“States and the federal government will have to work hard to make sure that new insurance exchanges in President Obama’s healthcare law actually create more competition, a new study says… The Health Affairs study says people in those areas generally pay higher out-of-pocket costs than people in more populated areas with greater competition. ‘If experience with the federal benefits program is an indication of how much competition can be expected in the exchanges, then people obtaining coverage from exchanges will not benefit much from competition unless the exchanges are at least modestly assertive in setting conditions of participation for qualifying health plans,’ the authors wrote.”
“The Health and Human Services Department has missed nearly half of its legal deadlines while implementing President Obama’s healthcare law, according to an analysis by the American Action Forum. HHS has faced 42 statutory deadlines in the roughly two years since the Affordable Care Act became law — and it missed 20 of them, according to the AAF’s count.”
“Early this year, I was briefly involved with one of the Affordable Care Act’s bureaucracies called the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, or CMMI. Despite its lofty ideals, it is one more pork program and venue for political cronyism, as I learned firsthand.”
“Perhaps you thought that the Affordable Care Act is all about making insurance more affordable. Too bad no one told Americans that the law also turned the Health and Human Services Department into a giant venture capital investor for health care. This won’t turn out well. Awash in ObamaCare dollars, HHS has a growing investment portfolio that includes everything from new insurance companies to health-care start-ups to information technology.”
“There is bipartisan concern that the IPAB could harm Medicare and limit access to care for seniors. The IPAB is a panel of 15 unelected, unaccountable government bureaucrats empowered to ‘reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending.’ In the text of the healthcare law, it states that while the law prohibits ‘any recommendation to ration health care,’ it does not prohibit slashing payments to physicians and other medical providers.”