Audits and investigations into the effects of ObamaCare from congressional committees, government auditors, advocacy groups, and others.
“‘Accountable care organizations’ is the health wonk phrase du jour. Obamacare’s advocates point to its support for ACOs as one of the important cost-control initiatives in the law. Except that, like nearly everything about Obamacare, the truth isn’t so simple. It turns out that the government’s idea of an accountable care organization is completely unworkable, to the point where nearly all leading health providers have declared it dead on arrival.”
“In any event, there is no problem that cannot be made worse when legislators convene. And when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) it definitely made things worse than they otherwise would have been… Here’s one immediate problem: no one knows how to define ‘administration.’ Just as there is no line item in the federal budget called ‘waste fraud and abuse,’ there is also no line item in any organization’s budget called ‘administrative costs.'”
“Investors believe that the government guarantee of millions of customers to health plans will lead to profits. Unfortunately, this optimism is likely unfounded.
ObamaCare distributes federal grants to states that encourage their insurance departments to increase power of prior approval of premium increases.
And the coming wave of political interference will threaten health plans’ very solvency. We already know that such laws do not keep a lid on health costs.”
“President Obama says that his health plan’s popularity will grow once its provisions start being implemented. But peculiar rules tucked into the legislation are likely to make the entire scheme even more disliked as its implementation approaches… The problem is that the actual insurance that health plans offer may be fairly lousy — perhaps just a little better than the typical managed care plan offered under Medicaid. That’s because of the way these insurance products are going to be regulated, and the way they will be priced under the federal scheme.”
“Most American workers value their employer-provided health insurance. It gives them the security of knowing they can get the care they need, from the doctor they want, at a price they can afford.
All that will change drastically if the president’s health care law remains on the books. That’s not just a warning from a conservative Republican – the administration’s own chief actuary of Medicare estimated that more than 14 million people would lose their employer coverage over the next eight years.”
“The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) was created based on the premise that decisions about the pricing of health benefits offered by Medicare are simply too contentious to be adequately handled by our present political system. But these decisions are precisely the kinds of consequential choices that should be subject to close public scrutiny and an open, rigorous, and transparent decision-making process that engages with Medicare’s stakeholders. Changes to the way Medicare pays for and covers medical services affect too many people in significant ways to be made behind the closed doors of an insulated committee.”
“Democrats don’t use such hyperbole, but more than half a dozen have signed on as cosponsors of a bill that would repeal the board. And many more, particularly Democrats in the House, never supported creating the board in the first place… [I]t could end up driving Medicare payments so low that providers will simply leave the program, or else go bankrupt if they can’t.”
“IPAB is fatally flawed, structured to punish innovative health care providers and threaten seniors’ access to care — while leaving the largest sources of Medicare spending untouched. It continues Washington’s obsession with price-fixing in Medicare’s separate ‘silos’ rather than changing the incentives that have led to rampant overspending, fraud and uneven care quality.”
“Clearly, the IPAB is unprecedented in the
power given to unelected officials to direct
hundreds of billions of dollars in federal
spending. The IPAB will give unelected,
unaccountable government appointees the
power to make decisions about payment
policy in Medicare that will ultimately
determine whether millions of seniors have
access to the care they need.”
“No one wants to be ‘average,’ but when it comes to medicine, being treated as an individual takes on a whole different meaning. Every patient’s treatment should be informed by the best evidence and the best science we have, but at the end of the day the best outcomes depend on a doctor using his or her best medical judgment to help the patient sitting in their office — not an abstract ‘average’ patient as defined by large studies that are more designed to cut costs than optimize outcomes.”