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Tag: AHCA

Death and Medicaid

• 31

By ANISH KOKA, MD

I remember 7 South at the Children’s hospital very well. I remember the distinctive smell, the large rooms, the friendly nurses, and Shantel. For a brief period of time, Shantel and her little boy – a too skinny child named James – were there every time I was there with my little girl. 7 South was the GI floor – Shantel and I were there because our children had the same dastardly liver disease that, for the time being, was winning. And that was it. We had nothing else in common.

She grew up in North Philadelphia, not far from where I was finishing a residency program in Internal Medicine. She had three other children, was a single mother, and in the year that I spent shuttling to the hospital I never saw the father of her child. Shantel did not work, and relied almost exclusively on the welfare programs to make life work.

I was a medical resident, our family had a combined income north of $150,000/ year, and our health insurance was through my employer. My wife and I worked, which meant that we had the flexibility for one of us to stop working, and still maintain our benefits.Continue reading…

If Your Premiums Go Down but Coverage Gets Worse, Does Your Healthcare Matter?

• 5

By JASON CHUNG

Picture this. Amy becomes pregnant while working as a high school teacher. Her employer’s health insurance plan pays the maternity bills and she happily raises her twins.

Fast-forward a few years. She’s decided to become an entrepreneur and runs a small business. She becomes pregnant again but, this time, finds that her $400 a month individual health insurance policy won’t cover the expenses. In fine print, she discovers that she needed to purchase a special rider to activate maternity care benefits. She’ll have to pay $10,000+ out of pocket now, putting her burgeoning business at risk.

Angry at this, Amy decides to switch insurers but, to her dismay, she finds that the four largest insurers in her area don’t cover most expenses associated with a normal delivery. Amy has nowhere to go. Also, since pregnancy is a pre-existing condition, Amy is advised by her doctor to “not become pregnant again” if she wants to get quote reasonable health insurance rates during her search.

This is not an exaggerated or dystopian situation, it’s a real example from 2010.

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Healthcare’s Fake News Epidemic

• 23

By BRIAN JOONDEPH, MD

Fake news has replaced responsible journalism. It’s hard to know what to believe. It wasn’t long ago that supermarket tabloids like National Enquirer were considered fake news. Now it seems the Enquirer and TMZ may be more reliable sources of accurate news than the New York Times or Washington Post.

Government agencies aren’t immune from the fake news trend either. The Congressional Budget Office describes itself as, “Strictly nonpartisan; conducts objective, impartial analysis; and hires its employees solely on the basis of professional competence without regard to political affiliation.”

I’ll bet most newspapers and television news networks say the same about their own objectivity.

The CBO analyzed the American Health Care Act of 2017, a lame effort by Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare.  Passed by the House, it’s now on to “the greatest deliberative body in the world.”

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Will Senate Republicans Get 50 Votes to Repeal the ACA?

• 2

By DAVID INTROCASO

THCB readers are well aware this coming week Senate Republicans plan to begin debate on passing their amended version of the House-passed American Health Care Act (AHCA), titled the Better Care Reconciliation Act.   As of today, June 23rd, immediate reactions by Republican senators to the June 22nd released discussion draft have been limited largely because members immediately left town after the draft’s release. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) score, that will again be influential, is expected this Monday or Tuesday. Senate debate on the legislation will likely begin next Wednesday with a vote expected late Friday or early Saturday morning, or just prior to their week-long July 4th recess.   Here is an assessment of the legislation’s prospects:

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Senate Releases Obamacare Replacement Bill (Download)

• 1

BY THCB STAFF

With action expected on the legislation next week, the Senate released the full text of its proposed Obamacare replacement.

Surprise, surprise: after weeks of secret meetings and dramatic late night tweets, the legislation looks very similar to the House Bill. More soon.

SENATEHEALTHCARE

 

 

 

Jimmy Kimmel Left Out Some Important Stuff About Obamacare

• 16

By BRIAN JOONDEPH, MD

Late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, in a recent opening monologue, spoke tearfully of his newborn son Billy, born with a serious congenital heart defect.  Heart defects in newborns, while uncommon, occur in 1 in 100 births.  The more serious ones, meaning those needing surgery in the first year, represent about a quarter of all congenital heart defects.

