Fix Health Care Policy

The United States faces financial collapse due to out-of-control government spending, and entitlement programs have a lot to do with it. Washington has promised more than it could ever possibly deliver.

Medicare in particular puts the government on the hook for $38 trillion in long-term unfunded liabilities, and reform to address this is sorely needed. Change must address not only spending but also the system by which the program operates, which currently encourages inefficient use of health services. This trend has penetrated the health care system at large.

According to the Obama Administration, the health care overhaul passed in March addressed the need for entitlement reform. However, at a recent event hosted by the Galen Institute, expert James Capretta introduced his research that shows that this is not the case. (more…)

Tags: bend cost curve, entitlement reform, financial collapse, Medicare, unfunded liabilities

The Senate’s health care bill became law earlier this week, but that does not mean the fight against a government overhaul of our nation’s health system is over. This week, the Senate will consider amendments to the reconciliation bill passed by the House alongside the Senate health bill, H.R. 3590. This process will provide a chance to ameliorate the numerous shortcomings of the passed legislation, and will provide Americans with a glimpse at the true intentions of their elected officials as they are forced to take a stance on difficult questions regarding changes to the bill. Here, we outline some of the amendments put forth and the Senate’s verdict:

Protecting Medicare Savings. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) offered an amendment to protect new savings from Medicare from being used to fund new entitlements. The passed legislation and the reconciliation package would create a combined $529 billion in cuts to Medicare spending over ten years. Lawmakers claim these cuts will be applied to increase the program’s solvency, which will otherwise cause $38 trillion in unfunded liabilities to the taxpayers. (more…)

Tags: Cornhusker Kickback, government overhaul, Louisiana Purchase, Medicare savings, repeal, Senate Health Bill, special deals, taxes on the middle class, unfunded liabilities

In a strongly worded editorial, The Wall Street Journal took the House to task for planning to vote this week on a “doc fix” bill that “would shock [convicted Ponzi-scheme operator Bernard] Madoff.”

“Any day now, the House is expected to vote on a $210 billion fiscal swindle that will prevent automatic cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. The entitlement’s price controls are scheduled to fall by 21.5% in January and another 2% every year after that under a formula known as the sustainable growth rate, and eliminating the SGR was the price the American Medical Association demanded in return for its endorsement of the House health-care bill that passed earlier this month.”

Heritage’s The Foundry noted in a recent blog that House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi promised to do so but ran into the problem of “how to game the Congressional Budget Office’s numbers to show that Obamacare was deficit neutral and pay for the so called ‘doc fix’ at the same time.” Congress solved the problem by “pretending the ‘doc fix’ was not health care reform. But to keep the AMA happy they took the unusual step of combining the debate rules for ObamaCare and the doc fix.”

The Wall Street Journal slammed Democratic congressional leadership for obscuring the true costs of health care reform by not including the “doc fix” bill as part of ObamaCare.

“A new Heritage Foundation study by the former Medicare trustee Thomas Saving and economist Andrew Rettenmaier finds that eliminating the SGR without offsets will increase Medicare’s unfunded liabilities by $1.9 trillion over the next 75 years. Given that the entitlement is already about $39 trillion in the hole (give or take a few trillion), the SGR fix alone is a European-style value-added tax waiting to happen, not including the huge new permanent spending commitments created by ObamaCare.”

Tags: doc fix, Medicare, ObamaCare, unfunded liabilities