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Obama-ney Care

• 3

By SENATOR DAVID DURENBERGER

Tim Pawlenty used a recent appearance on Fox News Sunday to show a tougher demeanor and to prove he will not make health care cost containment and access a priority.   As Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney worked with the Democratic legislature and the health care industry to expand access to all residents of the state and to commit to cost containing behavior change. The coverage reforms came right out of conservative health policy playbooks at Wharton (in the 1980s) and the Heritage Foundation (in the 1990s) and the cost containment was to be accomplished by voluntary action of Massachusetts health systems and health plans. On which they have since foundered, leaving Romney to take the heat.

When President Obama made his commitment to reform of national coverage, access, insurance, payment, and delivery system policy, national Republicans refused to cooperate. The legislative policy approach he advocated came mostly from a bipartisan Senate Finance Committee report from 2008. Elements of it came from the bipartisan approach Romney took in Massachusetts. Congressional Republicans unanimously refused to participate in the process. Today every elected Republican has committed to repealing Obamacare (and now Obama-ney care).

What changed? The definition of Republican.  The election power of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Jim DeMint and the Rupert Murdoch/WSJ/Fox version of facts to bring out the “just vote No on government and on Obama” in a substantial enough minority of Americans turned the trick. While Pawlenty and Bachmann represent a state which has been committed to universal coverage and healthcare cost containment for decades, neither has done much to make it a reality in our state. Assuming “repeal and replace” implies state action is preferable to national, they’ve nothing to show for their efforts so far.

Senator David Durenberger, Minnesota, served in the US Senate from 1978 – 1995.

There’s No Choice but Change

• 52

By GRACE-MARIE TURNER

The outrageous distortions about the Ryan Medicare reform plan are coming from people who are accelerating the program’s path to insolvency.

Medicare is being used as a piggy bank by Democrats, with $575 billion in payment cuts used to finance two massive new entitlement programs in Obamacare. And this April, the president proposed taking another $480 billion out of the program to lower the deficit.

Payments to providers will be cut so deeply that seniors will find it harder and harder to get care. Doctors will stop taking Medicare or go bankrupt. A whopping 87 percent of doctors say they will stop seeing or will restrict the number of Medicare patients they see, further shrinking the pool of providers and further restricting access to care.

The powerful, 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board will use price controls to meet ever-elusive spending targets. Rationing is inevitable, especially of newer medicines and technologies.

House Energy and Commerce chairman Fred Upton explained, “Last year, Medicare expenditures reached $523 billion, but the income was only $486 billion — leaving a $37 billion deficit in just one year. And with 10,000 new individuals becoming eligible each day, it’s only going to get worse.”

Medicare is $38 trillion in the red, and it accelerated five years toward insolvency in just the last year, according to the Medicare Trustees’ latest report.

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The Unbridgeable Gap between Left and Right on Health Reform

• 57

By JEFF GOLDSMITH

Though thoroughly smothered under 2900 pages of well meaning but poorly focused, expert-driven “good works”, the core of the Affordable Care Act was providing 30 million people subsidized health insurance coverage. As the country continues to decide how it feels about this monumental legislation, a major ideological divide persists over whether the aggressive coverage expansion in health reform was really needed or not.

Far from “selling itself,” as a overconfident White House aide suggested it would back on March 23, 2010,  health reform remains strikingly unpopular. Only 37% of the public thinks the country will be better off as a result of health reform, and only 28% think their families will be better off, according to the May Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll.  There is a stark partisan divide over health reform.  While 72% of Democrats have a favorable opinion of health reform, a substantial minority believes the bill could have done more (covered more people, provided a public option or path to single payer).  Alternatively, 74% of Republicans have an unfavorable opinion of health reform; the same percentage favors repeal.  Independents tend to break toward the Republican view of the bill (49% unfavorable vs. 35% favorable).  Those opposed feel more intensely about health reform than those in favor.

The Ryan House Budget for 2012 zeroes out all new spending for health reform (while keeping ACA’s Medicare cuts, devoting them to deficit reduction!).  The conservative narrative is that the problem of the uninsured was liberal mythology, not meriting major new spending.  In the blogosphere, an analysis surfaced suggesting that the real uninsured problem is only about 4 million people. This apparently originated in a Heritage Foundation blog posting from late August, 2009.  Other conservative analysts charitably suggest there may be as many as ten to twelve million uninsured worthy of federal help.   To take care of this smaller number, you do not need a major coverage expansion, but merely to apply the familiar market oriented remedies: selling insurance across state lines, high deductible health plans, malpractice reform, high risk pools, etc.

