Blog and News

Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice. 

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So, where are we now, almost two years after the law’s passage? A new report from the Department of Health and Human Services gives us the stats for the PPACA Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, or PCIP. After Obamacare became law, in November 2010, government officials estimated that they would spend $13,026 per high-risk pool enrollee. Nine months later, in August 2011, they revised their estimate to $28,994 per enrollee: a 123 percent increase. 

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Opposition to the IPAB crosses party lines. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee that will consider the bill today, has said he has no interest in defending the board: “I’ve never supported it, and I would certainly be in favor of abolishing it.” 

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Earlier this month, James Capretta tackled 5 of the most frequent arguments against health care reform that would move programs like Medicare into a premium support program. Capretta defends against the claim that reform would lead to cost-shifting; that Medicare is more efficient than the private market; that Medicare has not seen healthcare inflation to the degree the private market has; that the model for premium support - the Medicare Part D program, has not worked; and that government can work better to design a healthcare delivery system than the government can. 

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Secretary of HHS admits doubt that Obamacare "exchanges" will be operational by 2014 and likely at least half the states will not have one implemented. Even worse for taxpayers, the $1 Billion allocated to the program will not be insufficient to cover the costs and may require additional taxpayer support. Imagine that; another failed government program running over budget and not being operational on the scheduled date. 

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Most people agree that the way we pay for health care in the USA is broken, but they do not agree on the “fix."  PPACA (“Obamacare”) was marketed as the “fix” for all this, by way of more rules, more mandates, more taxes, more financial carrots and sticks, and more enforcement. And the cost?  Some of the costs include further loss of patient choice, and a bigger, more expensive GAME, whether it morphs into a single payer system or not. 

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A key technocratic gimmick of ObamaCare, the Accountable Care Organization, is rolling out now — but the wheels are already starting to come off. Critics warn that, instead of helping doctors and patients to make individualized treatment decisions, ACOs will empower government bureaucrats to consolidate health-care providers into top-down organizations and dictate how care is delivered — at greater cost. 

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There have been two noteworthy developments related to healthcare litigation over the past few days. 

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New data show that health spending over the past several years has been normalizing toward the rate of general inflation, rather than growing higher and higher, as had been the case almost continuously since the 1970s. This moderation in the growth rate of spending predates the national recession. And it puts the lie to the claim that we need government to put the brakes on an "out-of-control" health-care system. 

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Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.  

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Should the law give special treatment to a "VIP" or "big shot" while denying that to everyone else? Docs4PatientCare's Dr. Hal Scherz explains how ObamaCare will lead to a government takeover of healthcare and then, for budgetary reasons, the government will deny access to basic health care to most Americans. This won't be a problem for politicians and their friends who will use the perks of power to gain access to care but for those who are not politically-connected or lack the financial means to go elsewhere for care, the results could be devastating. 

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Doc4PatientCare's Dr. Richard Armstrong has written an excellent opinion piece for The Washington Times. In it, he discusses how the Obama Administration is attempting to sell the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) to doctors with the promise that it will enhance physician autonomy and liberty. 

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Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.  

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Dear Members and Friends of Docs4PatientCare,

I wanted to be sure you saw this press release below. As part of our work on your behalf to protect the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, we have filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the 11th Circuit’s decision that the individual mandate under ObamaCare is unconstitutional. This brief was filed in partnership with the Pacific Research Institute, Benjamin Rush Society, and the Galen Institute, and I am grateful for our team's hard work in contributing to the process.

We fully expect the Supreme Court to take up the Obamacare case next month, and to have a decision this summer. We will continue to monitor the situation and keep you informed.

We are grateful for your support as we work to bring about healthcare reform that really is in the best interest of doctors and patients. If you have not already, please consider joining today. If you are a member, please share this post with your colleagues and encourage them to join as well. If you are not a physician, we need your support as well, and hope you will consider making an online contribution.

Gratefully,
Hal

Dr. Hal Scherz, MD, FACS, FAAP
President and Founder of Docs 4 Patient Care
www.docs4patientcare.org 

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From The Daily Caller: 

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Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.  

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Drawing comparisons to the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie "War Games", Dr. Robert Sewell, MD sees similarities between the computer games Tic-Tac-Toe and Global Thermonuclear War and America's healthcare system. In the movie, a computer teaches itself that there are some games in which the participants will always lose. As a result, the computer "teaches" itself that the game should not be played at all. 

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Advocates of government run healthcare often overlook the fact that there are tremendous non-monetary costs for the policies that they advocate and that those costs have to be born by individuals and the nation as a whole. As Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute notes, "in the end, that very government guarantee ends up leaving people with less purchasing power and undermining the market’s ability to discover cost-saving innovations that bring better health care within the reach of the needy."  In addition, government run healthcare tramples on the rights of doctors, nurses and patients. 

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Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice. 

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We thought you might enjoy Dr. David Cossman's recent article from General Surgery News:

For those of you who have been spending your days operating and taking care of patients instead of keeping up with the latest machinations from central planning to separate you from the fruits of your labor and control of your practice, ACOs are bundles of providers who will receive a global payment for a specific patient encounter, like a cholecystectomy. Who will bill, receive and divide the money is uncertain, except that it won’t be you, the surgeon. The only thing certain is that like diagnosis-related groups, the sustainable growth rate, and relative value units, this latest iteration in health care spending discipline will be gamed and ultimately relegated to the alphabet graveyard of designer cost-containment programs invented by health policy wonks who have an aversion to traditional medicine based on the private doctor–patient relationship. I’ll say this much for them: They are undeterred by their unbroken string of failures. Maybe they’re Cubs fans.

Read the full article here. 

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D4PC has previously discussed how the American Medical Association (AMA) has subjugated the interests of its member-doctors (and the medical profession as a whole) in favor of protecting its government-granted CPT billing code monopoly. Dr. Daniel Palestrant writes about yet another way that the AMA is selling out doctors. This latest practice involves the collection and sale of data regarding doctors across the country. 

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