“President Obama likes to say his campaign is about building up the middle class, but his signature initiative in office — ObamaCare — will pile thousands of dollars in new taxes and higher health costs on top of America’s middle class. How so? Through redistribution, of course. The president has made no secret of his fondness for using the government’s tax and spending powers to spread our diminished wealth around from one group of Americans to another. And ObamaCare is nothing if not a massive redistribution machine.”
“Citing Obamacare, the Infirmary Health System this afternoon announced it would close its Infirmary West Hospital on Girby Road by the end of the month. Mark Nix, the president and CEO of the Infirmary Health, said in a prepared statement that officials decided to close the 124-bed hospital after a yearlong evaluation.”
“During oral arguments in the Supreme Court challenge to the individual mandate, NFIB v. Sebelius, the plaintiff’s lawyer Paul Clement warned the justices not to make the same mistake they made in the 1970s with Buckley v. Valeo. In Buckley, the Court upheld portions of the post-Watergate campaign-finance reforms while invalidating others. The result was a muddled statute that Congress and the courts would repeatedly revisit for years to come. Repeating this approach with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Clement cautioned, could produce similar undesirable results. It’s too soon to know how quickly Congress will revisit the PPACA, but Clement’s warning already seems to be coming true in the courts.”
“We are about to spend $1.8 trillion over the next ten years insuring about 32 million people. About half of the newly insured will go into Medicaid and half will get private insurance. If the above chart is to be believed, which half you’re in makes a real difference. That tiny little sliver of difference between the green line and the red line is the differential survival between those who are uninsured and those who are in Medicaid. Even after five years, the differential survival is a little more than 1%.”
“As the state’s largest safety net hospital, Hennepin treats a disproportionately large number of patients who cannot pay for some or all of their care. For more than 20 years, hospitals have relied on subsidies provided by the federal government to help defray those costs. But that funding is set to decline starting in 2014 with the full implementation of the federal health law.”
“A provision in the national health-care law that lets young adults stay on their parents’ insurance plan is popular with many families—but not ones in the military. Families covered by Tricare, the health program for active and retired members of the military, must pay as much as $200 a month to let an adult child stay on their plan until age 26. Most families in private plans now pay no fee to extend such coverage. Military families are starting to complain about the disparity, saying they can’t afford those premiums and have let their children go uninsured.”
“Leaders of the deeply conservative state say that even if Mississippi receives boatloads of cash under President Barack Obama’s health care law, it can’t afford the corresponding share of state money it will have to put up to add hundreds of thousands of people to the government health insurance program for the poor.”
“A state-run health insurance exchange is unlikely to be ready for a scheduled January 2014 rollout, Pennsylvania’s top insurance regulator said Wednesday. Insurance Commissioner Michael Consedine said development of the online exchange—a key element of the federal Affordable Care Act—has stalled because too many questions about its cost and other operational details remain unanswered by the federal government.”
“In fact, if the president makes no appointments, or the Senate rejects the president’s appointees, then all of IPAB’s considerable powers fall to one person: the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The HHS secretary would effectively become an economic dictator, with more power over the health care sector than any chamber of Congress.”
“President Obama’s plan to control Medicare spending — an expert board of cost-cutters — might have trouble even coming into existence. Obama and Mitt Romney spent a lot of time during Wednesday’s debate talking about the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a 15-member panel tasked with slowing the growth in Medicare spending.”