qualifying individuals and other taxpayers, disrupting America’s labor markets, and reducing economic activity.

Beginning in 2014, when the new health insurance exchanges will open for individuals and small businesses, subsidies will become available for those whose income falls between 134 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL). For a family of four living in a high-cost area, earning 134 percent of the FPL ($31,389 in 2014 dollars) would qualify them to receive $22,740 in assistance. A similar family earning an income at 400 percent FPL ($93,699) would qualify to receive $14,799 in subsidies.

The problem is that as income increases, families will experience large reductions in government assistance, which will discourage striving to earn a higher income. (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: federal poverty level, health insurance exchange, ObamaCare, repeal the law

New Research: Seniors and Taxpayers Can Gain from Medicare Reforms

The big three entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—promise to increase federal spending to unprecedented and unaffordable levels in coming years. Medicare in particular represents trillions in unfunded obligations, and only bold reforms can restore long-term sustainability to the program. In his recently released budget, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R–WI) takes on Medicare’s future insolvency through a proposal to change the program to a premium support model.

Since its release, Ryan’s approach has received much criticism. But the fact is that nothing short of a complete transformation can ensure that Medicare will exist for future generations of seniors. In breaking research, Heritage’s Bob Moffit and Kathryn Nix lay out the facts about premium support and how it would benefit both future seniors and taxpayers. (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: entitlement programs, Medicaid, Medicare, premium support, Ryan budget, Social Security

The False Choice Between Existing Medicare and Ryan’s Proposal

Yesterday, Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein used a recent poll to argue that Americans oppose House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R–WI) proposal to transform Medicare into a defined-contribution system, where seniors choose the health plan that best suits their needs. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

The Washington Post–ABC News poll gave respondents the following options: “Medicare should remain as it is today, with a defined set of benefits for people over 65, OR Medicare should be changed so that people over 65 would receive a check or voucher from the government each year for a fixed amount they can use to shop for their own private health insurance policy.”

In response, 65 percent said Medicare should be left untouched, with 34 percent preferring a defined-contribution approach. When asked generally if they would support cutting spending on the Medicare program in order to reduce the national debt, 78 percent said they opposed it.

The problem is, this represents a false choice between a feasible scenario and an impossible one. Experts on both sides of the aisle acknowledge that it is not possible to sustain Medicare in its current form. (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: defined-contribution system, House GOP 2012 budget, Medicare, Paul Ryan

HHS Initiatives Fail to Offer States Meaningful Flexibility

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced new initiatives intended to provide states with increased flexibility to better manage their Medicaid programs. However, these initiatives do not seriously address states’ mounting Medicaid crises.

The first HHS initiative is to improve coordination of care for individuals enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid, the so-called dual eligibles. Under Obamacare, 15 states will receive up to $1 million through a new bureaucracy focused on duals. While reform should address the problem of coordinating care for the duals, HHS’s approach will likely fail because it ignores the root of the problem. Currently, incentives to coordinate care between Medicare and Medicaid are lacking, since taxpayer funds (and not private-sector profits) are at stake for poor management. Cost-effective care would occur naturally if incentives were properly aligned. (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: cost-effective care, Medicaid, ObamaCare, repeal the law, state flexibility

The President’s Medicare Plan: A Trojan Horse to Ration Health Care?

Medicare, the federal health care program for America’s seniors, represents $30.8 trillion in long-term unfunded obligations. If Medicare’s runaway costs are not reined in, the program could cease to exist for future generations.

The issue is not whether Medicare costs should be controlled but how. Congress can pursue one of two routes: (1) It can change the structure and culture of Medicare to empower patients to make health care decisions in order to achieve the best value, forcing plans and providers to compete for their dollars, or (2) it can further empower bureaucracy to impose top-down controls on the costs of services. This can indeed reduce spending, but it guarantees a simultaneous reduction in the quality of health care Americans enjoy today. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: $30.8 trillion, Medicare, ObamaCare, reduce spending, runaway costs

Brace for Larger Deficits as Lawmakers Rethink Health Care Law’s Medicare Cuts

Obamacare will cost Americans trillions of dollars in the decades to come. To help pay for its new coverage provisions, the plan makes sweeping cuts to Medicare. But as it turns out, serious doubts exist about the likelihood of these cuts actually occurring, and evidence has already shown that lawmakers may shy away from some of the cuts. If the planned savings don’t materialize, the health care overhaul will add even more to deficit spending than already expected, further jeopardizing the nation’s fiscal future.

Both the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Medicare Chief Actuary warn that Medicare cuts made by Obamacare will be difficult to sustain in the long term. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: Congressional Budget Office, cuts in Medicare, long-term costs, ObamaCare, trillion dollars

Catch Co-Authors of ‘Why Obamacare is Wrong for America’ On BookTV

As has been well documented, Obamacare is destructive to Americans on several fronts: economically, medically, Constitutionally, ethically, and otherwise. This government takeover of America’s health care system (mislabeled as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA) must be stopped. And therein may lie the one positive side effect of this misguided law: it unites Americans as never before, in an effort to reverse Obamacare as quickly as possible.

Nowhere is such determined collaboration seen more clearly than in the new book Why Obamacare is Wrong for America, written by four of today’s leading health policy experts and published by Broadside Books (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers). This weekend, the four co-authors—Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Tom Miller of American Enterprise Institute, and Heritage’s Bob Moffit—appear together on BookTV to reveal the “lowlights” of their in-depth Obamacare analysis and share what real health care reform could look like moving forward. Their book forum presentation airs on C-SPAN2′s BookTV on Saturday, April 9, at 8:30 pm ET, and again on Sunday, April 10, at 2 pm ET. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: CSPAN2 BookTV, Grace-Marie Turner, Jim Capretta, robert moffit, Tom Miller, Why Obamacare Is Wrong for America