“The nation’s highest-profile health care centers—think of the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare or the Geisinger Health System—are the models for the Obama administration’s accountable care organization (ACO) proposal. But officials at those tightly organized institutions have so many concerns with the proposed rule to create ACOs that they doubt that they will participate.”
“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aims for a delicate balance that even its champions acknowledge as highly challenging: Making medical services affordable for tens of millions of uninsured Americans, and yet restraining the expenditures needed to vastly expand coverage so that it shrinks, rather than swells, the looming deficits.”
“Supporters of ObamaCare acknowledge it will have some unintended consequences. Yet surprisingly little attention has been focused on the law’s most problematic provision: government subsidies to help individuals and families purchase health insurance.”
“In 2009, using a PPACA-adjusted MLR
definition, we estimated that 29% of insurer-state
observations in the individual market would have
MLRs below the 80% minimum, corresponding to
32% of total enrollment. Nine states would have
at least one-half of their health insurers below the
threshold. If insurers below the MLR threshold
exit the market, major coverage disruption could
occur for those in poor health; we estimated
the range to be between 104,624 and 158,736
member-years.”
“Why would the president endorse an effort that would seemingly undermine his signature law? Because the provision would actually hasten the country’s progress toward the president’s ultimate goal: a single-payer health care system.”
“The monstrous Obamacare health law was passed by the House of Representatives on March 21, 2010 and signed into law by President Obama nine days later. Nancy Pelosi said that Congress had to pass the law to find out what was in it. Despite a lengthy debate, new details trickle out seemingly daily about the destructive impact of the law. One year later, a group of conservative health policy wonks have banded together to release a book that comes as close as possible to being the authoritative tome on the full impact of Obamacare.”
“On its one-year anniversary, Obamacare’s unpopularity is growing. Its hodgepodge of mandates and regulations have reduced competition in health insurance markets and increased the cost of coverage. Overall, Obamacare has increased government control of Americans’ health care choices and limited consumer choice. The more than 1,000 waivers already granted tacitly acknowledge that Obamacare’s ‘benefits’ are not worth its costs. Congress should replace Obamacare with consumer-focused reforms and sensible changes in health care entitlement programs.”
“Our current health care
arrangements have many
flaws, but we should not lose
sight of the many blessings
that come from the life
saving and life lengthening
technologies generated
by the U.S. health care system. Reforming the reforms is
our next task, one that I hope we will approach with more
sobriety and less partisanship than has been our recent
experience.”
“Ask yourself this question: Can you think of any other industry where low-cost, high-quality production has been achieved by the government running pilot programs? No? Well, if that approach doesn’t work anywhere else, why would you expect health care to be different?”
“ObamaCare goes the extra mile by only permitting approaches that are more coercive than itself. Its waiver provisions only apply to that law’s private-insurance provisions, and require states to preserve the law’s price controls prohibiting health rating, to cover the same number of people, and to provide coverage as comprehensive and subsidies as large as the new law does. These restrictions completely bar free-market reforms.”