Fix Health Care Policy

Earlier this week, the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee moved legislation forward that would repeal one of the most intrusive and unpopular parts of Obamacare: the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). A board of unelected government officials tasked with finding and implementing ways to control Medicare spending from the top-down, IPAB opens the door to rationing of care, both direct and indirect, without congressional approval.

The bill to repeal this onerous part of the health law has 226 co-sponsors, 17 of whom are Democrats. Meanwhile, support for better ways to control Medicare’s cost using a premium support model continues to surface on both sides of the aisle. Premium support would allow seniors to use a defined government contribution to purchase the private plan that suits them best in a competitive marketplace. Patient empowerment and choice would drive better value for dollars spent, bringing down costs without jeopardizing quality or patient autonomy through government rationing.  (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: IPAB, Medicare, ObamaCare, rationing, Seniors, top-down decisions

Dr. Donald Berwick may not be a household name yet, but if he is confirmed as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the position for which he was nominated by President Obama, he may soon determine the direction of health care of millions of Americans.

So what’s the big deal about that? Earlier this week, a Washington Post editorial attributed the ongoing hold-up in Berwick’s confirmation hearing to “partisan politics,” claiming that “Republicans are seizing on the Berwick nomination as an opportunity to relitigate the health-care debate, latching on to a few of Dr. Berwick’s statements to wage their campaign.” The Post misses the point. (more…)

Tags: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Donald Berwick, health care debate, ObamaCare, rationing

The Senate began debate on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R.3590) this week. Senators on both sides of the aisle offered amendments to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s huge, 2074 page health care bill. The first votes to take place concerned preventative services for women. As Senators weigh in on this vital topic, Americans have yet another opportunity to examine their actions rather than just their promises and talking points.

Bureaucratic Control over Health Benefits. This week, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) offered an amendment that would extend the preventative services that women and children receive without co-payments or other forms of cost-sharing with insurance companies. (more…)

Tags: Barbara Mikulski, David Vitter, government-run health care, Lisa Murkowski, mammograms, Mike Enzi, Obama Health Care Plan, rationing

Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) recently hosted Center for American Progress blogger Igor Volsky on their Senate Doctors Show. Volsky challenged Sen. Barrasso to identify where in the Senate Health Bill it empowers the federal government to ration mammograms. And Sen. Barrasso does. Watch:

Here is how we covered the issue last week: (more…)

Tags: mammograms, Obama Health Care Plan, rationing

Last week, the United States Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines recommending that women in their 40s no longer have annual mammograms and that women ages 50 to 74 have them only every other year, instead of annually. The recommendations were highly controversial, and by week’s end most health insurers and the federal Medicare program said they would ignore the panel’s recommendation and continue covering annual mammograms. This is at it should be: the federal government collects information and makes recommendations, and Americans are then free to consult their health care providers and ignore the government if they so choose. The problem is that Obamacare would forever change this relationship.

Both the House and Senate versions of Obamacare create detailed new federal regulations that micromanage all health insurance decisions. Specifically, Section 2713 of the Senate Health Bill would give the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force the force of law by requiring all health insurance plans to provide coverage (with no patient co-pays) for “items or services that have in effect a rating of “A” or “B” [recommended] in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force.” (more…)

Tags: health care, health insurance, mammograms, ObamaCare, rationing

The Washington Post reports:

Women in their 40s should stop routinely having annual mammograms and older women should cut back to one scheduled exam every other year, an influential federal task force has concluded, challenging the use of one of the most common medical tests.
…
“We’re not saying women shouldn’t get screened. Screening does saves lives,” said Diana B. Petitti, vice chairman of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which released the recommendations Monday in a paper being published in Tuesday’s Annals of Internal Medicine. “But we are recommending against routine screening. There are important and serious negatives or harms that need to be considered carefully.”