Jimmy’s son fell into the latter category, with Tetralogy of Fallot, bad plumbing in the heart, causing oxygen-poor blood to circulate out into the body without picking up a fresh supply of oxygen from the lungs.  Hence the newborn baby turning blue.

I have firsthand experience with this, as my youngest son was born with the same heart defect.  He needed surgery as an infant and then two additional open heart procedures before reaching adulthood.  I have walked in Jimmy Kimmel’s shoes and understand exactly what he is feeling – terror, anguish, guilt, helplessness, and hopelessness.

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A Health Plan CEO Daydreams

• 5

By MICHEL ACCAD, MD

Jim was at his desk, looking weary.

The last few weeks had been brutal.  Despite working twelve-hour days, he felt that he had little to show for it.  His annual board meeting was to take place the next day, and he expected it to be tense.

With a replacement bill for the ACA about to be voted on, and with Trump in the White House, the situation seemed particularly precarious.  The board members had asked him to present a contingency plan, in case things in DC didn’t go well.

As CEO of a major health insurance company, Jim was well aware that business as usual had become unsustainable in his line of work.  No matter what insurers had tried to do in the last few years—imposing onerous rules, setting high deductibles, pushing for government subsidies—prices had been going up and up.

Premiums, of course, had had to do the same but, evidently, the limit had now been reached.  The horror stories being told at town hall meetings across the country were all too real.  People were fed up, and politicians were feeling the heat.

Something needed to be done to change course, but what?  He did not have any good plan to propose to the board.

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Would Repealing the ACA Violate International Law?

• 2

By DAVID INTROCASO and JASON CHUNG

Barely one month after a stinging and stunning legislative defeat, President Donald Trump has committed to revising the AHCA and potentially resubmitting it for Congressional approval.

In addition to Democrats and widespread popular opinion against ACA repeal, the AHCA may face another obstacle – international law.

This week the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported that the United Nations Office of the High Commission on Human Rights forwarded a four-page letter to the Acting Secretary of State, Thomas A. Shannon, to express the Commission’s “serious concern” that the US was in danger of violating its obligations under international law if the U.S. ratified legislation repealing the ACA.

The letter authored by Dainius Puras, a Lithuanian with the somewhat remarkable title of UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, argues that repealing core elements of the ACA would negatively impact almost 30 million Americans’ right to the “highest attainable standards of physical and mental health”, particularly those in moderate and low income brackets and those suffering from poverty or social exclusion.

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Did Medical Darwinism Doom the GOP Health Plan?

• 9

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

“We are now contemplating, Heaven save the mark, a bill that would tax the well for the benefit of the ill.”

Although the quote reads like it could be part of the Republican repeal-and-replace assault against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it’s actually from a 1949 editorial in The New York State Journal of Medicine denouncing health insurance itself.

Indeed, the attacks on the ACA seem to have revived a survival-of-the-fittest attitude most of us thought had vanished in America long ago. Yet, again and again, there it was in plain sight, as when House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) declared: “The idea of Obamacare is that the people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick.” Contemporary language, but the same thinking that sank President Harry Truman’s health care plan almost seven decades ago.

Ryan’s indignation highlighted a fundamental divergence in attitudes that repeatedly turned the health care debate into a clash over the philosophy behind Obamacare-style health insurance. To some, the communal pooling of financial risk of medical expenses seems too often an unacceptable risk to personal responsibility.

As a researcher who has documented this approach to health care, I’ve been startled to see the debate over the AHCA reignite a political philosophy and policy approach that seemed to be have been discredited – and be in sharp decline.

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Repealed and Misplaced

• 1

By KIP SULLIVAN

Like Joe, Michael and others, I find myself wondering what, if anything, Trump learned from the demise of the AHCA last Friday. But I’m also wondering what Democrats and other Republicans are thinking. The question I would like to ask all Republicans is: Is it clear to you now that merely saying no to any Democratic proposal to lower the uninsured rate is bad for your party? The question I would like to ask all Democrats who supported the Affordable Care Act is: Is it clear to you now that that the managed care nostrums in the ACA cannot lower costs, and that attempting to lower the uninsured rate without cutting costs is bad for your party?

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