Fix Health Care Policy

Side Effects: Another Obamacare Initiative Bites the Dust

On Monday, the Obama Administration signaled that another part of its signature health care law may not be working out as planned. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) put an end to a program that offered a $100 incentive to insurance brokers and agents for recommending eligible people to Obamacare’s Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan (PCIP).

Obamacare created the PCIP, commonly called a high-risk pool, as a temporary way to cover those with pre-existing or chronic conditions before 2014, when insurance companies will be prohibited from excluding people based on health conditions.

In an explanation of the Administration’s decision, Ryan Young, senior director of federal government affairs for the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, stated, “They just said enrollment’s up to where we want it to be, basically, and we don’t need your services anymore.”

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Hercules Takes on the Obamacare Hydra

The contraception mandate has met yet another foe. On Monday, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) filed a complaint against Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius on behalf of Hercules Industries, Inc., a family-owned HVAC manufacturer based in Denver, Colorado.

Hercules Industries is owned by five family members, all practicing Catholics, who seek to operate the business in accordance with their beliefs. As such, the self-insured company’s health plan does not include coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, or sterilization procedures—and had no intention of doing so.

Until Obamacare, that is.

Under the law’s HHS mandate, Hercules will be forced to provide and pay for coverage of all these drugs and services in its company’s health plan, directly violating the owners’ deeply held beliefs. Because the company is a private, for-profit business, it is excluded from the mandate’s narrow religious exemption and, like all non-religious employers, is ineligible for the Administration’s year-long “safe harbor period.”

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: Catholics, contraceptive mandate, Hercules Industries, HHS, non-religious employers

Side Effects: Employees Lose Insurance and Taxpayers get the Bill Under Obamacare

The House Ways and Means Committee just released a report that shows that the most successful companies would save billions of dollars if they stopped offering coverage to their employees and dumped them into the taxpayer-funded Obamacare exchanges.

On a confidential basis, 71 Fortune 100 companies supplied information to the committee regarding the cost and coverage of their health insurance plans. The committee used the data to calculate the potential savings of dumping employees into the exchanges and paying the employer mandate penalty.

The report’s findings will likely scare the many Americans who like their current employer-sponsored insurance. The report concludes that companies could save $28.6 billion in 2014 alone by dumping their employees into the exchanges. Moreover, the savings grow over time: Between 2014 and 2023, dropping health coverage would collectively save these companies $422.4 billion—and that’s after paying the penalty.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: employer mandate penalty, House Ways and Means Committee, Obamacare exchanges, taxpayer-funded

Medicare Reform: Premium Support Is Bipartisan

The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health held a hearing last Friday to discuss the bipartisan effort behind competing premium support plans. These plans would restructure traditional Medicare and guarantee its fiscal stability in the future.

As Chairman Wally Herger (R–CA) said:

Unless Congress acts, the Medicare program that seniors and people with disabilities rely on will go bankrupt in just a few short years.… The premium support model holds promise to place Medicare on sound financial footing while transforming and modernizing the program to provide greater choice for beneficiaries.

In premium support, beneficiaries receive a defined contribution from the government toward a health plan of their choosing. This financing change—already the method for Medicare Part D drug coverage—would stimulate intense competition and lower costs and improve quality.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: bipartisan, defined contribution, Medicare premium support

What Obamacare’s Tax Hikes Mean for All Americans

In a recent article for MarketWatch, Andrea Coombes writes, “Whatever their opinion of the health-care reform law, wealthy Americans have a lot of money at risk in the Supreme Court’s coming decision on the law’s constitutionality.”

Yes, the rich will pay higher taxes under Obamacare. But they aren’t the only ones. Obamacare raises taxes by more than $500 billion in a decade, and a number of these will hit Americans at all levels of the income scale. The specific tax hikes Coombes describes are initially intended to impact just the wealthy, but it won’t remain that way for long.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: higher taxes, ObamaCare, Supreme Court decision, Taxmageddon

Medicare: Admitting You Have a (Structural) Problem Is the First Step

A new study by the Urban Institute reconfirms a vital fact: Medicare’s massive increase in enrollment, largely attributable to retiring baby boomers, is driving its fiscal instability.

This is an important finding, because during the health care debate of 2009, advocates of Obamacare insisted that excess health care cost inflation was the more urgent problem contributing to Medicare’s fiscal nightmare. A recent report by Charles Blahous, a public trustee for Medicare, explains:

This viewpoint increased in prominence when Peter Orszag, one of [Obamacare’s] leading advocates, was named to head the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Soon thereafter, CBO published a frequently cited graph that appeared to substantiate the view that the fiscal problems created by excess health care inflation dwarfed those arising from other known sources of fiscal strains, such as population aging.

