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Do We All Need to Be Like Massachusetts?
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
10.28.2009
Today's Wall Street Journal debate between Grace-Marie Turner and Michael Widmer, as to whether Massachusetts's health-care policies have been a thriving success or a colossal failure, prompts a few thoughts. In honor of the upcoming World Series, here are seven quick points (one for each possible game):
1. If Massachusetts is in fact evidence of a very successful state-run effort at health-care reform, then why is it implicitly viewed by Widmer and others as evidence that we can't afford to rely on state-run efforts at health-care reform, but should instead do everything nationally in a one-size-fits-all manner?
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Six Years of Farce
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
10.28.2009
That great free-market supporter and Milton Friedman groupie Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the topic of a Sacramento Bee story today: "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday called on Congress to pass a health care overhaul that would require all Americans to carry insurance, but he warned that California will get stuck with a bill of more than $1 billion a year for expanding Medicaid if the federal government doesn't provide more money to the states."
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NY Settlement on Out-of-Network Charges & Government Price Fixing
By: John R. Graham
10.28.2009
Yesterday, NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo made a big announcement pursuant to his settlement with health insurers about their use of Ingenix (a data vendor) to calculate usual & customary rates (UCR) for reimbursing patients who use out-of-network providers. As I noted in January, preventing health insurers from using a private vendor to calculate UCRs, and imposing a government-chartered monopolist instead, gives the state great power to fix prices for the purpose of controlling Americans’ access to medical services.
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Bringing Back the Lightning Rod: The 'Public Option' Returns
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
10.27.2009
After leaving the "public option" on the back burner for a couple of months, during which time the public outcry against Obamacare has somewhat softened, the Democrats are now ready to invite more of what they got in August. The Senate Finance Committee bill was extremely politically vulnerable, particularly for having been brazen enough to propose paying for itself largely by pilfering from Medicare. But its opponents failed to gain sufficient traction against it.
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Centrism Defined
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
10.26.2009
Politico reports today on the latest effort to drum up support for health-care socialism by moving some of the "benefits" (i.e., vote-buying) forward in time, from 2013 to next year, so that the Dems can campaign on these goodies during the mid-term election season. This strikes me as shameless even by Beltway standards, as was the effort last week to move the $247 billion physician fix into a separate bill so that the CBO scoring of the health-care bill as a standalone would show slightly less fiscal irresponsiblity. That heroic effort failed to get even a simple majority; even a cynic like yours truly was shocked that Harry Reid brought the proposal to the floor.
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CBO Underestimates Benefits of Malpractice Reform
By: Lawrence J. McQuillan, Ph.D
10.21.2009
Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said medical-liability reforms could save about $11 billion annually. This assessment is a gross underestimate of the potential benefits of reform and was intended to give cover to congressional Democrats who say malpractice-liability costs are trifling. But a full accounting shows the benefits would be a hefty $242 billion a year, more than 10 percent of America’s health expenditures.
Last year alone, damage awards for medical-malpractice claims reached $5.9 billion. Adding in legal costs, underwriting costs, and administrative expenses, total med-mal tort costs were nearly three times higher — $16 billion. From 1986 through 2002, the average insurance payment for a malpractice claim more than tripled to $320,000. The average jury award for medical liability was $637,134 in 2006.
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Post Poll Should Cause ObamaCare Opponents to Take Heart
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
10.20.2009
The headlines from the Washington Post-ABC News poll say that support for a "public option" and an insurance mandate have increased from their low-point this summer. But the poll's actual questions and answers look a lot different than the headlines.
The "public option" question reads as if the Democrats wrote it, phrasing it as a means to increase competition: "Would you support or oppose having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans?" Not surprisingly, when asked the question in that way, people have supported the "public option" across the months. They supported it by a 29-point margin (62-33) in June, and they support it by a much smaller margin — 17 points (57-40) — now. True, they supported it by only a 6-point margin in August (52-46). But at that point the House bill was the focus of discussion, and it contained a "public option," unlike the Senate Finance Committee bill that has been the focus of late.
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Group, Not Individual, Health Insurance Is Failing
By: John R. Graham
10.19.2009
Last Friday, I encouraged a "new rule" about health-insurance horror stories: Back them up with full documentation. I noted that Rocky Mountain Health Plans, the non-profit health insurer which refused to cover a weighty baby in Grand Junction, Colo., had not helped matters with its press release describing that it had changed its mind and would cover the baby. RMHP suggested that covering babies was a new line of business, and that parents were increasingly seeking individual coverage for their kids. The assertion seemed a little mysterious.
