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Health Care BLOG |
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Health Insurance Rates Soar in Oregon
By: John R. Graham
11.20.2009
Oregon’s insurance regulator has approved premium hikes ranging from 9% to 23% in the individual and small-group markets. The media, of course, blame bonuses paid to plans’ senior executives for the hikes.
That’s unlikely: Top execs’ total compensation ranged from $248,000 to $765,000 last year. These are utterly trivial “causes” of health-insurance premiums.
The Oregon Insurance Division (which approves all rate hikes), notes that plans’ surpluses have consistently been about 1% of revenues. Obviously, medical spending is driving premiums, not the other way around.
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The Audacity of Senator Reid’s Health-Care Bill
By: Sally C. Pipes
11.20.2009
During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope was often mentioned. A year after his election to the presidency, Obama continues to push on his number-one domestic-policy issue — affordable, accessible, high-quality health care for all Americans. Under his vision of achieving universal coverage while reducing health-care costs, he touts a plan that he says would cost about $900 billion over 10 years and be deficit-neutral. His goal — a bill on his desk by the end of this year.
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Ohio To Destroy Access to Individual Health Insurance?
By: John R. Graham
11.19.2009
I just got back from speaking in Columbus, OH, where I learned that the state’s recently passed budget includes health “insurance” reforms that make it illegal for health insurers to price actuarial risk accurately.
As of January 1, 2010, insurers in the individual market will be forced to offer open enrolment to people with any pre-existing condition, including cancer. Over time, the new law will force the insurer to charge the sickest new applicant no more than 1.5 times the premium of the healthiest beneficiary of the same age and gender.
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Only the Sick Need Apply
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
11.19.2009
A friend pointed me to the following language in the CBO analysis (page 9) of the Reid bill: "CBO's assessment is that a public plan paying negotiated rates would attract a broad network of providers but would typically have premiums that were somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges" (emphasis added). This presumably is because the public plan would have to be self-financing, just like any old insurance company, depending (I assume) only on some seed money from the rest of the federal government.
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The Best Defense Is a Good Offense
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
11.19.2009
As my piece published this morning by the New York Post details, only 1 percent of the costs of Senator Reid's new bill would kick in until the fifth year of its alleged "first ten years." Starting in 2014, 99 percent of the bill's costs would hit, meaning that its real first ten years are from 2014 to 2023.
In that real first decade, the CBO reports that the bill would cost $1.8 trillion, raise Americans' taxes by $892 billion, siphon $802 billion out of Medicare, and — if doctors' pay under Medicare isn't really cut by 23 percent and never raised back up — would increase our deficits by $286 billion.
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Americans Like Obamacare About as Much as Hillarycare
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
11.17.2009
Here are some highlights from the new Washington Post/ABC News poll released today. This poll is generally among the most liberal-leaning, and yet there would still be plenty to be concerned about if one were a swing-state Democratic senator flirting with voting for Obamacare.
According to the poll, not only do more people disapprove, rather than approve, of the way President Obama is handling health care and the federal deficit, but more than 40 percent strongly disapprove of his performance on these issues (41 and 43 percent, respectively, compared to only 28 and 19 percent who strongly approve).
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Bending the Cost-Curve and the Truth
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
11.16.2009
After months of hearing President Obama talk about the need to "bend the curve" on rising health costs, the Office of the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a thorough review of the House health bill. Its verdict? The bill would in fact bend the cost-curve. It would bend it upward.
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The CBO Is Using the Wrong Number of Uninsured
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
11.13.2009
By all accounts, the Congressional Budget Office is using the Census Bureau's tallies for the number of uninsured, but the CBO doesn't appear to have read the full Census report. In the very same document in which the now-famous number of 46 million uninsured appears, the Census admits that this number includes roughly 9 million people on Medicaid who were falsely recorded as uninsured. The CBO is not adjusting for this Medicaid undercount. Therefore, the CBO is inflating the number of uninsured — by about 20 percent.
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Federal Medicaid Funds Addictive Like Hard Drugs
By: John R. Graham
11.12.2009
Congress created Medicaid in 1965, to fund states’ health-care programs for low-income residents. The original formula was a minimum 50/50 split between state and federal funding. However, states with more low-income residents were supposed to receive higher federal transfer payments. (It didn’t quite work out that way. Actually, states that were ready, willing, and able to ratchet up state taxes and spending were able to pull down more federal dollars. See measurement no. 4, “Medicaid Freeloading”, in the U.S. Index of Health Ownership, 3rd ed., p. 18.)
