One of the myths that always needs bursting is that Big Business hates big government’ regulations, and supposedly prefers small-government Republicans to keep Uncle Sam off its back.
In reality, Big Business loves Big Government because mega-corporations can use their lobbying clout to get subsidies for themselves and regulatory burdens on their rivals.
But it is a basic reality that heavy regulations hurt smaller companies more, even when they are, in theory, applied evenly. Big companies can absorb expenses and compliance costs more easily, they tend to be more adaptable, and they can afford the analytical firepower to find profit opportunities hidden in complex regulatory mazes.
The latest demonstration of the principle is ObamaCare, which is absolutely devastating small insurance companies, and driving those fabled insurance co-ops out of business like lemmings marching off the edge of a cliff… but the biggest of the big players are doing fine.
In fact, as The Economist notes, even though the biggest of the big five companies, UnitedHealthcare, is having serious second thoughts about losing money on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, the share prices of those top five companies – also including Aetna, Humana, Cigna, and Anthem – “have all roughly tripled over the past five years,” as these companies have remained “consistently and highly profitable.” All of them are expected to report record profits over the next few years.
“With the Affordable Care Act crumbling, progressive activists are all but guaranteed to grab the opportunity that this single-payer ballot measure represents. But if Coloradans truly want better health care at a lower cost for more people, they shouldn’t vote for another one-size-fits-all government program. They should vote for proposals—and politicians—that will give patients more choices.”
Make no mistake. The government meddling into private insurance is the essence of ObamaCare–removing competition, mandating coverages that many don’t need, and forcing people to choose from a roster of compliant doctors. The government completely taking over health care will only make things more impersonal and bureaucratic. It SOUNDS compassionate, but will be anything but.
Don’t Let ObamaCare’s Failures Snowball Into Single Payer
Coloradans, hit hard by the law, are being pushed toward a state takeover of their health insurance.
By
NATHAN NASCIMENTO
Dec. 11, 2015 6:25 p.m. ET
Like an avalanche, the Affordable Care Act has swept through the Rocky Mountain State, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. At the end of 2013, 335,000 cancellation notices went out to customers whose plans were now deemed illegal by federal regulators. Nearly 200,000 cancellations for the same reason will come at the end of this year. As for Colorado HealthOP, the state’s co-op, which was the largest insurer on the ObamaCare exchange, it shut down in October, leaving more than 80,000 members without coverage. Huge premium increases loom for the remaining exchange plans: an average of 11.7%, according to the state’s calculation.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that many Coloradans want to abandon ObamaCare and replace it with something new. What’s worrying is that the state’s liberals and progressives have been mobilizing to replace it with a single-payer system, like the ones in Canada or the United Kingdom. On Nov. 9, after more than 100,000 voters had signed a petition in support of the idea, the secretary of state’s office announced that a single-payer proposal will appear on the 2016 ballot. “ColoradoCare,” as it is being called, would replace private insurance with health care funded completely by the government, substituting higher taxes for premiums.
But one state has already tried, and failed, to implement such a scheme. In 2010 Vermont voters elected Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, who promised to institute single payer in lieu of ObamaCare. Helping design the system were advisers such as Jonathan Gruber,the MIT economist often described as the architect of ObamaCare, and William Hsiao,the Harvard economist who developed the Medicare price controls that are driving up prices around the country.
Democrats gained the political muscle to push the Affordable Care Act (ACA) through Congress on three basic arguments.
First, they argued that the United States had too many uninsured people, with estimates ranging from 30 million to 45 million.
Second, the rise in costs for health care outstripped inflation, and the market required an intervention that would bend the cost curve downward.
Third, Democrats claimed that insurance companies made too much profit and shorted most consumers on care, while those with generous health plans – so-called “Cadillac plans” – drove up utilization rates and costs for everyone else.
