Blog and News

This headline should be seriously considered by all Americans. First, with the persistent decline of the US economy, an unprecedented number of unemployed Americans are becoming eligible for Medicaid and will therefore be affected by these new policies. Additionallly, as a direct result of legislation within the Obama healthcare law, more Americans again will come under the control of Medicaid for two specific reasons.

First, with the law's significant expansion of Medicad eligibility, 18-24 million Americans are likely to find themselves in this bankrupt program, some of whom may currently have private coverage. Secondly, due to the employer mandate, many businesses will find it less expensive to pay the "tax" for non-compliance and dump their existing medical insurance plan. This financial decision will leave workers on their own to either enter the Medicaid program or try to find coverage in the tax-payer funded state insurance "exchanges" if one even exists in their state.  

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States that have refused to implement the Obama health law have already blocked $80 billion of its new deficit spending. If more states follow suit, they can block the other $1.6 trillion and force Congress to repeal the law. 

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"In truth, prospects are bleak that you will be able to keep your doctor and even bleaker that there will be enough doctors to meet demand under Obamacare. Physicians say they simply won’t practice under Obamacare rules that strip away much of their autonomy, drown them in bureaucracy, and leave them even more exposed to lawsuits". 

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The latest CBO scoring of Obamacare, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision upholding the overhaul’s individual mandate as an allowable (although seemingly unprecedented) tax on inactivity, shows that President Obama’s centerpiece legislation would cost about $2 trillion over its real first decade (2014 through 2023). The CBO also says that — despite its colossal cost and its unprecedented expansion of power and control over Americans’ lives — Obamacare would, as of a decade from now, leave 30 million people uninsured. 

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Last month’s Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare left champions of that law breathing a sigh of relief, while its opponents — a majority of the public — were left frustrated. It seemed at first glance as though the chief justice’s tortured opinion had saved the individual mandate, and with it the broader statute. But Obamacare’s champions should take a closer look at what the Court left them with, because on their own terms, the law is now set to collapse. 

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Over time, these new ObamaCare taxes will hit more and more middle income families. Recall that the Alternative Minimum Tax targeted only 155 taxpayers when the first version passed in 1969, but today it hits millions of people.

Now that the American people see that the Supreme Court didn’t rescue them from Obamacare, there is renewed focus on the details of the law. The individual mandate is only one of dozens of provisions that will slam into our economy, hitting American families like a freight train in 2014. 

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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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D4PC has previously expressed concern over the impact that PPACA would have on Medicare Advantage. We have also questioned HHS's program to implement an $8.35 billion demonstration program to isolate Medicare Advantage from those cuts - at least through the election. (See a Wall Street Journal article on this subject here - subscription required). 

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In an analysis of ObamaCare, Grace-Marie Turner writes for Forbes that Chief Justice Roberts went to great pains to have the Court uphold ObamaCare. She writes: 

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Dr. Marci Cook, a member of Docs4PatientCare and President of the Virginia Chapter, was featured in an AFPTV story about the impact of Obamacare on doctors.

Watch the video here. 

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Physicians who care for patients every day understand what no one else does – that the benefits of HIT are not a forgone conclusion. To us HIT has as much potential to harm patients as it has to help them. We also understand that the fund of knowledge required to safely and effectively implement HIT has not yet been adequately developed.

Health information technology will change the practice of medicine more than any drug, imaging modality, operation or surgical device. It will profoundly affect the care of every patient. No other past or current medical advancement can make that claim.

Any new technology, including health information technology, produces unexpected adverse consequences. For adverse events in health care, government mandates create a frightening multiplier. What if the government had required all overweight patients to use Fen-Phen before its cardiac side effects were discovered? What if all patients with arthritic hips had been required to receive cobalt-containing implants? In an environment where every innovation is rightfully scrutinized before it is placed into widespread use, why do so many accept the unproven claims of HIT as unchallenged fact?  

