“Since the mid-1980s, medical inflation has outpaced all other inflation by an ever-increasing margin. While many factors play into this phenomenon, Obamacare fails to address the drivers of excessive and continuous price increases for medical goods and services. By shifting costs to government and taxpayers and by increasing overall U.S. health-care spending, Obamacare will, by its own standards, fail to control health-care costs.”
“President Obama often claims he wants to cut the budget smartly, using a “scalpel”—not a meat axe, machete, cleaver or chainsaw, to list a few of his favorite metaphors. He’ll need a more inspired term to describe what he’s now doing to Medicare Advantage, perhaps napalm or WMD. The Affordable Care Act drained $306 billion from this growing version of Medicare that 29% of seniors use to escape the traditional entitlement and obtain modern private insurance, but the Administration is imposing the cuts in ways that are even more harmful than the law requires.”
“It turns out President Obama was right when he said his health care law wouldn’t add one dime to the federal deficit.1 Figures from the Government Accountability Office suggest that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will in fact add 62 trillion dimes over the next 75 years.”
“Wellness programs do not appear to lower overall healthcare costs, a new study shows, leading researchers to conclude the Affordable Care Act’s wellness program incentives won’t significantly reduce healthcare spending. The study, published Monday in the journal Health Affairs, looked at a wellness program launched in 2005 by the St. Louis-based BJC Healthcare hospital system, which required employees wanting access to the system’s most generous health plan to participate in the program.”
“Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Wednesday that he will object to a government spending bill if it does not cut off funds for President Obama’s signature healthcare law. Cruz, a staunchly conservative freshman, said he will offer an amendment to delay the flow of funds to implement the healthcare law when the Senate takes up a continuing resolution to fund the federal government.”
“The Pioneer accountable care organizations have asked the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to revise quality benchmarks the ACOs have to meet to qualify for Medicare bonuses, threatening to drop out of the program otherwise. The Pioneer ACOs note 19 of 31 quality measures were set without anchoring methodology, reflecting a lack of data, according to a letter sent Feb. 25 and posted online by The Washington Post.”
“But the quality measures built into ObamaCare’s ACOs aren’t working so well yet either. Indeed, last week, virtually all of the health providers that Medicare has dubbed ‘Pioneer ACOs’—the program’s leaders and examples—sent a letter to Medicare officials overseeing the program in which they threatened to drop out. The reason is that the Pioneers feel that the performance and quality metrics aren’t up to snuff—and the data doesn’t yet exist to determine what the metrics should look like.”
“When Obamacare was being debated 2009, proponents banked heavily on its transformative potential. When skeptics caviled about the costs, the reformers pointed out that there were all sorts of pilots, and delivery system reforms like these ACO demonstration projects, that hadn’t gotten scored as cost-saving by the Congressional Budget Office… So far, pretty much every one of those promised improvements has underwhelmed, and the skeptics have been vindicated.”
“The GAO has been issuing warnings about ObamaCare’s shaky budget assumptions for a while now, but this is the first time it’s put a concrete number against it. Still, bad as this $6.2 trillion deficit boost is, the real figure is likely to be much higher, since the GAO is still being far too optimistic about the rest of ObamaCare. Here are five big assumptions the GAO makes that aren’t likely to hold true.”
“Under a different set of assumptions, the law has the opposite effect over time, the GAO said — the deficit will increase by 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) if the law’s cost-containment measures are phased out. The report attributed this potential increase in part to the law’s most expensive features — the Medicaid expansion and the provision of insurance subsidies.”