“Starting on Oct. 1, 2012, Medicare payments for hospitals with high readmission rates for certain conditions, including heart failure, will be reduced. This means Obamacare may actually punish hospitals and physicians for providing better quality care. As Dr. Eiran Z. Gorodeski of the Cleveland Clinic put it, ‘I think that the message to patients and the general public is that they should be wary of seemingly simple measures of quality of care.’ There’s also a message here for lawmakers: health care is too large and complex to expect central planning to yield positive results. Unfortunately, the passage of Obamacare and the recent recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick as Medicare head only move the U.S. further in that direction.”
“Indiana’s Medicaid chief told lawmakers Thursday that the federal government has largely left states in the dark on implementing the federal health care overhaul because it hasn’t yet provided needed guidelines. Medicaid Director Pat Casanova told the Health Finance Commission that key parts of the overhaul take effect in 2014 — about 3 1/2 years away — but states will need several years to pass their own rules and implement the overhaul.”
Medicare is an enormous, unfunded liability for the government. Medicare reform was urgently needed before ObamaCare’s passage, and the law was supposed to have addressed those problems. But instead of improving the program, and the country’s fiscal outlook, ObamaCare used the same failed policy changes tried over the last 20 years.
“The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the PPACA will add 16 million new individuals to Medicaid. And that almost certainly means many, many more emergency room visits. ObamaCare was sold as a way to ease America’s health care burdens. Instead, it looks more and more like its legacy will be to increase the strain on a broken system.”