“PhRMA saw the health care overhaul as a chance to advance its long-term interests and played along. But funny enough, it now seems that the White House is not all that interested in holding up its end of the bargain. President Obama’s recent speech on the debt included proposals that would violate the agreement.”
“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) creates federal ‘accountable care organizations’ (ACOs). In theory, ACOs provide financial incentives to health care organizations to reduce costs and improve quality. In reality, given the complexity of the existing system, ACOs will not only fail; they will most likely exacerbate the very problems they set out to fix. ACOs will concentrate more and more power in fewer and fewer organizations, allowing them to become ‘too large to fail.’ Such a system undermines competition and entrepreneurship—the bedrock of innovation and job growth in this country.”
“There’s ample evidence in the literature that physician productivity declines when doctors become owned employees rather than entrepreneurs. How then will the new marketplace that ObamaCare creates deliver efficiencies is downright quizzical.”
“I am convinced that ObamaCare was designed to lead to a government takeover of our entire health-care system, which is one-sixth of our economy. As I traveled around Wisconsin in the last year, I asked thousands of people a simple question: ‘Do you think the federal government has the capability of running one-sixth of our economy?’ Only two people ever raised their hands.”
“If the United States is going to remain the global forerunner in medical innovation, serious change is needed. The federal government needs to support, rather than impede, development. But even as it seeks to do this, new taxes on the industry under Obamacare will not only slow medical innovation in the United States but force it—and the jobs it has created—overseas. This is hardly a recipe for ‘winning the future.'”
“As in lots of large, unwieldy industries-such as hospitals–innovation often happens outside large, incumbent operators. ObamaCare makes competition with entrenched market actors more difficult. It will discourage experimentation with new, entrepreneurial business models in medical care. As such, ObamaCare is shaping up to be an innovation killer-something the Congress may want to consider as it mulls further changes to the nation’s health care system.”
“The most significant change is a wave of frantic consolidation in the health industry. Because the law mandates that insurers accept all patients regardless of pre-existing conditions, insurers will not make money with their current premium and provider-payment structures. As a result, they have already started to raise premiums and cut payments to doctors and hospitals. Smaller and weaker insurers are being forced to sell themselves to larger entities.”
“These taxes and fees are less important than the implications of the law’s gargantuan reordering of the pharmaceutical marketplace. Over the long term, Obamacare will cause a significant degradation of the private-sector market for pharmaceuticals, a market that has been the best in the world.”
“The Obama administration envisions accountable care organizations (ACOs) as the drivers of health care innovation, but such innovation has historically come from entrepreneurs in the private sector.
ACOs offer financial incentives to cut costs, but this means restricting patient choice and limiting the use of some expensive care.
The ACO concept is not new. Similar ideas have been tried before, but they failed because they were unable to control costs or manage medical risk.”
“The Obama Administration’s healthcare proposals continue to rob Peter to pay Paul with dangerous
consequences for the America’s healthcare system. First, the President failed to address the Medicare
physician reimbursement problem with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Now the
President is proposing a two year doc fix that shifts care access problems from the elderly to the poor,
undermines drug innovation, and further relies on unproven cost savings that will likely just add to the
federal budget deficit.”