FixHealthCarePolicy

Not As Advertised

Now that health-care bills have passed in both the House and the Senate, Democrats just can’t seem to stop themselves from rhetorical excess. Just before Christmas, as the bill sponsored by Majority Leader Harry Reid was clearing its final hurdles in the Senate, Democrats took to the chamber floor and cable television shows to trumpet the “historic” nature of the legislation they were about to vote on — legislation that would, at long last, move toward their long-sought goals of “universality” and a government-guaranteed right to health care.

But is it so?

Yes, both the House and Senate would provide essentially free health insurance, through the Medicaid program, to many millions of low-income people. But, even so, enrollment in Medicaid is a far cry from getting good care when it’s needed. For starters, about 40 percent of the nation’s physicians don’t see Medicaid patients because the payment rates are too low, which also means certain hospitals have very low rates of Medicaid admissions. The truth is that current Medicaid enrollees already have trouble getting access to high-quality care when they need it because the network of providers willing and able to see them is constrained and over-burdened. The House and Senate bills would add 15 million or more people to this program’s rolls without any guarantee whatsoever that there will be doctors and hospitals that can see them.

Ironically, the very Democrats who most frequently tout “universality” as the goal are also the ones who ensure it will never actually come about by insisting that America’s lower-income families enroll in government-run insurance — with no other options.

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Tags: cost control, Lewin Group, Medicaid Expansion, Medicare, ObamaCare

Baucus Bill Does Not Bend the Cost Curve

A Lewin Group study commissioned by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, finds that although the Baucus health care bill (the legislation that recently passed the Senate Finance Committee) is often touted as the most fiscally responsible of all of Congress’s reform plans, it “relies on certain cost containment approaches that have not worked in the past” and therefore “does not bend the total health care cost curve downward.”

Rather than fundamentally realigning incentives in the health sector to lower the overall cost of care, the Baucus bill imposes top down cuts in payments to medical providers which will only serve to shift costs around the current system. Here are some of the other key findings from the Lewin study on the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 (S.1796):

• Adds to the Deficit. The bill would add to the federal deficit in the first ten years and beyond if it included a permanent “doc fix” to prevent cuts in Medicare payments to physicians under the Sustainable Growth Rate instead of only a one year temporary fix. Every year, Congress defers these reductions in pay to doctors but the bill creates false savings by pretending that Congress would suddenly let these cuts occur. More than $404 billion in savings over the first ten years are attributable to these savings– and reductions in uncompensated care funds for hospitals that treat the uninsured (DSH payments)– that are unlikely to fully materialize. (more…)

Tags: Lewin Group, Max Baucus, Obama Health Care Plan, Peter G. Peterson Foundation, trillion dollar deficits

Lewin vs. Stark: How Many Americans Will End Up on the Public Plan?

Earlier this week, in conjunction with The Lewin Group, we released an analysis of the House health bill showing that if the public plan component became law:

– Approximately 103 million people would be covered under the new public plan and as a consequence about 83.4 million people would lose their private insurance. This would represent a 48.4 percent reduction in the number of people with private coverage.
– About 88.1 million workers would see their current private, employer-sponsored health plan go away and would be shifted to the public plan.
– Yearly premiums for the typical American with private coverage could go up by as much as $460 per privately insured person, as a result of increased cost-shifting stemming from a public plan modeled on Medicare.

Long-time single payer advocate Rep. Peter Stark (D-CA) has since responded to the Lewin study claiming “The Congressional Budget Office Trumps the Lewin Group.” The Lewin Group now has a point by point rebuttal of Stark. The is the text of the Lewin response, also available here: (more…)

Tags: Lewin Group, Pete Stark, single-payer health care