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Texas Govenror Rick Perry announced last week that Texas would not be implementing the Medicaid expansions of ObamaCare or create an ObamaCare exchange. As D4PC has previously explained, all of the people who will gain health insurnace under ObamaCare will do so either through a government program (Medicaid) or government subsidies (the exchanges) and not through market-based, patient-centered reforms that will lower costs and make insurance more afforable.  

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The ACA fails to fix the basic problems that were promised if passed- high costs and access to care. It actually exacerbates these problems. There is little disagreement that America’s health care “system” was in need of reform, however, many of the “solutions” embedded in the ACA are concepts that are untested or have failed historically and in recent CMS demonstration projects.

Governor Romney can distance himself from President Obama on healthcare by developing a health system reform platform that relies on trust of the American consumers and their physicians, instead of erecting artificial barriers and obstacles that further erode the physician-patient relationship. A leader like Governor Romney with a lifetime of business experience is poised to collaborate with the working physicians of America to set a more hopeful and constructive healthcare course for the future. 

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The Joint Committee on Taxation - or JCT - provides fiscal analysis or "scores" to Congress on the impact of legislation that proposes changes in tax policy. JCT was recently asked by Senators Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) and John Barrasso, M.D. (R-WY) about the impact ObamaCare's taxes would have on individuals making less than $200,000 and families making less than $250,000 per year.  

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According to a new Gallup poll, the American people believe the law is causing economic harm to the nation. Gallup finds: "Americans are more likely to say the 2010 healthcare law upheld by the Supreme Court last week will hurt the national economy (46%) rather than help it (37%), while 18% say they don't know or that it will have no effect." 

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Testimony of Richard A. Armstrong MD FACS, Chief Operating Officer of Docs4PatientCare before the House of Representatives Oversight Committee

On the effect of the Affordable Care Act on the physician-patient relationship

The Honorable Darrell Issa R-CA
Chairman

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen;  it is an honor to speak with you today on behalf of Docs4PatientCare and thousands of practicing physicians nationwide who share our deep concerns about the effects of the Affordable Care Act upon the practice of medicine and specifically upon our relationship with patients. 

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Earlier today, Docs4PatientCare Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Richard Armstrong testified in Washington before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at their hearing "Examining the Impact of Obamacare on Doctors and Patients."

You should be able to watch the hearing via the web on the Committee web site. 

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One of Capitol Hill's newspapers, The Hill, is reporting that at least 15 governors are leaning against implementing ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion. The reluctance comes on the heels of the Supreme Court decision that found unconstitutional the provisions of the law that punished states if they refused to expand Medicaid. 

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Last week, after the Supreme Court decision, the media tried to make a big deal out of the fact that Republicans were calling the individual mandate a "tax." Because if it is a tax, Republicans must be agreeing with Chief Justice John Roberts that the mandate is constitututional. Or at least the media has tried to make that argument. 

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The principal factual claims made by the individual mandate's supporters are that the failure to purchase conventional health insurance causes harm to the uninsured person (in the form of worsened health) and to others (in the form of a shifting of the burden of the costs of care).

The evidence supporting each of these claims is weak at best. Peer-reviewed studies from the National Health Insurance Experiment and other data dating back to the 1980s have concluded that there is little or no causal relationship between health insurance and a person's health outcomes.

What about the claim that the costs of caring for the uninsured are significantly shifted onto doctor and hospital bills, thereby raising insurance premiums? George Mason University Prof. Jack Hadley and John Holahan, Teresa Coughlin and Dawn Miller of the Urban Institute published a comprehensive, peer-reviewed study on this in Health Affairs in 2008. It concluded that "Private insurance premiums are at most 1.7 percent higher because of the shifting of the costs of the uninsured to private insurance."

The problems with the U.S. health-care system are mainly the result of a handful of government policies that have prevented market forces from reducing costs and making services more widely available. So what to do? 

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Robert Book writes at Forbes.com that any suggestion that the Supreme Court's decision marks a victory for conservatives in relation to the commerce clause is unfounded. He explains: 

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