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When Private Insurers Are No Longer Private
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
11.11.2009
Here's further evidence that Obamacare would contain a little something for everyone — except for the American people who would have to finance it and live under it. More exactly stated, it would contain something for every lobbyist under the sun. It turns out that when government becomes more involved in health care, lobbying becomes more, rather than less, important.
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Enemies of the People
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
11.9.2009
It's official. The Joint Tax Committee informs us that under the terms of the Pelosi health-care bill, "Americans who do not maintain acceptable health insurance coverage and who choose not to pay the bill's new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years."
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On the 'Sacredness' of Government Health Care
By: John R. Graham
11.9.2009
Over on Meet the Press, both E. J. Dionne and David Brooks assert that, once the government takes over citizens' access to medical services, the new status quo becomes "sacred." Robert Costa believes that Americans won't fall for it.
But foreigners haven't really fallen for it either, despite the claims of British Tory leader David Cameron. In the latest Commonwealth Fund survey of people in eight developed countries, well over half the respondents stated either that "there are some good things in our health-care system, but fundamental changes are needed to make it work better"; or that "our health-care system has so much wrong with it." Furthermore, as the indispensible Greg Scandlen noted after the Commonwealth Fund's 2008 report, the trend of opinion since 1988 has been worse in other countries than the U.S.
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PhRMA Is Shocked About GosHealth
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
11.9.2009
Make that shocked, shocked. "We are disappointed . . . by today's vote," PhRMA said in a statement following Saturday's House health-care vote. "While well intentioned [!], the bill . . . would have the unintended consequences [sic] of killing tens of thousands of jobs in our industry . . ."
As I have argued before, it just doesn't get any stupider than this. Having made an unenforceable $80 billion deal with the White House, having spent upwards of $130 million on advertising in favor of health-care socialism, having been blind all this time to the reality that they are in an ideological battle in which the Left has painted a bullseye on them: PhRMA now just cannot believe that the Beltway Left would view them as both a piggy bank and an obstacle blocking their fundamental goal of centralizing health care, health-care research, and health-care lobbying in the vast monster soon to be known as GosHealth.
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Mutiny in Scrutiny?
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
11.8.2009
It was always clear that the real health-care battle would be in the Senate. But what would have been shocking eight months ago is to hear that it would take until November for the Democrats to pass a bill even in the House. It would have been even more shocking to have heard that, even after a full-court-press by the White House, the bill would pass by only five votes — meaning that if just three of the 435 members had changed their minds, it would have changed the bill's fate. And it would have been shocking to have heard that 39 Democrats would jump ship.
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What Would Yogi Say?
By: Sally C. Pipes
11.8.2009
That great American forecaster Yogi Berra would say "the ball game is not over till it's over." On Saturday night, the House voted to pass HR 3962 by a vote of 220 to 215, a narrow two-vote margin. On Saturday morning, the president gave a pep talk to Democratic members of the House. He followed that with a short address from the White House garden. He reiterated how important it was to have a landmark health-care bill passed by the end of this year. The plan that he has touted and that he supports would cost $900 billion over 10 years and be deficit neutral. It is unclear how the House or the Senate bills will be able to reduce health care spending and at the same time reduce the number of uninsured.
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Security and Stability
By: Sally C. Pipes
11.7.2009
The president spoke from the Rose Garden this afternoon reiterating how important it is for the House to pass this landmark health-care-reform bill, HR3962. It is expected that the vote will take place tonight or tomorrow. It is clear that no Republican will support this proposed legislation.
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The AMA and AARP Don’t Speak for Doctors and Seniors
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
11.6.2009
In the wake of endorsements of the House health bill by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the AARP, President Obama greeted the White House press corps and explained the AARP’s motivation: “They're endorsing this bill because they know it will strengthen Medicare, not jeopardize it. They know it will protect the benefits our seniors receive, not cut them. So I want everybody to remember that the next time you hear the same tired arguments to the contrary from the insurance companies and their lobbyists. And remember this endorsement the next time you see a bunch of misleading ads on television.”
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The AMA Is More a Monopoly in Crisis Than a Professional Association
By: John R. Graham
11.6.2009
The government's media collaborators went hog-wild when the American Medical Association and AARP endorsed the House's health-reform bill(s). The media continue to insist that these organizations lobby for doctors and seniors, which is not the case. Grace-Marie Turner notes that AARP earns a significant fraction of its revenues by endorsing private-health insurance policies that supplement Medicare. Called Medigap policies, they will likely benefit if the government rolls back another line of business, called Medicare Advantage.
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