“But over the past two years, ordinary Americans have come to realize that Washington’s political class—the politicians and their staffs and the armies of lawyers and lobbyists and consultants that intermingle with them routinely—really have become distant from them in mind and heart; they have become disconnected in so many ways. That mental and emotional distance had become glaringly evident on many topics, such as record spending and deficits, but none so clearly as in the long and bitter national debate on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA), the new national health care law.”
“Ask yourself this question: Can you think of any other industry where low-cost, high-quality production has been achieved by the government running pilot programs? No? Well, if that approach doesn’t work anywhere else, why would you expect health care to be different?”
“There is no good way, or even a less-bad way, for states or the feds to implement Obamacare’s exchanges or other central elements. Permitted to stand, Obamacare will reduce Americans’ incomes, harm their health, and decrease their freedom. The only way to fix it is to demolish it.”
“Our review of the research has found that there is no credible evidence of a cost shift of any substantial consequence, either within state boundaries or across state lines. Moreover, the new law will likely generate more cost shifting—the opposite of what its supporters would have us believe.”
“Sports fans relish this time of year for the NCAA Championship Basketball Tournament, aka ‘March Madness.’ But this year the tournament has a serious contender for that title. March is also ObamaCare’s anniversary month.
Last year, President Obama gave Congress an arbitrary deadline to pass his health-care takeover legislation before the Easter recess at the end of March. This forced lawmakers to hurry their votes on a deeply flawed bill that very few of them had read. Worse, many made false promises to secure final passage.”
“The ACA contains insurance reforms, medical device taxes, pharmaceutical fees, and insurance company
fees that will raise the cost of insurance for millions of individuals, small businesses and households.
This analysis suggests that the insurance tax in isolation will raise premiums by roughly 3 percent. An
important topic for future research is to perform similar analyses for the other cost-raising aspects of the
ACA in order to assess the overall pressure on premiums.”
“So why do Medicaid patients fare so badly? Payment to providers has been reduced to literally pennies on each dollar of customary charges because of sequential rounds of indiscriminate rate cuts, like those now being pursued in states like New York and Illinois. As a result, doctors often cap how many Medicaid patients they’ll see in their practices. Meanwhile, patients can’t get timely access to routine and specialized medical care… President Barack Obama’s health plan follows this logic. Half of those gaining health insurance under ObamaCare will get it through Medicaid.”
“Sandy Chung is grappling with a new kind of request at her pediatrics office in Fairfax, Va.: prescriptions for aspirin and diaper-rash cream.
Patients are demanding doctors’ orders for over-the-counter products because of a provision in the health-care overhaul that slipped past nearly everyone’s radar. It says people who want a tax break to buy such items with what’s known as flexible-spending accounts need to get a prescription first.”
“ObamaCare goes the extra mile by only permitting approaches that are more coercive than itself. Its waiver provisions only apply to that law’s private-insurance provisions, and require states to preserve the law’s price controls prohibiting health rating, to cover the same number of people, and to provide coverage as comprehensive and subsidies as large as the new law does. These restrictions completely bar free-market reforms.”
“Recent district court decisions have fueled speculation over what the Supreme Court will do about ObamaCare if and when one of the challenges to the law’s ‘individual mandate’ arrives on the justices’ doorstep. Largely unnoticed amidst the agitation, though, cases that will have profound effects on ObamaCare’s future are already pending before the Court. They involve enormous amounts of money, and they have powerful implications for the implementation of the criminally misnamed ‘Affordable Care Act.’ The justices will get these cases right, to good effect.”