The only solution for these ills was a massive government intervention, complete with mandates for all participants in the market, including providers, insurers, and consumers. Once government ran this market, Democrats promised, consumers would see their premiums decrease (by $2,500 a year, according to Barack Obama), insurers would gain access to vast numbers of new consumers who couldn’t get insurance before, and the lifting of cost burdens would spark a job-creation surge that would lift the economy.
Such were the promises of Obamacare five years ago. The reality began looking much different in the fall of 2013, when the first open-enrollment period turned into a disaster. Millions of insurance policies were canceled even though the health care exchanges failed to work properly.
In 2014, premiums spiked, and then in 2015 they exploded again along with deductibles so high that many decided not to be insured at all. Over half of Obamacare’s co-ops collapsed this year, most of them this fall, and now the providers who took their clients may end up stuck with the bills.
“Health care providers could get stuck with unpaid bills in a half dozen states where co-op plans have collapsed,” reports Politico Pro’s Paul Demko. “That’s because there’s no financial backstop in those states if the failed nonprofit startups backed by Obamacare loans run out of money before paying off all of their medical claims.” The failure of the co-op Health Republic Insurance of New York left $165 million in unpaid bills, and a survey showed 64 percent of New York providers waiting for payment. Had a private-sector insurer defaulted in a similar manner, these providers would have been compensated from a guaranty fund set up by the industry.
Obamacare co-ops had no such backstop, and more than 600,000 Americans will have to find insurance that is more expensive or do without.
Still, as bad as the news has been over the past five years, the remaining illusions were shattered by the CBO and the White House itself this week. Obamacare didn’t make much of a dent in the uninsured rate, it has forced costs to rise faster than before, and it will kill millions of jobs that otherwise would be created.
“The labor force is projected to be about 2 million full-time-equivalent workers smaller in 2025 under the ACA than it would have been otherwise,” the CBO concludes in the latest analysis of Obamacare’s impact on the economy. Much of the reason — the CBO puts it at 75 percent — comes from the net increase of effective tax rates on labor, which will incentivize potential workers to stay out of the work force. Democrats claim that this is a feature rather than a bug, as people can choose not to work. However, even with that rose-colored glasses view, it means that the rest of the taxpayers will have to subsidize the health care of those who opt out, whether happily or unhappily.
The depressing impact on job growth is not the only illusion shattered, either. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) published a study on Obamacare’s impact on costs and on reducing the numbers of uninsured — and it fails on both counts. The CBO estimated after the passage of Obamacare that the number of uninsured would drop 19 million by 2014 from a 2010 benchmark. Instead, it has only dropped 12.6 million. As Avik Roy points out at Forbes , the 2010 level of uninsured was artificially high due to the impact of the Great Recession. Using 2008 as a benchmark, the number of uninsured has dropped by only 6.7 million.
“As attackers discover new methods to make money, the healthcare industry is becoming a much riper target because of the ability to sell large batches of personal data for profit,” said Dave Kennedy, an expert on healthcare security and CEO of TrustedSEC LLC. “Hospitals have low security, so it’s relatively easy for these hackers to get a large amount of personal data for medical fraud.”
“One method that can help stop electronic medical records theft is to seek out a physician that uses paper records. Orient suggests asking health care providers which system is used before agreeing to treatment.”
Medical records worth more on black market than credit card numbers
By soaznewsx on December 7, 2015
By Harry Alexander / SoAzNewsX
For many years the public has been warned about credit card and identity theft. The public has also been deluged with advertising from companies that pledge they can keep your personal information safe from hackers.
Indeed, while credit card number theft and identity theft is important, there is another type of personal identity theft that seems to go unreported in the mainstream media.
Medical records theft and Medicare fraud.
Dr. Jane Orient, the Executive Director of the American Assoication of Physicians and Surgeons, said on the Dec. 5 Inside Track radio program that medical records theft is rampant. One of the topics was electronic medical records.
“Anybody who does healthcare treatment, operations, or claims payment has legitimate access to those records,” she said. And, those are the records that can be hacked or even stolen by medical personnel wanting to make some money on the side, she said.
