“Abbott Laboratories, maker of the rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira, said it will cut about 1,900 jobs as part of a restructuring of its pharmaceutical business. The cuts, amounting to 2 percent of the workforce, will help the Abbott Park, Illinois-based company cope with the U.S. health-care law passed last year, Abbott said in a statement today.”
“The government’s chief actuary for Medicare spending on Wednesday said he had more confidence that Republican Paul Ryan’s plan to reform entitlements would drive down health-care costs than President Obama’s recently passed overhaul.”
“The long-term care pharmacy lobby says a proposed regulation that aims to reduce waste would end up raising prices for the Medicare Part D prescription program and taxpayers with little benefit to show for it.”
“When government controls so much of health spending, it can quash investments in innovation and interfere with the natural processes of scientific investigation by denying payment and therefore blocking access to its huge markets. Many investigations are better than one centralized government body in determining whether a product is efficacious. Governments too often make decisions in silos. Integrated private plans are more likely to see the overall benefit of paying for a costly drug to avert an even more expensive hospitalization.”
“Parente offers a clear, market-oriented alternative to the current centralized health-IT procurement approach, which is supplemented with insufficient bribes and penalties to achieve private-sector compliance with interoperability standards. He concludes that this more practical “back to the future” path to harnessing health information in real time can deliver
long-overdue dividends in medical-fraud control, insurance-coverage administration and underwriting, and improved health care quality.”
ObamaCare is filled with perverse incentives and unintended consequences which will lead to declining patient care. “Consumer advocates fear that the health care law could worsen some of the very problems it was meant to solve — by reducing competition, driving up costs and creating incentives for doctors and hospitals to stint on care, in order to retain their cost-saving bonuses.”
ObamaCare levies a $20 billion tax on medical device companies, which will reduce incentives for innovation and raise the cost of care. It will likely be one of the first targets for repeal.
ObamaCare is paid for partly with new taxes on health firms, especially medical device manufacturers and drug companies. These taxes will discourage medical innovation and drive up the cost of care.
“Patient choice looks to be the first casualty of Obamacare. The new healthcare law gives the federal government unprecedented control over medical decisions. And one bureaucrat in particular looks to be leading the crusade for more public power: Dr. Donald Berwick, the new director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS may be obscure. But it wields enormous influence over the availability of treatments. If CMS decides a treatment isn’t worth its price, public insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid will stop covering it, and patients will lose access to the treatment.”
“The turn toward consolidation among insurance companies is not new, and neither is it among doctors, hospitals and other providers. Yet the health bill has accelerated these trends, as all sides race to anticipate and manage political risk and regulatory uncertainty. This dynamic is leading to much larger hospital systems and physician groups, and fewer insurers dominated by a handful of national conglomerates. ObamaCare was sold using the language of choice and competition, but it is actually reducing both.”