President Obama pitched his plan to take-over the health care system with frequent reference to research showing that much of the federal spending on health care is being wasted and could be redirected to his new entitlement programs without any loss in quality or access, but new research is showing that those claims might have been wishful thinking.
The Federal government was given broad discretion to implement regulations limiting the profits of insurance companies by regulating their “medical loss ratio,” but a board of state insurance regulators missed a key deadline to provide guidance to HHS which could delay implementation and cause uncertainty for insurers and businesses.
Funding to cover the uninsured in state-based, high risk pools until the new insurance subsidies are rolled out is woefully inadequate and would cover less than 10 percent of those eligible, according to studies.
The association for physician-owned hospitals filed suit against the government, claiming that the ObamaCare provision preventing them from expanding is arbitrary and violates their Constitutional rights to due process and equal protection.
“The President repeatedly promised that if you liked your health plan, you would be able to keep it. Nothing would change. Fat chance.”
“The Hill writes, ‘A plurality of Americans said they would prefer Republicans to leave the new healthcare law alone and not repeal any parts of it, a new poll found Tuesday.’…But the poll, conducted by Vanity Fair and ’60 Minutes,’ did nothing of the sort.”
The administration’s inability to meet several ObamaCare deadlines, including a deadline for simply publishing a list of its own new authorities under the overhaul, does not inspire confidence in its capacity to manage a sixth of the economy.
“The Veterans Health Administration shows how incompetent the federal government is when it comes to making medicine a patient-centered enterprise.”
“Kaiser Health Network’s Julie Appleby has a story in today’s Washington Post on the ‘foursome of longtime industry watchdogs’ who will be leading the health bill’s implementation efforts at [HHS’s] new Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight…headed by former Missouri insurance commissioner Jay Angoff. Bob Goldberg recently profiled Angoff in the American Spectator, observing that ‘Angoff’s tenure in both Missouri and New Jersey is associated with driving out health insurers and driving premiums sky high.'”
ObamaCare is poised to become another runaway entitlement program. Once the Congressional Budget Office’s cost-estimate is adjusted to reflect things for which it wasn’t allowed to make allowances — such as the omission of the “doc fix,” the CLASS Act gimmick, and the double-counting of money siphoned out of Medicare — it is clear that ObamaCare would raise costs, raise deficits, and reduce access to high-quality care for millions of Medicare recipients and other Americans.