President Obama has been hammered for his failure on ISIS in the wake of the Paris attacks. But there’s at least bitzcelt / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-NDone bright spot for him in that criticism: At least it deflected the spotlight from the unfolding catastrophe that is Obamacare.
Indeed, last month brought arguably the worst news for the program since the healthcare.gov debacle: UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, announced that it might quit Obamacare’s exchanges next year. Should UnitedHealthcare act on this threat, there may not be enough (red) tape in the desk drawer of even future President Hillary Clinton to put the Obamacare Humpty Dumpty back together again.
United announced during an investor briefing Thursday that it was expecting a whopping $425 million hit on its earnings this year, primarily due to mounting losses on its Obamacare exchange business. “We cannot sustain these losses,” United CEO Stephen Hensley declared. “We can’t really subsidize a marketplace that doesn’t appear at the moment to be sustaining itself.”
Avik Roy, who serves as GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s health care advisor, suspects United may just be the first domino to fall. Other commercial insurers, such as Aetna, Anthem, and Cigna, have raised premiums by double digits and still say they can’t make the numbers work in their favor. Hence, they have withdrawn from counties where their losses were particularly acute.
For-profit companies that have shareholders breathing down their necks don’t have much latitude to absorb losses. But even companies that don’t face similar profit-maximizing pressures can’t escape the basic dilemma confronting the industry. For example, state filings of the non-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield show that the company barely broke even in the first half of 2015. In Texas last year, BCBS collected $2.1 billion in premiums and paid out $2.5 billion in claims. If Obamacare’s condition worsens, such companies will have to scale back their participation too.
The CEO of UnitedHealthCare on Tuesday said he regretted the decision to enter the ObamaCare marketplace last year, which the company says has resulted in millions of dollars in losses.
“It was for us a bad decision,” UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor’s meeting in New York, according to Bloomberg Business.
UnitedHealth, the country’s largest insurer, announced last month that it would no longer advertise its ObamaCare plans over the next year and may pull out completely in 2016 — a move that sent shockwaves across the healthcare sector.
Hemsley’s remarks double down on his earlier warning that the ObamaCare exchanges remain weaker than expected after two years and that it will take far longer for insurers to profit from the millions of new enrollees.
“On Thursday, the administration tried to calm insurers, sending them a written memo full of promises. Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services vowed to go to Congress for full funding to reimburse insurers for their losses.”
Look out taxpayers– you will be asked to pony up for plans with little accountability, nice stock options and generous executive compensation. The louder they whine, the more government largesse will be rained upon them. Alieta Eck, MD For Real Health Care Reform
A new taxpayer bailout to cover up ObamaCare’s failure?
By Betsy McCaughey
November 20, 2015 | 8:58pm
How dare the Obama administration bail out insurance companies with our money in order to hide ObamaCare’s failures. Thursday, just hours after giant insurer UnitedHealthcare said it’s losing money selling ObamaCare plans and will likely exit the health exchanges next year, the Obama administration quietly promised to bail out insurers for their losses — using your money.
Nearly all insurers are bleeding red ink trying to sell the unworkable plans. Without a bailout, more insurers will abandon ObamaCare, pushing it closer to its demise. A bailout would benefit insurers and the Democratic Party, which is desperate to cover up the health law’s failure. Ironically Democrats (including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders) bad-mouth bank bailouts but are all for insurance-company bailouts. Truth is, it’s a ripoff for taxpayers, who shouldn’t have to pay for this sleazy coverup.
We were promised that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would “bend the cost curve down”, and yet health insurance premiums are expected to rise by as much as 60% in 2016. What should be done to solve this dilemma? A common refrain is that since the “free market” has failed, the United States needs a Single Payer healthcare system like Canada’s.
