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Health Care BLOG |
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Cadillac Health Plans; And Taxation Thereof
By: John R. Graham
12.30.2009
Count me in as one who anticipates that a January "conference" (of whatever formality) mashing up the House and Senate health bills will be a lot tougher than the Beltway pros believe. A growing number of people, whom the President should take for granted, have been finding things in the bills that displease them greatly.
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Sen. Bill Nelson’s Florida Flim Flam
By: John R. Graham
12.30.2009
The Miami Herald breathlessly asserts that U.S. Senator Bill Nelson has “preserved” Florida’s Medicare benefits. (Hat tip to John Goodman.) This is because the “Florida Flim Flam” that he swapped to give Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid his vote in favor of the federal take-over of Americans’ access to medical services will allow Florida’s seniors to keep access to Medicare Advantage plans.
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Now Is the Time to Fight
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
12.24.2009
Harry Reid had the Senate meet for 25 consecutive days for the first time since the United States was deciding whether to enter World War I, and he held the Senate's first vote on Christmas Eve since the 19th century. Such is the zealotry of those who champion the cause of government-run health care. Gaining control over what will soon be one-fifth of our economy is apparently so important that it requires a Christmas Eve vote — for a bill that would essentially start about four Christmases from now.
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Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Obamacare
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
12.23.2009
Remember back in June, in President Obama’s major address to the AMA, when he said the following? “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise. . . . If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” In the six months since, there seems to have been a change.
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Federal Regulatory Burden on Health Care Increased By Over Half in Ten Years
By: John R. Graham
12.22.2009
It is almost impossible to describe how bloated both the House and Senate bills have become. Compare them to the legislation passed in 1965 that created entirely new programs, Medicare and Medicaid: President Johnson signed Public Law 89-97 in July of his first elected term — and it was a mere 137 pages long!
This dramatic different in length motivated me to attempt a similar measurement of the federal regulatory burden on U.S. health care — by counting the pages dedicated to regulating health care in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) over the past decade. During most of this period, the federal government preached regulatory restraint. Indeed, the major bill, the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, was designed to reduce federal control over access to medical care via a privately run Medicare drug benefit and the introduction of Health Savings Accounts.
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Electronic Health Records: Blah, Blah, Blah
By: John R. Graham
12.21.2009
One of the ways that the government is going to make the delivery of health care more “efficient”, the saying goes, is to subsidize the acquisition of electronic health records (EHRs) that adhere to federal standards.
There are a couple of problems with this. Many are rightly concerned that the federal government will end up having way too much information about our health status. Another big problem, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, is that the record of adoption of EHR by both private and government buyers does not suggest success.
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Reduced Medicare Benefits Will Increase Cost of Private Insurance
By: John R. Graham
12.21.2009
As noted elsewhere, much of the "savings" in the so-called reform legislation are fictional, because the government has never succeeded in rolling back physicians' Medicare Part B fees. Medicare Part B fees already run about 20 percent lower than the fees that private insurers pay, and any further cut-backs would sentence seniors to a catastrophic lack of access to physicians.
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The Senator Who Stole Christmas
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
12.20.2009
While senators' families undertake their Christmas preparations without them, Sen. Harry Reid and President Obama continue to celebrate this festive season by pushing the Senate to give the American people the "gift" of Obamacare for Christmas. Fruitcakes and lumps of coal have never sounded so good.
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The Advantage of Medicare Advantage
By: John R. Graham
12.19.2009
As Linda Gorman has previously discussed, if the real point of a so-called “public option” was simply to supply fair competition against private insurers, the government would allow patients dependent on VA, Medicaid, and Medicare to take their entitlements as vouchers and get private insurance. In fact, the opposite is happening: All the reform proposals before Congress would significantly reduce seniors’ choice of benefits in Medicare. Cutting back payments to Medicare Advantage by as much as $172 billion over the next decade will cause millions of seniors to lose their coverage.
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The Essence of Obamacare
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
12.16.2009
With the death of two even worse ideas — a government-run "public option" and a proposed Medicare expansion — President Obama was right yesterday when he said that "we are on the precipice" of something that would "touch the lives of nearly every American." We are indeed on the precipice. For after nearly a year's worth of debate, Obamacare has now been boiled down to its essence: a mandate that Americans pay trillions of dollars, funneled through Washington, to private insurers.