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New Rule: Back Up Your Health-Insurance Horror Story
By: John R. Graham
10.16.2009
Comedian Bill Maher has a shtick where he imposes "new rules" on people and things of which he disapproves. Well, here's mine: When you have a health-insurance horror story, I think you should have to post all communications from the evil, profiteering, health insurer(s) on a public website for all to see. Furthermore, you should release the accused health insurers from their legal obligation of confidentiality.
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They Just Don’t Learn
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
10.14.2009
Perceived crisis can make for very bad judgment, and nowhere is that eternal truth more prominent than inside the Beltway. With the arrival of The One and absolute Democratic control of Congress, the groups that provide actual health care and insurance services — the doctors, the hospitals, the producers of drugs and devices, the insurers — knew that the thieves would view them, Willie Sutton–style, as the places where the money is to be found. And so they began to run around in circles like a guy whose mistress was in the bathroom when his wife came home a day early from a visit to her mother.
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Health-Care Reform: Where Do We Go From Here?
By: Sally C. Pipes
10.14.2009
President Obama has been committed to health-care reform since he became a player in the 2008 presidential race. In fact, it was his top domestic-policy issue during the campaign.
Now nine months into his presidency, he is still very resolute about getting a health-care-reform package passed before the end of this year. So far, he has given 29 speeches — and in each talk he keeps reiterating that his goal is universal coverage for all Americans. He wants to reduce the cost of health care (now about 16 percent of the nation’s GDP) and to decrease the number of uninsured (about 46.3 million, according to the Census Bureau). These two goals are not compatible.
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The Death of Employer-Based Benefits Is Nigher Than I Thought
By: John R. Graham
10.9.2009
Yesterday, I pointed out that the "excise tax" for not maintaining (what we call today) continuous, creditable coverage would be much lower (maximum $1,900) than the annual premiums for a health-insurance policy. I concluded that Tower Perrins' September survey of employers, which reported that less than half of employers would continue to offer health benefits if the "pay or play" fine was lower than the cost of health benefits, informs us that we will experience a massive shedding of employer-based health benefits.
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Insurance 'Reform' Equals Single-Payer
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
10.9.2009
In one of the more amusing dimensions of the Beltway death struggle over the massive transfers of wealth to be gained or sacrificed by various groups through health-care "reform," the large health-industry players — honestly believing all this year that they could stay off the menu by buying a seat at the table — suddenly have discovered themselves in the frying pan nonetheless. And who'd a thunk it? After all, no way no how would people with decades of experience in Congress, on K Street, or simply reading a newspaper recognize that "deals" with the White House are unenforceable in Congress. Or that "deals" with one Congressional Rebbe might not appear kosher to another. Or that a certain Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning president might not in the final analysis actually veto a bill promising enormous political benefits merely because it violates some deal cut months earlier with interest groups whose political popularity might not be sterling, notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that his word is his bond.
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Taxing Baucus
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
10.8.2009
Mike Tanner of Cato and I (separately) have looked at the CBO analysis of the Baucus markup (which is not a bill), and have reached much the same conclusions. The headlines will tell us that it will cost $829 billion (that is, less than $900 billion) over ten years, and will reduce the cumulative deficit by $81 billion.
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Employer-Based Health Benefits: The Death Spiral Is Nigh
By: John R. Graham
10.8.2009
There can be little doubt that employers will move quickly to socialize the costs of health "reform" by dropping health benefits and sacrificing their employees to the new government-run health plan. The Baucus bill proposes to levy a fine of $1,900 on individuals who do not buy qualifying insurance, and maybe even send them to jail. Nor is it clear that employees will mind being dropped, as long as employers increase their cash wages by more than the amount of the fine.
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Jindal's Poll-Driven Health-Reform 'Ideas'
By: John R. Graham
10.6.2009
Yesterday's Washington Post ran a column by Gov. Bobby Jindal (R., La.), in which he chastised "so-called Republican strategists" for conceding health care to the Democrats. So far, so good: But this is not a new complaint. In the 1980s, John Sununu, as chief of staff to President Reagan, is reputed to have dismissed Prof. Alain Enthoven with a curt: "If the American people want health care, they'll vote Democrat."
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