“The real problem, according to a new survey from the American College of Emergency Physicians, isn’t caused by people who don’t have insurance — it’s caused by people who do, but still can’t find a doctor to treat them.
A full 97 percent of ER doctors who responded to the ACEP survey said they treated patients ‘daily’ who have Medicaid (the federal-state health plan for the low-income), but who can’t find a doctors who will accept their insurance.”
“In 2012, Obamacare will create the ‘Value-Based Purchasing Program’ in Medicare. Using a pay-for-performance scheme, the program will reimburse hospitals and other health care providers at different rates based on how they score on performance measures chosen by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Proponents of pay-for-performance see it as a way to use financial incentives to streamline and improve the quality of health care while attempting to reduce costs. But the fact is that standardization of the practice of medicine costs patients and physicians tremendously, and evidence shows it does very little to improve health outcomes.”
“President Obama’s plan for budget reform is to freeze these entitlement programs in their current arrangements and tinker at the margins — through, for instance, giving more power to Medicare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board or applying price controls to drugs sold through Medicare.
Along with higher taxes for high earners (families making $250,000 and up) and defense cuts, Obama’s deficit-reduction plan offers little innovation.
If Obama’s plan prevails, and these programs aren’t fundamentally reformed, poor and elderly Americans who depend on these programs will likely face much larger cuts in the future.”
“The problem is common here and across the country, especially as states, scrambling to balance their budgets, look for cuts in Medicaid, which is one of their biggest expenditures. And it presents the Obama administration with a major challenge, since the new federal health care law relies heavily on Medicaid to cover many people who now lack health insurance.”
“Contrary to federal government promises, ObamaCare will move Louisiana residents off their private insurance and further inflate Medicaid costs, as a new study shows.”
“A new article in Health Affairs brings attention to the problem of ‘churning’ in the eligibility requirements for subsidized ObamaCare. The study by Benjamin Sommers and Sara Rosenbaum looks at how often people will fall in and out of eligibility for, on one hand, Medicaid for people up to 133% of the poverty level, and on the other hand, subsidized coverage for those up to 400% of poverty in the Exchange.”
“Bottom line: after we get through 10 years of spending our $1 trillion under ObamaCare, there is no convincing reason to believe that the bottom half of the income distribution will have more care, better care, or better access to care than they have today.”
“Already facing a challenging budget picture, Texas received more bad budgetary news with the release of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s study Final Notice: Medicaid Crisis, A Forecast of Texas’ Medicaid Expenditures Growth.
The study by Jagadeesh Gokhale, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, warns President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will vastly increase the amount of money states have to spend on their Medicaid budgets.”
“States in the South and Mountain West, which traditionally have the lowest rates of primary care physicians, could struggle to provide medical services to the surge of new patients expected to enroll in Medicaid under the health overhaul and federal incentives may not provide much help, according to a report issued today by a Washington health research group.”
“My critics say that I’m ‘cynical’ because I say that Medicaid’s reimbursement rates are too low, and yet oppose spending more money that we don’t have. This is a false dichotomy. There are a lot of things we can do to make Medicaid more cost-efficient: starting with converting the program into block grants for the states, and letting states focus on fully funding care for the truly needy.”