Blog and News

Almost everyone involved in health care will tell you that the greatest problem in our system is that we pay on a "fee-for-service" basis. Almost everyone is wrong. Fee for service is not the problem, but FFS in a third party payor system. Only in health care is there someone else picking up the tab for our spending.

If we applied the same third-party payment technique to any other segment of the economy we would get the exact same inflationary spiral we see in health care.

This week marks the two your anniversary of the passage of the PPACA (OBAMACARE). The White House recently held a meeting with more than 100 left-wing organizations who support the government takeover of American healthcare. As this memo leaked from the meeting shows, the progressive left is engaged in another tax-payer funded public relations blitz in order to persuade the American people to embrace ObamaCare.

The information below will dispute their claims how ObamaCare helps women. The Left states that ObamaCare: prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage to women due to preexisting conditions, gives women preventative care such as mammograms and birth control at no out-of-pocket cost, and will prohibit insurers from charging women higher premiums than they charge men. Let's examine these claims individually:

Democratic leaders in the U.S. House, still trying to pick up enough votes to pass a sweeping health care reform bill Sunday, have inserted a provision into the legislation that would bring millions of dollars to Tennessee hospitals that treat large numbers of poor people.

The language, part of a package of revisions released Thursday, would provide $100 million over the next two years to hospitals in states that do not receive federal funds for providing a disproportionate share of uncompensated care.

Members of Tennessee's congressional delegation have been working for years to pass similar legislation, and its inclusion in the health care bill is seen by many as a last-ditch effort by Democrats to influence lawmakers who may be on the fence about health care reform or persuade others to switch their "no" votes to "yes."

ABC News' Zachary B. Wolf reports: It is clear that priority number one for the White House health reform summit is to cleanse the health reform legislation process in the eyes of Americans who soured on the process and became convinced that the House and Senate bills were behind closed doors with special treatment for certain lawmakers.

Three months before he was elected president, Barack Obama vowed not only to reform health care but also to pass the legislation in an unprecedented way.

"I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table," he said at an appearance in Chester, Va., repeating an assertion he made many times. He said the discussions would be "televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies."

But now, as a Senate vote on health-care legislation nears, those negotiations are occurring in a setting that is anything but revolutionary in Washington: Three senators are working on the bill behind closed doors.

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world.  Economists, government officials, insurers and academics alike are beating the drum for a far larger government rôle in health care.  Much of the public assumes their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex.  However, before turning to government as the solution, some unheralded facts about America's health care system should be considered.