Being a Canadian physician now living in the Minnesota, I assure you that Canada’s healthcare system is not Utopia. In my former life as Medical Director of Diagnostic Imaging for Thunder Bay Regional Hospital in Canada, for a while our wait time for an elective MRI was 13 months and for CT it was seven months. I managed to convince the hospital administration to increase MRI operational hours, and we reduced the wait to 4 months becoming the envy of the province. Doctors from other regions attempted to send us their patients. We said no. We could not accommodate the extra work because we only had one scanner for a radius of about 500 miles because that was all that the government would allow. As payer for the system, it is inevitable that the government controls the system. The incentive is to control costs, not necessarily to care for patients.
The Fraser Institute monitors wait times in Canada. As of 2014, the average wait time for medically necessary specialty care is 18.2 weeks. In the province of New Brunswick, the wait time averages 37.3 weeks. In my hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, where I still own property, the average wait for a newcomer to town to get established with a family doctor is five years, unless you have insider ties to the system.
The standard response by single payer advocates is that Canada’s healthcare system is underfunded. According to the Fraser Institute, the average Canadian family is spending 12,000 dollars per year for health coverage (buried in taxes). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Canada per capita healthcare expenses rank sixth highest amongst 192 ranked countries.
Another rejoinder of the single-payer advocates is that “outcomes” are better in Canada. For example, according to the World Health Organization, the average life expectancy in Canada is three years longer than in the US. Many factors affect life expectancy of which the health care system is only one. Racial background is very important. According to 1999 OECD data, an Asian-American male at birth can expect to live 80.9 years, a non-Hispanic white male can expect to live 74.4 years, and an African-American male has a life expectancy of 68.4 years. More homogeneously white, Canada is a less racially diverse country than the US contributing to a higher average life expectancy. According to Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute, when allowing for deaths from violent crime and traffic accidents, Americans are the longest-lived people in the Western world. According to John Goodman in “Lives at Risk”, Americans fare better than any other country when looking at individual disease states such as myocardial infarction and various malignancies.
What happens in the doctor’s office or in the hospital pales in significance to the decisions that people make in their day-to-day lives. For example, Canadians are generally less obese than Americans and there is less gun-related crime. The relationship between health care systems and population outcomes is murky, and so we cannot conflate the efficacy of a health care system with average life expectancy.
Why is it that Canada’s single payer health care system is so constipated with an onslaught of patients waiting interminably for care? There are two basic reasons that are really two sides of the same coin. They are price controls and central planning.
Ridgewood NJ, the Ridgewood Education Association are currently in contract talks with the Ridgewood BOE .A state-appointed fact finder in February will try to settle a 10-month contract dispute with the Board of Education .The main point of contention is over how much REA members must contribute to their health insurance premiums .
“Why doesn’t the Ridgewoid BoE just make the teachers buy their own insurance through ACA health exchanges in NJ? Health care benefits are not constitutionally protected in NJ, so this change would hold up in the state Supreme Court and resolve a huge headache (and unlimited future healthcare liability) for both the BoE and Village taxpayers in Ridgewood”, Ridgewood blog reader
Maybe its time to put teachers on Obamacare ,after all the teacher unions supported it and voted for it .Why is it good enough for everyone but not good enough for them? After all didn’t Labor unions use the Supreme Court’s King vs. Burwell ruling as a chance to accuse Obamacare critics of putting lives in jeopardy.
Before the decision, Service Employees International Union warned “~10,000 people a year could die prematurely” if the Supreme Court overturned an Internal Revenue Service rule propping up HealthCare.gov in 34 states.
The NEA, the largest labor union in America, gave Health Care for America Now (HCAN) an organizer of pro Obamacare rallies $1.8 million from 2008 to 2013. AFT, the nation’s third-largest union, gave HCAN $325,000.NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia praised the Supreme Court for keeping health insurance “secure” and “affordable” through Obamacare. AFT presidentRandi Weingarten cheered the Court for preventing “a major step backward.”