It’s one thing to have a task force issue a recommendation that people and groups can adopt or not adopt (and there are strongly held views on both sides of the screening-at-40 issue), but quite another if some task force can just change what is or is not available in most plans – which is exactly what would happen if President Barack Obama’s Super MedPAC proposal became law. Heritage Vice President for Domestic and Economic Policy Studies Stuart Butler explained this summer: (more…)

Tags: MedPac, Obama Health Care Plan, rationing

Last week NBC News released a poll showing that while 36% of Americans believed President Barack Obama’s health care plan was a “good idea,” 42% of Americans believed it was a “bad idea.” NBC’s explanation for this inconvenient truth? “[M]isperceptions about the president’s plans for reform … that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue.” Specifically NBC found that 55% of Americans believed Obamacare “will give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants,” 54% believed it “will lead to a government takeover of the health care system,” 50% believed it “will use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions,” and 45% believed it “will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.”

The President has since copied NBC’s diagnosis, devoting his Saturday Weekly Address to debunking these “phony claims.” The problem for NBC News, and the White House, is that every one of these concerns has rock solid foundation in fact.

Obamacare Will Provide Health Benefits to Illegal Immigrants: The President is correct when he says that the idea to provide illegal immigrants with health insurance “has never been on the table.” The problem is that the American people also know that despite the fact that our immigration laws did not intend it, there are 12 million persons illegally in the United States. The issue is enforcement and the provisions in H.R. 3200 are completely inadequate to ensure that illegal immigrants do not illegally obtain health care through the bill. In the House Ways and Means mark up of H.R. 3200, Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) introduced an amendment that would use two citizenship status verification systems, the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) programs, to establish an individual’s eligibility to obtain the bill’s proposed affordability credits or enroll in the public insurance option. Both programs are currently used to determine citizenship status and eligibility for other public assistance programs. Safeguards to guarantee that only citizens can access federal health care benefits are necessary, considering that the US Census Bureau currently estimates that 9.6 million of the uninsured are not US citizens. The Heller amendment failed on a straight party-line vote. (more…)

Tags: abortion, comparative effectiveness, government-run health care, illegal immigrants, myths, rationing

Controversial Princeton bioethics professor and philosopher Peter Singer is making waves with his article outlining the case for rationing in last week’s New York Times Magazine. This is the same Singer who advocated infanticide, proposing that abortion be made legal for 28 days after birth, in order to allow parents to decide whether to keep an “imperfect” baby.

Professor Singer’s latest piece, “Why We Must Ration Health Care,” should be a call to action for every American who cherishes personal freedom and self-determination. There is no doubt that health care reform proposals being rushed through Congress are the initial steps in government rationing of health care. As has been shown from experience in this country and others, under a government-rationed system the needs of the elderly, the disabled, and the unborn are pushed aside in the name of government bureaucrats seeking the “best value” from limited health care resources. (more…)

Tags: consumer-driven reform, elderly, rationing, unborn

Rep. Marsha Blackburn has seen the future of health care in America that the Left wants to implement. Blackburn’s home state of Tennessee implemented TennCare, a Medicaid style program in 1994.

The results were predictable.

Employers moved employees onto TennCare because the subsidized public plan appeared to cost less. “As a result of this, insurance rates for those who have private coverage were going through the roof,” said Blackburn who spoke at Heritage’s weekly Blogger Briefing today. (more…)

Tags: blackburn, blogger briefing, government-run health care, marsha blackburn, Medicaid, rationing, TennCare, Tennessee

The Washington Post takes an in-depth look today at one of the core questions swirling about in the health care reform debate: Since medical resources and dollars are finite, who will have the power to decide what medical care patients can receive and providers will be reimbursed for?

Current legislation being drafted in Congress “would put new emphasis on evaluating treatments according to their ‘comparative effectiveness,’ or weighing the risks and benefits of different types of treatment for the same illness, but the bills stop short of incorporating cost-benefit analyses into the findings or of requiring that providers abide by conclustions,’ the Post article says.

Heritage health care expert Rober Moffit said in the article this kind of emphasis could lead to rationing. “You’re going to be saying to people to be saying to people, ‘We’re not going to care for you, because we decided it’s too expensive to care for you,” he said in the article.

Tags: comparative effectiveness, rationing, robert moffit