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It’s All Going According to Plan

• 75

By JONATHAN HALVORSON

Most people regard health care reform in America as thoroughly bungled. The proverbial train left the station weak and wheezing, was pushed off the rails by hooligans and is about to crumple in an inglorious heap in the ditch. Only about 20% say the reform hits the sweet spot, with the rest convinced it went too far or didn’t go far enough.

To review the most recent pilings-on: in a time of huge Federal deficits, we get depressing predictions that the PPACA will do little or nothing to slow the growth of health care costs. Only a year after passage of what was supposed to be comprehensive reform, Democrats acknowledge that Medicare and Medicaid spending remain out of control and propose new cuts in the hundreds of billions. In the span of four months, Republicans switched from posing as aggrieved defenders of Medicare spending, to proposing to slash it and leave seniors to absorb the spillover. Medicaid funding is probably even more precarious, since fewer Medicaid recipients vote.

To add injury to injury, the Supreme court may rule to invalidate the entire law, or perhaps just the mandate to purchase insurance, thereby removing the most hated part of the law, but eliminating the “universal” part of universal coverage and inviting an actuarial death spiral. Oh, and the few reforms that look like they might bring costs down, like the IPAB board in Medicare and the minimum medical expense ratio for insurers, are under threat of being watered down. A year after legislation has been passed that will transform nearly a fifth of the American economy, to the casual observer it looks like nothing much has happened and nothing in the future is secure, especially anything that the big industry players don’t like.

In light of this and more, pessimism is understandable, but what we are witnessing in these turns of events is not mere politically-driven chaos. There is good reason to think that events are unfolding more or less in line with a staged strategy for deep reform that emerged out of the experience in Massachusetts. The strategy is essentially this: enact universal coverage first to precipitate a sense of crisis. This will lead to deep reform on the problem that exacerbates all other problems: the cost of health care. Readers of this blog need little reminding that these costs are twice as high as in any other nation.Continue reading…

Does the GOP Have a Health Plan?

• 17

By JOHN GOODMAN

The Republicans have no plan to insure the uninsured.

How do I know that? A New York Times editorial told me. So did Ezra Klein, writing in The Washington Post. Matt Miller, also writing in the Post, went further. “I’m willing to repeal ObamaCare,” he wrote, provided the Republicans can “cover the same number of uninsured” and “do it at a lower cost.”

So why don’t the Republicans have a plan? That’s easy. “They’re against reform because it would cover the uninsured — and that’s something they just don’t want to do,” wrote Paul Krugman in The New York Times. The Times’ own editorial said the same thing.

All this has caused me to suffer a bout of severe depression. But, wait a minute. Wasn’t health care the biggest issue in the last presidential election? And…how memory fades…didn’t the Obama campaign spend millions of dollars…promoting his own plan?…no, that’s not right…

Ah, now I remember. The Obama campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on TV commercials attacking the John McCain health plan! It spent more money than has ever been spent for or against any policy proposal in the history of American politics.

The McCain plan, for all those suffering from collective amnesia, proposed to replace all existing health care tax and spending subsidies with a universal health grant, structured like a refundable tax credit. The Patients’ Choice Act version of the idea is sponsored by Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Paul Ryan (R-WI). It promises $2,300 (individual) or $5,700 (family) to everyone who isn’t enrolled in a government health plan.

So what was candidate Obama’s problem with that? Did he object that the plan wasn’t generous enough? Too few regulations? No, none of that. The Obama TV ads focused like a laser on raw self-interest. McCain’s health plan, the ads said, will cause your withholding taxes to go up (without mentioning the offsetting credit that would cause them to go down).Continue reading…

The GOP’s Health Policy Cynics

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By MICHAEL MILLENSON

The health care community is discovering to its shock and dismay that it’s not simply traditional Republican conservatives who have taken control of the House of Representatives, it’s a new group of cynics.

Conservatives, like liberals, have a more-or-less coherent set of ideas. They use political power to push preferred policies, whether related to health care, housing or a hundred other possible issues. William F. Buckley Jr., one of the fathers of modern American conservatism, “had a way of … making conservatism a holistic view of life not narrowed to the playing fields of ideology alone,” as one admirer put it.

