Audits and investigations into the effects of ObamaCare from congressional committees, government auditors, advocacy groups, and others.
“Around one in 10 employers in the U.S. plans to drop health coverage for workers in the next few years as the bulk of the federal health-care law begins, and more indicated they may do so over time, according to a study to be released Tuesday by consulting company Deloitte.”
“Americans are so focused on the availability of health care provided by the Affordable Care Act that they completely overlook the quality of care they might receive. Government interference, intrusive mandates and cumbersome regulations are making it impossible to continue providing high-quality care.”
“Instead of betting on entrepreneurs, Obamacare assumes that improvements in the delivery of medical care will arise as a result of shifts in market power. This turns on a shortsighted view that once providers are grouped into larger networks, they’ll make wider use of things like information technology to better coordinate the care of patients, in turn lowering costs.”
“Regulations are slowly strangling HSAs. Under Obamacare, “fully insured” policies must spend at least 80 percent (small group and individual market) or 85 percent (large group market) of every premium dollar on health care related expenses (called the medical loss ratio or MLR). The remainder can be spent on administrative costs (improving health care delivery or combating fraud) and profits.”
“ObamaCare has been a war over the processing of insurance claims. It has been fought by institutional interests representing insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical firms. The doctor-patient relationship, or what used to be called ‘the practice of medicine,’ has sunk beneath these waves.”
“When the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in a 5-4 ruling Thursday, the American Medical Association was quick to release a statement in support of the ‘historic’ decision that will give more people access to health coverage.
But (and there’s always a ‘but’) medical professionals across the country are wondering: When an additional 32 million Americans get medical insurance, who exactly is going to treat them?”
“The Affordable Care Act will expand the reach of government into our personal health-care choices, while exacerbating the problems with our current health-care system. Market forces, if allowed to work properly, are the best means for reducing the growth in health costs, encouraging continued innovation, and ensuring that consumers have access to quality health care.”
“IPAB’s unelected members will have effectively unfettered power to impose taxes and ration care for all Americans, whether the government pays their medical bills or not. In some circumstances, just one political party or even one individual would have full command of IPAB’s lawmaking powers. IPAB truly is independent, but in the worst sense of the word. It wields power independent of Congress, independent of the president, independent of the judiciary, and independent of the will of the people.”
“Reviewing peer-reviewed literature on the relationship between medical technology and improvements in life expectancies, Zycher estimates that the knock-on effect of the tax will be about one million life-years lost annually. (Due to limitations in applying the literature, it not possible to tell the degree to which this tilts towards one million people dying one year earlier, or a smaller number of people dying many years earlier. My own interpretation leans towards the latter.)”
“States and the federal government will have to work hard to make sure that new insurance exchanges in President Obama’s healthcare law actually create more competition, a new study says… The Health Affairs study says people in those areas generally pay higher out-of-pocket costs than people in more populated areas with greater competition. ‘If experience with the federal benefits program is an indication of how much competition can be expected in the exchanges, then people obtaining coverage from exchanges will not benefit much from competition unless the exchanges are at least modestly assertive in setting conditions of participation for qualifying health plans,’ the authors wrote.”