So the primary target of Obamacare was Medicare payment reduction, not structurally modifying Medicare to absorb the large enrollment increase in the coming years.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: cost inflation, fiscal instability, Medicare enrollment, ObamaCare, Urban Institute

Opening the Door to Health Care Rationing Under Obamacare

One of the biggest fears Americans have about Obamacare is who will ultimately control health care decisions: the government or patients and their doctors. New research by Heritage health policy analyst Kathryn Nix explains that while the law does not explicitly put those decisions in the hands of the government, it does allow government bureaucrats to unduly influence medical care. Enter comparative effectiveness research (CER), which compares different methods for preventing, diagnosing, or treating a specific disease or condition. In her paper, Nix explores the many ways CER might be used under Obamacare in ways that harm patients more than help them.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: comparative effectiveness research, government-run health care, ObamaCare, patients

Side Effects: The $8.35 Billion Attempt to Fool Seniors

A new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shows that a demonstration program created by the Obama Administration in Medicare Advantage (MA) is primarily designed to “demonstrate” how to hide politically unpopular parts of Obamacare.

The Quality Bonus Payment demonstration program will take place from 2012 to 2014 and differs substantially from the bonus program described in Obamacare. In the original statute, high-performing plans (those rated 4 and above on a five-star scale) would receive bonus payments as an incentive to improve quality. In the current demonstration program, bonus payments are awarded to plans rated 3 and above, essentially rating almost all plans “above average” and giving them bonus payments. The additional funding offsets Obamacare’s $145 billion in cuts to the popular MA program.

As Heritage has warned before, Obamacare’s cuts to MA would severely reduce the quality of the program and force enrollees back into traditional Medicare. Writing for Heritage, health care experts Jim Capretta and Robert Book explain, “Phased in between 2012 and 2017, the MA cuts will substantially restrict the ability of Medicare beneficiaries to choose the health plans that best meet their needs and will result in substantial reductions in coverage for many millions of seniors and disabled Americans.” Medicare’s Office of the Actuary predicts a 50 percent drop in enrollment by 2017.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: GAO, Medicare Advantage, ObamaCare, quality bonus payment demonstration program, unpopular law

Medicare Trustees to America: A Bleak Future Without Real Reform

On September 8, 2011—well after the enactment of Obamacare—President Obama told Congress: “Millions of Americans rely on Medicare in their retirement. And millions more will do so in the future.… But with an aging population and rising health care costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program. And if we don’t gradually reform the system while protecting current seniors, it won’t be there when future retirees need it.” The just released 2012 Medicare Trustees report reinforces the need for serious reform. But seniors and taxpayers alike should keep three things in mind:

1. The short-term outlook of the Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund says nothing about the long-term financial challenge posed by the Medicare program. HI Trust fund insolvency, focused only on hospital payments, is only one marker of Medicare’s fiscal health. The 2012 trustees report says that the HI program, financed almost entirely by payroll taxes, will remain solvent until 2024, the same target date for insolvency as stated in last year’s report. Since 2008, HI expenditures have exceeded income. If the HI fund is exhausted, it cannot pay for seniors’ hospital benefits. Some higher costs for Part A have been offset by the 2 percent reduction in Medicare expenditures are a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011. However, the likelihood of these cuts starting in 2013 as scheduled is problematic given the history of overriding prior cuts, such as the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR), which would theoretically cut the payment to Medicare doctors by 30 percent in 2013. However, Congress has always overridden the scheduled SGR reduction in the past.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: bankrupt, Medicare Trustees report, premium support, rising health care costs

Regrets on the Left: Democrats Second-Guessing Obamacare

Earlier this week we learned that former Obama Administration official Elizabeth Warren is calling for a repeal of one of Obamacare’s many taxes, and today The Hill is reporting that several Democrats in Congress are starting to regret President Obama’s signature health care law.

First there’s Representative Brad Miller (D-NC), who is retiring at the end of this session of Congress:

“I think we would all have been better off — President Obama politically, Democrats in Congress politically, and the nation would have been better off — if we had dealt first with the financial system and the other related economic issues and then come back to healthcare.”

Miller, who voted for the law, said the administration wasted time and political capital on healthcare reform, resulting in lingering economic problems that will continue to plague Obama’s reelection chances in 2012.

Then there’s Representative Dennis Cardoza (D-CA), who is also planning to retire this year:

Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.) also criticized his party’s handling of the issue, and said he repeatedly called on his leaders to figure out how they were going to pay for the bill, and then figure out what they could afford.

(Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: Democrats, ObamaCare, regret, repeal the law