“Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Medicaid enrollment is expected to grow by 16 million people by 2019, an increase of more than 25 percent. Given the unwillingness of many primary care physicians (PCPs) to treat new Medicaid patients, policy makers and others are concerned about adequate primary care capacity to meet the increased demand. States with the smallest number of PCPs per capita overall—generally in the South and Mountain West—potentially will see the largest percentage increases in Medicaid enrollment, according to a new national study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). In contrast, states with the largest number of PCPs per capita—primarily in the Northeast—will see more modest increases in Medicaid enrollment. Moreover, geographic differences in PCP acceptance of new Medicaid patients reflect differences in overall PCP supply, not geographic differences in PCPs’ willingness to treat Medicaid patients.”
“Our current health care
arrangements have many
flaws, but we should not lose
sight of the many blessings
that come from the life
saving and life lengthening
technologies generated
by the U.S. health care system. Reforming the reforms is
our next task, one that I hope we will approach with more
sobriety and less partisanship than has been our recent
experience.”
“Among Obamacare’s hundreds of pages was tucked a new government-run long-term care program, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Program. CLASS was poorly designed, and actuaries criticized it as being unsustainable well before the passage of ObamaCare. It appears from three recent congressional appearances by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the Obama Administration has caught up with the actuarial analysis.”
“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.”