“Congressional Republicans investigating last fall’s botched launch of HealthCare.gov revealed Friday that a top Obamacare official had asked her spokeswoman to delete an email from a senior White House advisor that discussed problems with customer service calls about that website.
Those Republicans now want Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner to explain that deletion request, and to reveal if she has asked staff to “delete or otherwise destroy emails, communications or any other documents relating to HealthCare.gov.” The Republicans said the Obama administration has a “pattern” of being unable to preserve records.
Tavenner’s email asking the subordinate to delete an email was turned over to the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week, just a day after her staff told the committee that some copies of her email communications might have been lost.”
“New information related to physician-industry interaction is scheduled to be released to the public for the first time on September 30. The public database from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which is part of the Sunshine Act implementation, will focus on payments that biopharmaceutical and medical technology companies have made to physicians. Although the release date is less than six weeks away, concerns about what the data will look like and its effect on medical innovation are already being brought to light by stakeholders across the board.
One of the primary concerns that PhRMA shares with more than two dozen other patient and industry organizations is that the data needs to include context to explain what the payments represent – collaborations that benefit patient health and innovation. It’s critical to note that the new database will include information on many different types of interactions. For example, the data could reflect an oncologist partnering with a biopharmaceutical company to lead a clinical trial on an innovative cancer treatment or a family practice physician’s attendance at an industry-sponsored speaking event led by a peer to further her education about geriatric care. However, if the data released includes only names and numbers, the public is likely to be confused and the information is left subject to misinterpretation.
Additionally, many physicians are not aware about the Sunshine Act, what it means for them and their ability to be part of this collaborative process. It is important for CMS to provide physicians with more information about their ability to register and review data reported on them.
To compound this lack of information, physicians also face a confusing registration process with a very short timeline. Given how instrumental relationships between companies and physicians are to driving future innovation, we want to ensure that both groups can provide input on the process of Sunshine Act reporting.”
“Next month, when the federal government releases data about payments to physicians from pharmaceutical and medical device makers, one-third of the records will be withheld because of data inconsistencies, an official told ProPublica.
The issue is the latest hurdle for the federal government as it seeks to launch the already-delayed Open Payments database mandated under the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, a provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Making this information public is a crucial step in promoting greater transparency about conflicts of interest in medicine.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services first turned up flaws in the data in the past two weeks, while investigating a physician’s complaint that payments were being attributed to him even though they were made to another physician with the same name. In the process of reviewing that issue, it found “intermingled data,” meaning physicians were being linked to medical license numbers or national provider identification numbers that were not theirs.
“CMS is returning about one-third of submitted records to the manufacturers and [group purchasing organizations] because of intermingled data, and will include these records in the next reporting cycle,” CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said by email. These records won’t be posted until June 2015.”
“Opposition to the 2010 health care law has been above 50 percent for over a year. And that continues to be true, as the latest Fox News national poll finds voters oppose the law by a 52-41 percent margin.
Support for Obamacare has been as high as 43 percent (May 2014) and gone as low as 36 percent (January 2014).
The number opposing the law has ranged from 49 percent (June 2012) to a record-high 59 percent (January 2014).
As in the past, the new poll shows that most Democrats favor Obamacare (74 percent), while most Republicans (84 percent) and independents (61 percent) are against it.
Voters in every age group are more likely to oppose the law than favor it, with one exception: those ages 65 and over. And that group only favors it by two percentage points.”
“Republicans plan to hold a series of votes on repealing ObamaCare if they win control of the Senate in November, according to a report.
The votes would set the tone for a new, GOP-led Congress and create a showdown with President Obama, who would almost certainly veto any legislation rolling back parts of the healthcare law.
“If we won, I think you would see a vote for repeal, and I would vote to repeal the whole thing,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), an expected GOP presidential candidate, told The New York Times.
“I have a feeling he won’t sign that,” Paul said of Obama. “Then you start trying to see what he will sign.”
The Senate will change hands if Republicans score a net gain of six seats in the election — a goal that is difficult, but doable, given the number of incumbent Democrats who are vulnerable this year.
Republicans would also be expected to send legislation to Obama repealing the law’s tax on medical devices and changing the law’s definition of full-time work to 40 hours per week.”
“Fresh Unlimited Inc. won’t have to provide contraceptive coverage for its employees under the Obama administration’s health-care reform law, in what may be the first exemption granted since a June U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
The parent of Freshway Foods today won an appeals court ruling that qualifies it for the same treatment the high court approved in its June 30 Hobby Lobby decision allowing family-run businesses to claim a religious exemption from the requirement to include contraceptives in their health insurance plans.
The suit by Francis and Philip Gilardi, who own Sidney, Ohio-based Freshway, is one of about 50 filed by for-profit businesses over religious objections to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010’s birth-control coverage mandate. The Gilardis are Roman Catholic and said that complying with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandate would require them to violate deeply held religious beliefs.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington in March 2013 ruled against the Gilardis, saying that he couldn’t allow a corporation to assert the religious beliefs of individuals. The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed part of Sullivan’s decision, and the ruling was put on hold pending the Supreme Court’s resolution of the Hobby Lobby case.