The NEA website says , “NEA is committed to health reform to ensure that every person in America has quality, affordable health care coverage. Not only is this a moral imperative, it is a key component of controlling spiraling health care costs. Health reform must also guarantee a choice of health care plans and providers through a private health insurance plan, including one that an employee may currently have through their employer, and a public health insurance plan. This choice is a fundamental feature of an American solution for health reform and another critical piece of cost control. Health reform that provides comprehensive benefits to all at an affordable cost guarantees a choice of health plans and rewards quality and innovation as an attainable goal that the public supports.”
The NJ Assembly elections are predicted to be the lowest voter turnout races in years – yet much hangs in the balance of the outcome. After the dust has settled, a number of crucial healthcare issues being addressed in the NJ Legislature remain unresolved, and New Jerseyans will still face a maze of obstacles when they look for accessible, affordable, quality health care. Ann Twomey, PolitickerNJ Read more
Hundreds of thousands people will lose their insurance plans as a raft of health insurance cooperatives (CO-OPs) created by the Affordable Care Act will cease operations. Just last week, CO-OPs in Oregon, Colorado, Tennessee and Kentucky announced that they would be winding down operations due to lower than expected enrollment and solvency concerns (although the one in Colorado is suing the state over the shutdown order). They join four other CO-OPs that have announced that they would be closing their doors. In total, only 15 out of the 23 CO-OPs created by the law remain. These closures reveal how ill-advised this aspect of the ACA was both in terms of lost money and the turmoil for the people who enrolled in them. The eight that have failed have received almost $1 billion in loans, and overall CO-OPs received loans totaling $2.4 billion that might never get paid back. In addition, roughly 400,000 people will lose their plans.
Sources: Sabrina Corlette et al. “The Affordable Care Act CO-OP Program: Facing Both Barriers and Opportunities for More Competitive Health Insurance Markets,” The Commonwealth Fund, March 12, 2015; Erin Marshal, “8 Things to Know About Insurance CO-OP Closures,” Becker’s Hospital Review, October 20, 2015. Created using Tableau.
Notes: Hawaii and Alaska not shown. Neither state had a CO-OP. CoOportunity Health served both Iowa and Nebraska.
Proponents of the CO-OPs believed that they would be able to offer lower premiums than for-profit insurers because they did not have the same profit motive, but even non-profit insurers cannot operate at a financial loss indefinitely. When they were created, these CO-OPs had no customers, no experience in setting premiums, no networks and limited capital. The government tried to subsidize the early period of uncertainty by disbursing loans to help with startup and solvency issues, and money from other provisions like risk corridors would dampen losses in the initial years. Lower than expected payments from the risk corridors have exacerbated the issues facing some of these CO-OPs, who were counting on substantial payments to stay afloat. But this is hardly the only factor contributing to their struggles, some of them the product of other government policies like delaying employer mandate penalties and giving states the option to allow transitional policies through 2017. Some of these later developments could not have been anticipated, but many analysts, including Cato scholars, were skeptical about the prospects of CO-OPs from the beginning. Even some ACA supporters recognized the flaws inherent in the CO-OP design: Paul Krugman derided them as a “sham” and in a 2009 interview Professor Timothy Jost said could not see how a CO-OP “does anything to control costs.” There have been multiple warning signs that many CO-OPs were in trouble. Earlier this year The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent letters to 11 CO-OPs placing them on “enhanced oversight” due to financial concerns, and a 2014 report from the HHS Office of Inspector General found that “most of the 23 CO-OPs we reviewed had not met their initial program enrollment and profitability projections,” and that the government “had not established guidance or criteria to assess whether a CO-OP was viable or sustainable.”
These CO-OPs were not a good idea at inception and were always going to face many obstacles to success. Multiple changes to the law since they were established have exacerbated these problems, and already struggling CO-OPs have folded. Competition is indeed vital in health insurance markets, but the CO-OPs were a bad way to try to foster this competition. With these closures, billions of taxpayer dollars could be lost and hundreds of thousands of people will discover that the “if you like your plan, you can keep it” promise does not apply to them.
The future of an ObamaCare program that was intended to create non-profit insurers is increasingly in doubt, with several of the ventures forced to close down around the country.
