Blog and News

As physicians face declining third party payments, comply with expensive government mandates such as electronic medical records and attempt to navigate through burdensome government regulations, it is no surprise that more and more physicians are leaving "private practice" and becoming "employees" of large hospital chains. The benefit to doctors is apparent; more predictable hours and no more need to manage a small business in a ever changing healthcare environment. Unfortunately, this consolidation of physicians within powerful hospital chains is actually driving up the cost of healthcare in many communities around the nation.  

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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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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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Avik Roy, at The Apothecary, examines the comments from MIT economist Jonathan Gruber about the impact ObamaCare would have on insurance costs. At the time Congress was considering the law, Gruber promised the law would reduce costs, his comments since then acknowledge the truth - ObamaCare will increase costs substantially. 

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Before the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and the HMO Act of 1973, the private sector funded over three quarters of the country's health care expenditures, individuals paid nearly one-half of total costs out-of-pocket and health care inflation was in-line with the consumer price index (CPI). When a third party pays the cost of routine health care services, consumers become insensitive to prices, quality, and choice of care setting. Individuals respond to lower cost-sharing (more comprehensive coverage) by utilizing more care, as well as more expensive care because they do not face the full price of their decisions at the point of utilization. 

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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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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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A new analysis from the Office of the Actuary of CMS (and published in Health Affairs) breaks down how much more government will be spending on health care as a consequence of the PPACA. This analysis concludes that in 2014, when ObamaCare kicks in, the growth rate for government spending on health care will increase by 50% compared to the year before (increasing from a growth rate of 5.5% in 2013 to 8.3% in 2014). 

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The New York Times reports that Federal regulators will, starting September 1, use a provision of PPACA to review premium increases for individual and small group plans in seven states where the feds have concluded state law does not comply with new federal standards.  The feds will also conduct reviews for group plans in another three states. 

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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.

"The Affordable Care Act Pushes the Limits of Constitutionality" 

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Stanley Kurtz writes on National Review Online:

"The 2012 election, and the existence of a free health-care market in this country, could well depend on a little-known agency called IPAB. [Short for Independent Payment Advisory Board, it is], a vastly powerful but too often overlooked component of the president’s health-care-reform law. IPAB has not yet come into existence, but when Obamacare goes into full effect, it will be an unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic entity with nearly limitless power over federal Medicare spending. IPAB will have the power to effectively ration health care through price controls — which may not even be the scariest thing about it. That distinction arguably falls to its unprecedented overriding of congressional sovereignty, in flagrant violation of the constitutional separation of powers."

In his April 13 speech, in response to Paul Ryan’s deficit-reduction plan, President Obama pushed to give IPAB more power and more authority over Medicare pricing as part of the President's own deficit-reduction plan. Kurtz characterized the President's speech as calling for "a substantial expansion of IPAB’s already unprecedented powers," and noted that "Obama can’t begin to match Ryan’s deficit-reduction program without massive, IPAB-imposed health-care controls that would amount to rationing."

In contrast, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans have offered an alternative about which Kurtz has said: "The advantage of the Ryan plan... is its reliance on patient choice. Having been taxed throughout their working lives to support a system that offers no choice, Medicare-dependent patients lose control of funds they might otherwise have used to purchase private health insurance. Ryan’s plan returns some of that money to Americans via a tax-supported health-care voucher. This allows consumers to choose the private insurance plan that most closely matches their priorities — devoting more or less resources to end-of-life care, for example."

Read the full article here...  

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From Sally Pipes...

"Democrats have recently seized on a novel way of reducing health care costs — threats.

"The Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced that any insurance company that wants to increase premiums more than 10% will have to get approval from the government. Congress didn’t pass a law mandating this draconian policy — HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius simply decreed it."

While Vermont and Massachusetts are also headed towards a single payer system based on price controls, Canada, a country that has tried single payer, is moving away from that system.

According to Pipes, Dr. Claude Castonguay, the "father of Quebec Medicare," said in 2008 that “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Read the full article here...  

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Former Congressional Budget Office Director(CBO), Douglas Holtz-Eakin, provides this excellent economic analysis of the PPACA and illustrates how the law's provisions will negatively impact the existing dysfunctional programs of Medicaid/Medicare, disrupt the private insurance marketplace, impede growth to American small business and become a budget killer for states and our national debt. 

http://finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/031611dhetest.pdf 

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Even though the PPACA was signed into law one year ago, the promises made are not being achieved. Insurance companies are raising premiums or dropping out of the marketplace altogether in response to the increased demands mandated by the legislation.  In order to provide political cover and find a new villain, the Obama administration is micro-manging the insurance market by setting up new bureaucracies to determine the merit of premium increases. This government meddling and establishing of price controls is precisely what got us here in the first place and will only serve to continue the problem of decreased market competition and rising prices.

http://www.forbes.com/2011/03/14/obama-care-insurance-opinions-sally-pipes_print.html 

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