Sioux Falls Specialty Hospital in South Dakota is regularly full. Its doctors and nurses often have to work longer hours or perform elective surgeries such as hip or knee replacements on weekends.
“In many cases, patients have to wait forever,” said Dr. R. Blake Curd, an orthopedic surgeon and the hospital’s CEO. “We don’t have the physical capacity to take care of them.”
He would like to expand the hospital by adding beds or rooms, but he isn’t allowed to do so because of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The law largely bans the expansion of hospitals such as Curd’s, which are partly owned by doctors. New physician-owned hospitals also cannot be set up unless they forego government reimbursement from Medicare or Medicaid.
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It’s not a stretch to say that ultimately, keeping Obamacare on the books will take us to a single-payer healthcare system.
Conversely, enactment of the Senate GOP healthcare legislation embraces a vision that empowers individuals and families to make their own healthcare decisions. It will move individuals and families away from government programs and toward private markets. While it doesn’t achieve all the policy goals that the free market movement would like, it takes a huge step in the right direction and puts the nation on a path toward a market-based, consumer-oriented healthcare system.
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Republican senators on Thursday urged Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price to reverse an Obama-era regulation that places restrictions on short-term health insurance plans.
The plans do not contain the same comprehensive list of benefits mandated by Obamacare, instead allowing people to choose what they want covered. The greater the number of provisions, the higher the premiums tend to be.
In a letter to Price, 14 senators asked for the plans to go back to being allowed to cover people for 364 days. Customers are not allowed to be enrolled in short-term plans for more than 90 days because of a regulation created by former President Barack Obama.
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The Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday released a checklist for states that choose to seek waivers from certain Obamacare requirements.
Through the waivers, commonly known as “innovation waivers” or 1332 waivers, states can ask the federal government to allow them to set up high-risk pools, reinsurance programs or another proposal that would reduce costs for customers or allow for more people to be covered.
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Health insurance giant Aetna said Wednesday that it will not be participating in any Obamacare exchanges in 2018.
“Our individual commercial products lost nearly $700 million between 2014 and 2016, and are projected to lose more than $200 million in 2017 despite a significant reduction in membership,” T.J. Crawford, Aetna spokesman, said in an email.
The reason for the losses, he said, came from structural issues within the exchanges “that have led to co-op failures and carrier exits, and subsequent risk pool deterioration.”
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Senate Republicans said Thursday they won’t vote on the House-passed bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, but will write their own legislation instead.
A Senate proposal is now being developed by a 12-member working group. It will attempt to incorporate elements of the House bill, senators said, but will not take up the House bill as a starting point and change it through the amendment process.
“The safest thing to say is there will be a Senate bill, but it will look at what the House has done and see how much of that we can incorporate in a product that works for us in reconciliation,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.
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Health insurers and small businesses are pushing their long-sought goal of abolishing Obamacare’s health insurance tax as lawmakers work to repeal and replace the healthcare law.
The tax is a priority for insurers even as negotiations have centered on the Obamacare repeal bill and federal insurance payments.
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Health information technology regulations have become overly burdensome, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who vowed that the Trump administration would work to spur innovation in the field. This week, he laid out several principles he said would guide the Trump administration on health IT and electronic medical records, saying the administration was committed to promoting the exchange of medical information between providers. “We simply have to do a better job of reducing the burden of health IT on physicians and other providers,” said Price.
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Given the damage wrought by Obamacare, it’s understandable that so many Americans want a comprehensive overhaul of our health sector. But single-payer is one of the few approaches to health policy with a worse track record than Obamacare. What proponents of government-run medicine ignore is that the policy has been an utter disaster everywhere it’s been tried—from Canada, to the UK, to America’s own experiment in single-payer care, the Veterans Health Administration. The only way to ensure that Americans have access to timely, affordable, high-quality care is by creating a competitive healthcare market—not a government healthcare monopoly.
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Republicans have a point that their Obamacare replacement plan is particularly hard for the Congressional Budget Office to score, budget experts say.
The bill, which Democrats are sharply criticizing for its lack of a CBO score, gives states much more leeway in how they would provide — or not provide — health insurance for people. And predicting how states will behave over the next decade is a time-consuming and tricky task for the agency.
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