In addition to carving a hole in the law, the Hobby Lobby ruling marked an expansion of corporate rights, allowing companies, like people, to claim religious freedom under federal law.”
“James Lansberry didn’t blink an eye when the Supreme Court handed down its Hobby Lobby decision last month.
The vice president of Samaritan Ministries, which provides health coverage for more than 37,000 families nationwide, said even though his organization applauds the decision, “it doesn’t have any effect on us.”
Samaritan Ministries, and other health sharing groups like it, cater to a small-but-growing group of Americans who have chosen to opt out of the Affordable Care Act. Not only do these organizations ignore the contraception mandate, they also bypass nearly all the hallmark provisions of Obamacare.
Dr. Andrea Miller, medical director and vice president of Christian Care Ministries, said “the biggest thing to understand” is these groups do not provide insurance. Instead, they “facilitate the direct sharing of medical cost between people of like beliefs.”
Because of this distinction, the Alliance for Health Care Sharing Ministries successfully lobbied Congress for a religious exemption in 2009. This allows medical sharing groups to provide a form of coverage but dodge the deluge of Obamacare regulations governing the insurance industry.
Lansberry calls this exemption the last “isle of freedom” in health care and a “miracle straight from God’s own hand.””
“Religious liberty has long been considered our “first freedom” in America. So why are we spending so much time defending this freedom in court now?
Many celebrated the Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling on Hobby Lobby. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: Plenty of other challenges are coming for churches, synagogues, mosques and, yes, businesses.
On July 21, President Obama issued an executive order that prohibits federal government contractors from “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” discrimination and forbids “gender identity” discrimination in the employment of federal employees. In a scathing response, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops decried the executive order as “unprecedented and extreme and should be opposed.”
The bishops’ response, authored by Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore and Bishop Richard Malone of Buffalo, asserted that “in the name of forbidding discrimination, this order implements discrimination.” The bishops predicted that “faithful Catholics and many other people of faith will not assent” to the deeply flawed understanding of human sexuality undergirding the order. “As a result, the order will exclude federal contractors precisely on the basis of their religious beliefs,” the bishops said.”
“Two-plus weeks have passed since the D.C. Circuit’s panel decision in Halbig v. Burwell and the Fourth Circuit’s opposite decision in King v. Burwell, a substantially identical case.[1] The King plaintiffs have filed their cert petition; and the government has asked for rehearing en banc in the D.C. Circuit; and the initial agitation has subsided. It’s a fine time to highlight a few lessons that, in my estimation, we have already learned. I offer three sets of observations: today, I’ll focus on the interplay between constitutional and administrative law and on the advocacy network that produced Halbig and its companion cases; tomorrow, I’ll analyze the institutional pathologies and ideological derangements that account for the contretemps.
Constitutional and Other Law. To rehearse the wholly obvious, Halbig is the second frontal legal assault on Obamacare. The first (NFIB v. Sebelius) was directed at its “individual mandate,” and its provision that states refusing to participate in the Act’s Medicaid expansion would forfeit all Medicaid funding. These were high-toned constitutional attacks—the former, on the authority of Congress under the commerce and tax powers; the latter, on its spending authority. I don’t mean to dispute the urgency or righteousness of those lawsuits. They had to be brought, and quickly—even if the only point had been to proclaim that they can’t do this to us, at least not without a fight. Beyond that, NFIB served to demonstrate that constitutional arguments over enumerated powers still cut some ice.
The prevailing response to the Court’s narrow upholding of the mandate as a permissible exercise of the taxing power has been disappointment (or worse). At variance with many of my friends and colleagues, I believe that the Supreme Court’s decision actually produced a positive result on the enumerated powers front. Either way, though, even a full-scale win on the mandate question would have done little beyond turning Obamacare into the no-mandate care system that had been advocated by then-candidate Obama—and which the President has since implemented by waiving and postponing the oh-so-essential mandates for individuals and employers.[2] In operational terms, and even for significant constitutional questions, the individual mandate itself has always been a side show.”
“It’s one thing for President Obama to win an award for “Lie of the Year” for promising Americans “if you like your [health insurance] plan, you can keep it.” It must sting a bit more when a political ally like Barney Frank, the former congressman, flat out says the president “just lied to people.”
In an interview with Huffington Post, the veteran Massachusetts Democrat said he was “appalled” at the “bad” rollout of Obamacare last October.
“I don’t understand how the president could have sat there and not been checking on that on a weekly basis,” Frank said, then added:
But, frankly, he should never have said as much as he did, that if you like your current health care plan, you can keep it. That wasn’t true. And you shouldn’t lie to people. And they just lied to people.””