12/16 11:03 AM
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Why the Senate Bill Must Be Rejected
By: Sally C. Pipes
12.16.2009
Democratic senators, giving into Sen. Joe Lieberman’s demands, agreed on Monday evening that their 2,074-page health-care bill will contain neither a Medicare “buy-in” option for people aged 55 to 64 nor a broader public option. If the House and Senate reach agreement next week on final wording and a bill does pass near Christmas or soon after, President Obama has stated that he wants the bill on his desk for signature before his State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 12. This is extremely important for his presidency because he wants to be able to tout a significant first-year success to the electorate before moving further into an election year where jobs and the deficit are going to be major issues.
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Obamacare's Winners and Losers
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
12.15.2009
As Jim Capretta writes over at NRO, now that the government-run "public option" has been stripped out of the Senate's proposed health-care legislation, Obamacare is left as this: a mandate that Americans funnel huge sums in new taxes, through the federal government, to private insurers. Were you wondering why the health insurance lobby supports the Democrats' version of "health insurance reform"?
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What Really Happened in 1994
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
12.15.2009
There's been a lot of extremely relevant talk of late about why the Democrats lost so badly in 1994. Was it because they failed to pass Hillarycare, or because they tried? Over at The Weekly Standard, Andy Wickersham and I thoroughly analyze the numbers and conclude that the reason is the latter: It's because they tried.
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The Wages of Hubris
By: Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D
12.14.2009
What can I say? I'm just a glass-half-full kind of guy. Rainbows. Puppies and kittens. The laughter of children. Latkes and Santa in December. An advertisement for some consulting firm at the airport showing a huge photo of Tiger Woods walking in the rough, along with the words "Sometimes performance is found off the paved road." Life is wonderful.
And I am starting to think that the ineffable Harry Reid, Grand Poobah of the Senate Democrats, will not get his 60 votes to move health-care socialism back to Nancy Pelosi and then to the White House. For months, Reid and Baucus and Dodd and all the others have been searching for a way to thread the 60-vote needle. Something. Anything. Incoherent, destructive, bankrupting, another shotgun blast at the young: It matters not a whit. If it increases dependence upon the federal government, it's a winner.
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Senators Report Reaching a ‘Compromise’ on the Public Option
By: Sally C. Pipes
12.9.2009
Late Tuesday evening it was announced that the group of ten moderate and liberal Democratic senators had reached broad tentative agreement to remove the public option from the Senate health-care bill. But it is important to look at what compromises have been made and what they mean for the health care of all Americans.
The two main compromises are the “Medicare Buy-In” for people between 55 and 64 and the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) overseeing a national health-care plan run by non-profit entities where the federal government will negotiate the rates insurance companies can charge. OPM is the agency responsible for the health-care plan for federal employees and members of Congress.
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Obamacare Makes Hillarycare Look Pithy
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
12.7.2009
Here's a quick stat to help illustrate just how bloated, intrusive, and bureaucratic the Democrats' intended health-care overhaul would be: The bill that the Senate is currently debating is more than half again as long as the bill that was proposed by President Clinton in 1993. The Clinton bill was 1,342 pages long. The current Senate bill is 2,074 pages long — 55 percent longer.
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The $100,000 Obamacare Policy
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
12.2.2009
Nearly everyone agrees on the major goals of legitimate health-care reform: reducing costs and reducing the number of uninsured — without reducing the quality of care.
Polls show that Americans' number-one health-care concern — by far — is the first of these: lowering costs. But the proposed Democratic health-care overhaul would instead raise health costs. It would also inject the federal government into the historically private relationship between patient and doctor. By a margin of about two to one, Americans think that their quality of care would decline rather than improve as a result. Raising costs and lowering quality would seem to be two rather major shortfalls in any effort at "reform." And such figurative shortfalls would be matched by a literal one: The Congressional Budget Office says that, unless doctors' pay under Medicare is cut by 25 percent and never raised back up, the proposed Senate bill would increase deficits by $286 billion in its real first decade (2014–23).
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Total Records: 21
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