Fix Health Care Policy

PODCAST: How Obamacare Will Change the Face of Medicare

In this week’s Heritage in Focus, expert Bob Moffit discusses how Obamacare ends Medicare as we know it. Click here to listen.

How does the health reform law break up traditional Medicare? What’s a better way to fix Medicare? And how much could we save by bringing free market reforms to it?

Be sure to hear Dr. Moffit answer these questions and more!  (Find the audio on The Foundry…)

Tags: Medicare, ObamaCare, Podcast, premium support, robert moffit

Catch Co-Authors of ‘Why Obamacare is Wrong for America’ On BookTV

As has been well documented, Obamacare is destructive to Americans on several fronts: economically, medically, Constitutionally, ethically, and otherwise. This government takeover of America’s health care system (mislabeled as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA) must be stopped. And therein may lie the one positive side effect of this misguided law: it unites Americans as never before, in an effort to reverse Obamacare as quickly as possible.

Nowhere is such determined collaboration seen more clearly than in the new book Why Obamacare is Wrong for America, written by four of today’s leading health policy experts and published by Broadside Books (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers). This weekend, the four co-authors—Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Tom Miller of American Enterprise Institute, and Heritage’s Bob Moffit—appear together on BookTV to reveal the “lowlights” of their in-depth Obamacare analysis and share what real health care reform could look like moving forward. Their book forum presentation airs on C-SPAN2′s BookTV on Saturday, April 9, at 8:30 pm ET, and again on Sunday, April 10, at 2 pm ET. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: CSPAN2 BookTV, Grace-Marie Turner, Jim Capretta, robert moffit, Tom Miller, Why Obamacare Is Wrong for America

There is Nothing Conservative About This President

According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, public confidence in government is at one of the lowest points in a half century. Pew Research Center president Andrew Kohut writes in today’s Wall Street Journal: “A desire for smaller government is particularly evident since Barack Obama took office.” Last March, by 54% to 37%, more people said it was a good idea for the government to exert more control over the economy. Now, by 51% to 40%, a majority of Americans say they want less government control.

President Obama has always tried to cast himself as a centrist. During the 2008 campaign, he promised Americans he would cut their taxes, expand the military, and enact “a net spending cut” for the federal government. Lower taxes, a strong defense and shrinking the size of government; these are core conservative beliefs. Unfortunately, President Obama has completely abandoned them by raising taxes on lower-income Americans, cutting defense spending, and enacting a $862 billion failed stimulus.

And we haven’t even mentioned the President’s health care plan yet. With polls showing that the President’s health care plan has only gotten less popular since it became law, the White House has been desperate to portray their plan in as centrist a light as possible. So on March 30th, President Obama told “Today” show host Matt Lauer that “a lot of ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, that originated from the Heritage Foundation.” Heritage Center for Health Policy Studies director Robert Moffit responds in today’s Washington Post: (more…)

Tags: Individual Mandate, insurance portability, national health exchange, ObamaCare, President Barack Obama, public disapproval, robert moffit

Who Will Say No on Health Services?

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

Robert Moffit Testifies on the Public Plan

Heritage Foundation’s Robert Moffit testifies on the public plan and other health reform components proposed by the House Education and Labor Committee (as well as two other House committees).

Tags: House committees, public plan, robert moffit