“The top-down federal approach to health care reform assaults the traditional state role in insurance regulation, squashes innovation, and undermines real choice and competition. PPACA is thus a bad deal for states, reducing them to mere agents of federal health and insurance policy. They could not make full use of their comparative advantages in coping with very different insurance markets, mending the safety net care for the poorest and most vulnerable of their citizens with new policies, or undertaking imaginative reforms without getting a permission slip from Washington.”
“Hayek’s most famous insight, about the indispensible informational function of the price mechanism, in his most famous paper, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, comes in the course of an argument to the effect that central economic planning boards are bound to fail. On it’s face, it’s hard to agree that the Affordable Care Act does much to incorporate the fundamental Hayekian lesson when one of its key provisions is the establishment of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a sort of central price-setting committee thought by its advocates necessary to contain the runaway cost of the American health-care system.”
“Calling these rules ‘consumer protections’ implies that the people harmed don’t matter, or one has clairvoyance to know that the benefits outweigh the costs.
ObamaCare supporters should call these supposed consumer protections what they are: regulations that can hurt even more than they help.”
“In fact—if we may use that term without PolitiFact’s seal of approval—at the heart of ObamaCare is a vast expansion of federal control over how U.S. health care is financed, and thus delivered. The regulations that PolitiFact waves off are designed to convert insurers into government contractors in the business of fulfilling political demands, with enormous implications for the future of U.S. medicine. All citizens will be required to pay into this system, regardless of their individual needs or preferences. Sounds like a government takeover to us.”
“Rising entitlement spending is already driving the federal budget off a cliff. But Obamacare would add fuel to the fire with the largest entitlement expansion since the 1960s. So it takes a special kind of audacity for Obamacare’s apologists to continue to insist that the new law will cut the projected budget deficits. Evidence clearly shows otherwise.”
“The recently enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aims to transform regulation of private health insurance. It would put in place a new federal regulatory regime that prescribes various mandates for covered benefits, imposes tighter restrictions on insurance premiums, sets limits on how premium dollars are spent, and exerts much greater political and bureaucratic control over health insurance.”
“The healthcare reform law flunks the test of real healthcare reform. Real reform would: encourage providers to offer higher-quality care at lower costs; reduce the cost pressures that threaten to bankrupt Medicare and Medicaid; and give every American access to more options for quality insurance. To enact real healthcare reform, and help to restore fiscal balance to the nation’s budget, the next Congress should pursue substantial changes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). We recommend the following five healthcare objectives for the 112th Congress.”
“Liberal consumer groups are aghast to learn that the Obama health team are really monopolists at heart, bent on handing hospitals a cartel in their local markets. Sunday’s New York Times report on this horror confirms what I wrote about in these pages weeks ago… I warned that the creation of ‘accountable care organizations,’ which put hospitals in control of all the doctors in their outlying areas, would lead to concentrated power over the provision of medical care–turning physicians into salaried employees and reducing consumer choices.”
“My conversations lead me to believe that many people are expecting that the plans offered in the exchanges will be Medicare-like in many ways. I feel like many people think they will have choice of doctor, choice of hospital, and the ability to dictate care. I’m not seeing how insurance companies will be able to offer such products at prices people can afford. As I talk to more and more people in the insurance industry, my thoughts seem confirmed. I may be wrong, but I think it’s worth addressing. Mistaken expectations have been, and continue to be, a real problem in health care reform.”
“Congress must repeal the new law. Congress cannot build sound market-based health care reform on the PPACA foundation, which is utterly incompatible with a health care system based on consumer choice and free markets.”