On Friday, co-op insurance plans in Colorado and Oregon became the latest to call it quits, following the closure of similar plans this month in Tennessee, Kentucky and New York.
Just 15 of the original 23 co-ops remain in operation, and the administration acknowledges that more of them could fail, potentially leaving a strike against President Obama’s signature law.
“The co-op program was always kind of swimming upstream,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which does nonpartisan health analysis. “Starting an insurance company is not easy, and there’s a reason why it’s not done very often.”
Democrats created the non-profit co-ops under ObamaCare as a way to increase competition with established, for-profit insurers. Liberals rallied to the idea after they failed to secure the passage of a government-run insurance option.
But experts say the co-ops are facing a range of problems that could prove hard to overcome.
I want to thank Senators Vitale and Gill for raising the red flag on the Blue Cross Horizon Omnia Plan. Any time a private company wants to merge and become bigger, we run the risk of having a monopoly that ultimately has the power to charge whatever it wants. “Care-coordination” and “value based approach” are meaningless buzz words.
The sickest and most vulnerable patients are at risk, as these plans have no real way to “keep people well.” Hospitals must be places of mercy and not revenue centers. This should be about care– not big business and mergers. If a hospital is unprofitable, it may just be doing its job, caring for those who are in need. Arbitrary “measurements of quality and cost efficiency” are not what the people need when choosing a hospital.
There is no price transparency in medical care as demonstrated by the recent $42,678 hospital bill for a normal uncomplicated delivery. “Insurance payments and adjustments” were $42,624.60. What exactly did that insurance company pay? What were the real costs and how can such a bill be justified? All of these charges, adjustments and payments behind closed doors suggest skulduggery, plain and simple.
We need to remember what real insurance was meant to be– a buffer to protect one’s assets against the cost of major medical events. Insurance cannot keep people well. We must reduce the power of these plans and have them serve the people, competing with other plans on cost, service and ability to negotiate and pay for major medical expenses. All hospitals should be included.
Let’s work together. Let’s clear the way for direct primary care, where people pay directly or become members of a local physician office for as low as $50/month. Let’s reserve insurance for the catastrophic and reduce the power of these big conglomerates. And let’s figure out how to provide real charity care to the poor without erecting a huge bureaucracy that amounts to a barrier to care. Alieta Eck, MD For Real Health Care Reform
ANDREW KITCHENMAN | OCTOBER 6, 2015
State senators to call on attorney general to block controversial tiered insurance plan before planned November launch
The traditional role of New Jersey’s state government in regulating the hospital and insurance industries has been to balance the needs of residents against the realities of the market, to ensure, among other things, equitable access to healthcare.
Then why are two leading senators on insurance issues — Nia H. Gill (D-Essex and Passaic) and Joseph F. Vitale (D-Middlesex) — arguing that the state has abdicated its responsibility in the case of the new OMNIA Health Alliance from Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey? And they’re not alone in claiming that Horizon’s secretive selection process has left hospitals that were shut out of the alliance facing a bleak future, one that could include going dark.
This situation helps explain why Gill and Vitale are calling for Acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman to step in and put a stop to the OMNIA rollout, at least until his office and legislators have more time to review the plans.
Both Horizon executives and critics of how OMNIA was put together attempted to build their cases during nearly eight hours of testimony before a joint meeting of Senate Commerce and Health, Human Services, and Senior Citizens Committee.
It’s a process that could play out again in legal proceedings, as those left out of the alliance are raising the possibility of going to court to block it.
That said, not everything about OMNIA is raising a red flag. Senators welcome the possibility of lower costs, as well as the improved care-coordination and value-based approach that the tiered insurance plan is supposed to deliver.
And OMNIA has its defenders. One of them, Dr. Jeffrey Le Benger, CEO of alliance member Summit Medical Group, said that Summit has already reduced the cost of providing care to Horizon members by 13 percent over a two-year period.
Ronald C. Rak, chief executive of New Brunswick-based St. Peter’s Healthcare System, is definitely not among OMNIA’s champions. He found a corollary to the actions of the state’s largest insurer in ancient Rome.
