Fix Health Care Policy

Conservatives, including The Heritage Foundation, support reforming Medicare to provide seniors with a defined contribution to apply to the health care plan of their choice. This approach would address the program’s insolvency, and it is superior to other options—including the President’s plan to allow an unelected board of officials to ratchet down spending—because it would allow consumer choice to catalyze patient-centered innovations and better value in the health care system.

Among the straw man arguments liberals have made against this “premium-support” model is the claim that it would be too confusing for seniors to act as cost-conscious, savvy consumers in a controlled marketplace. But choice is nothing new in Medicare.   (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: cost-conscious, defined contribution, Medicare, premium support, Seniors, straw man

This Wednesday marks the first anniversary of Obamacare. While its supporters spend the week highlighting the new law’s effects on affected groups of Americans, we will do the same. By laying out the facts on the ground and the conclusions of Heritage research from the past year, we shed light on the realities of the new law and the negative consequences it has for every American.

Today, liberals will argue that Obamacare is good for America’s seniors. The truth is that the few perks Medicare beneficiaries will experience under the new law are overshadowed by the negative consequences of the far-reaching, fundamental changes it makes to the program. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: Medicare, negative consequences, Obamacare anniversary, Seniors

Pollster Scott Rasmussen joined us “In The Green Room” to discuss Obamacare on the eve of its one year anniversary. We discussed how the law has remained consistently unpopular—from about 54% of Americans favoring repeal one year ago to 53% still favoring repeal nearly one year later.

As Mr. Rasmussen pointed out, this is still an issue on the minds of many voters, especially among seniors who are likely impacted most by the new law. While admitting that attention to this issue may not always be this high, Mr. Rasmussen suggested that it will continue to weigh on Americans’ minds. “They will be interested when they see it impacting their life,” he explained, “And that could be in terms of expanded deficits—which is sort of a distant relationship—or it could be when they have to change their insurance coverage or when their doctor says, ‘I have to do this because of the health care law.’”

But while the future may be unclear, one thing is certain: this issue is not going away any time soon.

Tags: American opinion, ObamaCare, repeal the law, Scott Rasmussen, Seniors

Currently 3.4 million Americans seniors covered by Medicare find themselves in a giant “doughnut hole,” but despite the tasty terminology, there’s nothing sweet about it.

The doughnut hole refers to a gap in prescription drug coverage under Medicare Part D. As David Hilzenrath explains, “…beneficiaries enter the coverage gap when their prescription tab hits $2,830, including both their share and the amounts paid by insurance. Once in the gap, they are responsible for 100 percent of the cost and must spend $3,610 of their money before qualifying for catastrophic coverage, which typically pays 95 percent of the cost.”

President Obama has pledged that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will, “in the coming years… close the doughnut hole completely once and for all,” while also conceding that “it’s very expensive to close this doughnut hole…[, and] for us to close that right away would have blown a hole in the budget.” (more…)

Tags: doughnut hole, Medicare, ObamaCare, Seniors, Side Effects

While Medicare held the spotlight for much of the debate over health care reform last year, the changes to the health care program for seniors and the disabled that were most widely acknowledged were the $575 billion in cuts to the program. These cuts threaten to result in reduced benefits or access to health care providers. But this isn’t the only way in which the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will affect seniors. In recent Heritage research, Clete DiGiovanni, MD, and Robert Moffit, Ph.D., lay out some of the other important changes to Medicare which could, depending on the direction taken in pending regulation, challenge the doctor-patient relationship and undercut physician autonomy:

Standardization of Care. The PPACA creates a new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which will be charged with setting research priorities and advance studies of comparative effectiveness research. Though there is no problem with advancing evidence-based research to influence medical decision-making, DiGiovanni and Moffit write that, “The key issue, to be resolved through regulation, is the precise relationship between providers’ reimbursement and plan coverage and the findings of comparative effectiveness research.. statutory conditions are not to be construed as “preventing” the Secretary from using such evidence in determining coverage or reimbursement.” (more…)

Tags: Medicare bureaucracy, patient-centered outcomes research institute, physician payments, Seniors, Side Effects

On the stump, Candidate Obama identified government entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security as the largest contributor to the federal deficit. If Congress doesn’t rein in the costs of these programs, he said,, these three programs will “consume all of the federal budget.”

Candidate Obama was right. (Still is: just check out The Heritage Foundation’s new 2010 Budget Chart Book.) Unfortunately, the President’s health care law will only exacerbate the entitlement crisis.

While Obamacare seeks some cost-savings (witness its ham-fisted treatment of popular Medicare Advantage plans), it does nothing to reform the overall structure of the Medicare entitlement. While the new law carves out $529 billion in Medicare “savings,” it calls for using those funds—and trillions more—to bankroll even more expansive health care entitlements. According to the National Center for Policy Analysis : “Instead of fixing the health care programs for seniors and those who cannot afford insurance, this law cuts Medicare and adds more people to the failing Medicaid system.” (more…)

Tags: 2010 Budget Chart Book, CMS, Florida, Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, Seniors, Side Effects, Social Security

Yesterday, the actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that runs the giant entitlement programs, released their analysis of the new health care law. The AP reports that “White House officials have repeatedly complained that such analyses have been too pessimistic and lowball the law’s potential to achieve savings,” but the official CMS analysis reinforces several of Heritage’s predictions regarding Obamacare.

Some highlights of the CMS report:

– Mandates Without Impact. Writes CMS, “For many individuals, the penalty amounts for not having insurance coverage were not sufficiently large to have a sizable impact on the coverage decision” (p.7). Concerning employers, “the penalties would not be a substantial deterrent to dropping or forgoing coverage” (p.7). So these provisions will do little to achieve their purpose, i.e., to encourage individuals to carry coverage and employers to offer it. (more…)

Tags: bend cost curve up, CLASS program, higher health care costs, Individual Mandate, Medicare cuts, Seniors, Side Effects