“One year ago today, the then-Democratic House of Representatives openly disregarded the cool and deliberate sense of the people and rammed Obamacare down the American people’s throats. At the time, the Democrats claimed that their bill would become more popular once Americans found out what was in it (a process that, as Democrats explained, required passing it). A year later, polls show that Obamacare’s popularity has declined even further.”
“House Democrats held a birthday party last week for passage of the health-care law. Just as we looked at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s floor speech noting the milestone, we will now examine some of the claims made by Democrats…
By contrast, House Democrats appear to show little hesitation about repeating claims that previously have found to be false or exaggerated. So let’s take a tour through the numbers.”
“One year ago today, the House of Representatives approved the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which had passed the Senate the previous Christmas Eve — at four in the morning, by one vote. Two days later, President Barack Obama signed the measure. Those three steps are usually enough to transform a bill into a permanent fixture of U.S. law. But this was no ordinary bill.”
“Already facing a challenging budget picture, Texas received more bad budgetary news with the release of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s study Final Notice: Medicaid Crisis, A Forecast of Texas’ Medicaid Expenditures Growth.
The study by Jagadeesh Gokhale, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, warns President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will vastly increase the amount of money states have to spend on their Medicaid budgets.”
“On its one-year anniversary, Obamacare’s unpopularity is growing. Its hodgepodge of mandates and regulations have reduced competition in health insurance markets and increased the cost of coverage. Overall, Obamacare has increased government control of Americans’ health care choices and limited consumer choice. The more than 1,000 waivers already granted tacitly acknowledge that Obamacare’s ‘benefits’ are not worth its costs. Congress should replace Obamacare with consumer-focused reforms and sensible changes in health care entitlement programs.”
“States in the South and Mountain West, which traditionally have the lowest rates of primary care physicians, could struggle to provide medical services to the surge of new patients expected to enroll in Medicaid under the health overhaul and federal incentives may not provide much help, according to a report issued today by a Washington health research group.”
“My critics say that I’m ‘cynical’ because I say that Medicaid’s reimbursement rates are too low, and yet oppose spending more money that we don’t have. This is a false dichotomy. There are a lot of things we can do to make Medicaid more cost-efficient: starting with converting the program into block grants for the states, and letting states focus on fully funding care for the truly needy.”
“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.”