Tag: socialized medicine

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Phil Murphy Rolls Out “Murphycare”

MVC

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Trenton NJ,  Acting to improve health care access for New Jersey residents, Governor Murphy today announced that the State of New Jersey will move to a State-Based Health Exchange for the year 2021 .

Transitioning to a State-Based Exchange (SBE) will give the state more control over the open enrollment period; access to data that can be used to better regulate the market, conduct targeted outreach and inform policy decisions; and allow user fees to fund exchange operations, consumer assistance, outreach and advertising. By redirecting the assessment on premiums, currently paid to the federal government to utilize a Federally-Facilitated Exchange (FFE), New Jersey can operate an exchange that is tailored and efficient for New Jersey residents.

Continue reading Phil Murphy Rolls Out “Murphycare”
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The big ObamaCare bubble

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Bryan Rotella, contributor

“No one can see a bubble. That’s what makes it a bubble.” That was Christian Bale’s character’s summation of a market bubble in last year’s hit movie “The Big Short,” which chronicled the few investors who saw the signs pointing to the mortgage market collapse. With terrorism, email scandals and race relations dominating the headlines, has a healthcare bubble been filling up quietly behind the scenes?

Since the 2010 passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or ObamaCar), the health care industry has seen record growth and increased revenues. Why? Illness, especially chronic, sadly is a moneymaking business. Illness requires more office visits, more hospitalizations and inevitably more bills. ObamaCare halted insurance companies’ practice of rating premiums based on a customers illness history, or as more commonly known, preexisting conditions.

In the 2013 rollout of the ObamaCare exchanges, the promised result was that more people would have insurance coverage. Undoubtedly, this part of the law worked. By Jan. 7, 2016, more than 11.3 millionAmericans had signed up for ObamaCare; by March,20.3 million were covered. A large percentage of these new insureds were high-risk. As NBC reportedin April, “Last month, an analysis of medical claims from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association concluded that insurers gained a sicker, more expensive patient population as a result of the law.”

While bad for insurance companies, this was very good for the bottom lines of the merging large healthcare systems and newly formed physician monolith groups. A drafter of the lawadmitted the law was founded on the belief that the “consolidation of doctors into larger physician groups was inevitable and desirable.” With consolidation, the dollars have racked up. According to U.S. News & World Report, “from June 3, 2010, to June 30, 2015, the Russell 3000 Healthcare benchmark (an all capitalization index) posted a gain of 176.8 percent.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/healthcare/the-big-obamacare-bubble/ar-BBvqAx3?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

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Obama and Democrats Move Closer to Socialized Medicine

obamacare_theridgewoodblog

Obama calls for adding public option to ObamaCare

President Obama is calling on Congress to add a “public option” to ObamaCare to improve his signature health law.

The pitch from Obama comes after he abandoned pursuit of a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers during the long legislative battle over healthcare because of opposition from some Democrats in Congress.

“Public programs like Medicare often deliver care more cost-effectively by curtailing administrative overhead and securing better prices from providers,” Obama writes in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“The public plan did not make it into the final legislation. Now, based on experience with the ACA, I think Congress should revisit a public plan to compete alongside private insurers in areas of the country where competition is limited,” writes the president.

The new embrace from the president also comes amid what appears to be a concerted push by the Democratic Party to rally around the public option.

It’s a shift that reflects how the party has tilted leftward during the Obama years.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/287256-obama-calls-for-adding-public-option-to-obamacare

 

 

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Don’t Let ObamaCare’s Failures Snowball Into Single Payer

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“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.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-let-obamacares-failures-snowball-into-single-payer-1449876348

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Obamacare Is Now on Life Support

obamacare_theridgewood blog

By Edward Morrissey
December 10, 2015

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.

https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2015/12/10/Obamacare-s-Condition-Has-Gone-Critical-Life-Support

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Obamacare Is Falling Apart

obamacare_theridgewoodblog

Insurers are bolting from the exchanges.

Shikha Dalmia | December 1, 2015

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.

https://reason.com/archives/2015/12/01/obamacare-is-falling-apart-limb-by-limb

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HEALTHCARE: WHY SINGLE PAYER IS NOT THE ANSWER

obamacare_theridgewood blog

 

Posted By MediChick in Health Care Reform

by Lee Kurisko, MD

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.

https://www.medibid.com/blog/2015/11/why-single-payer-is-not-the-answer/