FPANJ Women’s Group: Health Care Crisis is a Matter of Bureaucracy
Dr. Alieta Eck, founder of Zarephath Health Care Free Clinic and 2014 Congressional Candidate, tells FPANJ Women that taking government out of health care is key to lower costs
Upper Montclair, NJ – October 2015 – Financial Planning Association of New Jersey(FPANJ) has launched a Women’s Group and their inaugural event touched on a hot-button topic: health care costs and the Affordable Care Act.
The group invited Dr. Alieta Eck, M.D., to speak on “How Women Can Solve the Health Care Crisis” last week and her message was well-received among the financial professionals.
“Dr. Eck’s message of reducing costs resonated with our group, especially because we are always working with clients to manage their money, and recent changes in the health care system have proved challenging for many,” Trish Scott, Chairman of the Women’s Group said. “She shared a vision of positive change for the health care in the near future that was enthusiastically received.”
Dr. Alieta Eck pictured front row, second from left, with FPANJ Women’s Group Members and Nick Scheibner, FPANJ PR Chair.
Startling to most in attendance were the statistics comparing the rise in health administrators (more that 3500 percent) to doctors (approximately 100 percent) since 1970. It’s this addition to the health care bureaucracy that Dr. Eck points to for making affordable health care inaffordable for many patients.
“If you have a single mother who has to pay $268 per month for a premium, that’s a lot of money,” Dr. Eck explained. “But if you add a medical problem to that mix, most bronze plans require a $6000 deductible, which skyrockets those costs.”
She also explained that the measures of a good doctor between patients and bureaucracies are vastly different, much to the detriment of the patient-doctor relationship, saying, “Patients measure a doctor on their experience, how well they listen, how much they care. Bureaucracies focus on things like ‘clinical quality metrics,’ and maintenance of certification. In the end they view a good doctor as one who earns and spends less so the bureaucracy can earn more.”
Dr. Eck and husband Dr. John Eck founded the Zarephath Health Center, a free clinic for the poor and uninsured that currently cares for 300-400 patients per month utilizing the services of volunteer physicians and nurses. She explained they spend $13 per patient because of the volunteer staff, and is working with New Jersey lawmakers to pass theVolunteer Medical Professional Health Care Act in the Senate. The bill provides malpractice protection for doctors in their private practice if they volunteer four hours every week at a non-governmental free clinic such as Zarephath.
She contrasted these costs with the $13 billion Medicaid costs for New Jersey, which is approximately one-third of the state’s budget.
Dr. Eck explained the new law could also provide a way to “Help the poor without fleecing the public” with the cost of bureaucracy. The bill is co-sponsored by
Sen. Robert Singer, District 30; and Sen. Brian P. Stack, District 33.
More about Dr. Alieta Eck:
Dr. Eck’s topic “How Women Can Solve the Health Care Crisis,” stems from her interest in health care for the poor and her advocacy against the Affordable Health Care Act, testifying in opposition in 2011 at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing. She has campaigned twice for public office: first as a Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in 2013, and again in 2014 to fill the temporary seat in New Jersey’s 12th District. These bids were unsuccessful, but she continues to be active in advocacy.
NEW YORK (TheStreet) — It’s time for the Affordable Care Act to join a long list of oxymorons. Why? Because rather like “military intelligence,” “cat proof,” “government organization,” and “simple calculus,” the law better known as Obamacare turns out to be an inherent contradiction. For a sizeable part of the population, anyway.
The ACA is just not affordable to a big chunk of those it was most meant to serve: The previously uninsured. In fact, many are worse off than before, according to a new study. That fact could also unravel part of the program’s foundation, which could be a problem for healthcare insurers.
“Many of the non-poor formerly uninsured are estimated to be worse off,” than without insurance, according to a September-dated working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “The Price of Responsibility: The Impact Of Health Reform On Non-Poor Uninsured.”
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