“The top-down federal approach to health care reform assaults the traditional state role in insurance regulation, squashes innovation, and undermines real choice and competition. PPACA is thus a bad deal for states, reducing them to mere agents of federal health and insurance policy. They could not make full use of their comparative advantages in coping with very different insurance markets, mending the safety net care for the poorest and most vulnerable of their citizens with new policies, or undertaking imaginative reforms without getting a permission slip from Washington.”
“The problems of the uninsured, including the ‘free rider’ issue, are best addressed through a judicious combination of positive economic incentives, such as tax credits and vouchers for insurance, creative new mechanisms to facilitate coverage (such as automatic enrollment with a right to refuse coverage), and transparency in personal choice and consequences, such as an upfront signed acknowledgement of financial liability for refusing coverage.[18] This policy encourages the adoption of coverage and individual responsibility while not compromising Americans’ personal freedom and responsibility.”
“The problem is that the board is prohibited by law from proposing real structural reforms. The only cuts it is allowed to make would be cutting providers’ reimbursements—including administrative costs and profit margins of Medicare Advantage plans, which are already slated for a payment freeze and future cuts under the new law.”
“One of the central goals of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was to increase the number of individuals with health insurance coverage. To encourage employers to offer coverage, the new law creates a tax penalty on firms with more than 50 workers that fail to provide “adequate” coverage for their employees. The result is government intrusion into voluntary arrangements made between employer and employee. The cost of the tax penalty will ultimately be borne by workers (lower wages and fewer jobs), shareholders (lower profits), and consumers (higher prices).”
“Roughly half of the anticipated gains in insurance coverage from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) are achieved through a massive expansion of Medicaid, the joint federal–state health insurance program for the poor. The Medicaid program, with its soaring price tag and dubious level of care for recipients, is in serious need of reform, not expansion. Increasing enrollment in this program by a third is a major flaw of the new health care law.”
“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) contains several provisions that weaken longstanding federal policy denying public subsidies for elective abortion and health care plans that provide coverage of elective abortion. In addition, PPACA fails to adequately protect the conscience rights of health care insurers, providers, and personnel who decline to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions. These defects in PPACA not only fail to fix the patchwork of laws that have been passed to bar federal support for elective abortion; they also create new avenues for federal subsidies and promotion of elective abortion.”
“Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Congress has enacted record-breaking Medicare payment reductions. Most of these are reductions in Medicare payment updates to non-physician providers. To a lesser degree, these reductions are attributable to certain health care delivery reforms. The Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that administers the Medicare and Medicaid programs, estimates an initial 10-year savings from the total set of Medicare changes amounting to $575 billion.”
“The truth is that the issue of preexisting-condition exclusions is yet another example in ObamaCare where Congress focused on a small (though legitimate) problem with the current health system and, rather than enacting a modest and sensible solution, instead used the problem to justify an ideologically motivated, sweeping, and disruptive policy change that creates new and bigger problems than the one Congress claimed to be solving.”
“When Scott DesJarlais heard the American Medical Association was backing the Democratic health care overhaul, he cut up his membership card. Now the Tennessee doctor, who was elected to the House last fall, can express his disdain for the law more directly by voting this week to repeal it.”
Watch this video of a doctor who’s fighting against ObamaCare because it hurts her practice, both as a physician and as a small-business.