Although cynics may claim conservative credentials, their view of government is really nothing more than a quarrel about its cost. It brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s immortal phrase, “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

The contrast between the two viewpoints was on stark display at two recent marquée meetings, AcademyHealth’s yearly policy conference and the sprawling Health Information and Management Systems Society — HIMSS — Health IT Conference and Exhibition.

AcademyHealth’s “Running of the Wonks” (my term, not theirs) is a magnet for researchers and policy mavens who are inured by long experience to most political rhetoric. Yet at the general session featuring a bipartisan dialogue among congressional staffers, the harsh rhetoric from the GOP participants stunned the crowd. The new federal health law, it seemed, was evil incarnate, and the rhetoric of “repeal and replace” was wielded with a fundamentalist zeal.Continue reading…

Laboratories of Democracy, Part 2

By MERRILL GOOZNER

Experimentation in how states would move toward universal health care coverage was written into the DNA of the Affordable Care Act. The law allowed any state to petition for a waiver that would enable it to enact its own brand of reform — including versions that did not include an individual mandate to purchase coverage or penalize employers who didn’t provide it – as long as their plans met the basic criteria of the law in terms of covering most people, providing comprehensive coverage, being affordable, and not increasing the federal deficit.

President Obama yesterday offered to move up the date for states that want to pursue their own visions of reform from 2017 to 2014. Stories in today’s press billed this as an effort by the administration to assuage conservative critics who’ve filed suit against the law and governors from both political parties who fear its economic impact. Medicaid expansion accounts for about half of the newly covered people under reform. Even with the feds picking up 90 percent of the tab, many states in today’s fiscal environment are wary of any new obligations — even one where they’re only on the hook for 10 percent.

As I wrote last month, leaving states to implement reform provides Americans with a classic example of federalism in action, one that may or may not lead to a common system across the U.S. In the early part of the 20th century, states began setting up unemployment and workers compensation insurance systems. The former became a shared federal-state responsibility with common features across the U.S. The latter remained unique to each state. Ohio, for instance, has a single-payer workers compensation system and insurance companies are prohibited from selling policies in the state.Continue reading…

Survivor

• 7

By MICHAEL TURPIN

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”  Charles Darwin

As the legislative reform volcano rumbles and angrily spews magma into the Washington night, nervous industry stakeholders competing for survival on this unstable island of American healthcare are still betting that the seismic activity is merely a false eruption.

Survivor contestants are using every possible means to ensure they are not voted off the island.  The stakeholders are a veritable who’s who of personalities – the powerful, the wealthy, the prima donnas, the tough love advocates, the national health zealots, the well-intended academics, the bellicose politicians, the under-employed, the overweight, and the disenfranchised. It remains to be seen whether Congress, market forces or the American people will be the ultimate judge of who stays and who goes.

If the contestants cannot change in the next five years, 2015 will find them staring at a terrifying wall of regulation and governmental intervention that will be more destructive than the changes from the 2010 proposed legislation.Continue reading…

The Grinch that Stole Obamacare

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By DAVID DRANOVEDavid dranove, PhD

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the Constitution, better known as the Commerce Clause, states that Congress has the power to “regulate Commerce…among the several States.”  To supporters of health reform, the Commerce Clause is the Grinch that stole Obamacare.  To opponents, the Commerce Clause might seem like a Sanity Clause (apologies to the Marx Brothers.)  One thing now seems certain.  Obamacare is on the fast track to the Supreme Court, where a ruling on the Commerce Clause could have far reaching implications for health reform and, frankly, for many other federal interventions into economic activity.

Virginia officials cited the Commerce Clause in arguing that the individual mandate was beyond the power of Congress.  U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson agreed with the centrality of the Commerce Clause:

While this case raises a host of complex constitutional issues, all seem to distill to the single question of whether or not Congress has the power to regulate and tax a citizen’s decision to participate in interstate commerce.

Judge Hudson sided with Virginia, stating that “no specifically articulated constitutional authority exists to mandate the purchase of health insurance.”

Judge Hudson does not reject health reform in its entirety.  Although he speculates as to whether the bill would have been enacted without the exchange, he notes that the record in the case is insufficient for a final determination and thus he “severs (the individual mandate) with circumspection,” leaving the rest of the bill intact.  In doing so he provides a road map to others attempting to strike down the entire legislation, provided they can find some evidence that votes hinged on the inclusion of the exchange.

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