Tag: Policy/Politics

Obama health plan, silliness

Jul 23, 2008• 16

By Matthew Holt

Enter David Cutler. Result is more silly meaningless numbers

<sigh>

It is truly worrying when the single most sensible quote in the whole damn article comes from AEI’s Joe Antos.

How is this worth the NY Times’ attention? And what happens when the Obama bill comes up in Congress and somehow there isn’t a $2,500 check to be mailed to each household?

I thought this guy was going to treat us like grown-ups. After 8 years of insanity that would be nice.

If Cutler, who doesn’t exactly strike me as a major league populist, thinks that Obama has to “find a way to talk to people in a way they understand” how about he steers him to talk more about some insurance reforms that are both possible and very understandable. Like stopping this.

Doubtful McCain’s health plan would accomplish any real cost savings

Jul 23, 2008• 3

By Robert Laszewski

John McCain is now the presumptive Republican nominee for president. As a result, what he thinks about health care policy will be out front in the presidential campaign this fall.

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McCain’s thinking couldn’t be more different from Democrat Barack Obama.McCain very rightly points to health care costs as the biggest health care issue. "We are approaching a ‘perfect storm’ of problems that if not addressed by the next president will cause our health care system to implode," he has said.

Therefore, his focus is on the health care costs that make health insurance so expensive that many individuals can’t afford it for themselves, employers can’t afford to provide it to their employees, and government can’t afford a wider safety net for the poor and long-term solvency for senior benefits.

He also reminds us that costs can’t be improved without dealing with quality in tandem.

Birthing turf wars

Jul 18, 2008• 7

By Vijay Goel

This spring, the American Medical Association decided to support a legislation "that
helps ensure safe deliveries and healthy babies by acknowledging that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital" or accredited birth center.

So the AMA is against ANY women choosing to give birth at home. This appears to be based more on turf management than evidence.

(The issue erupted following the release of the documentary, "The Business of Being Born," by former talk show host Ricki Lake in which she haves her baby at home. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and AMA publicly criticized Lake, who wrote about the ordeal last month for the Huffington Post.)

AHIP starts smoking astroturf

Jul 17, 2008• 8

By Matthew Holt

Let’s say you ran a lobbying organization that may (or may not) be staring into a political storm. And say that you’d just lost a battle with opponents within the health care industry that you thought you’d won in 2003.

Now, say you “believe” that the 47 million people — who are uninsured in part (but to be fair, only in part) due to your members’ greed, political choices and incompetence over the years — represent a market for your members.

Say your organization had some members who could possibly adapt to a new world, where tightly regulated organizations were contracted under strict terms to provide care to the whole population in a social insurance scheme — with appropriate risk-adjustment and other mechanisms in place to promote the care management you say your members do so well.

And say then it had other members, who are mere sharks and who would go out of business the minute they were banned from cherry-picking only the best customers and selling them quasi-fraudulent products.

Is Meaningful Health Care (Or Any Other Kind Of) Reform Possible?

Jul 17, 2008• 27

By Brian Klepper

Those who wait, ever hopefully, for real health reform might want to take a deep breath and take stock of a few realities.First, think about the fact that when the Democrats retook Congress, they tweaked but did not fundamentally change the lobbying rules that trade money for influence over policy. In fact, most contributors have now adjusted their contributions to favor the current, rather than the past, majority party. As it turns out, Democrats, like Republicans, are only too eager to allow special interests to trump the common interest, so long as the transactions fetch a good price.

Commonwealth puts the boot in, again

Jul 17, 2008• 8

By Matthew Holt

Veteran THCB readers shouldn’t need too much reminding about this, so I’ll spare you the blow by blow documented here over the years. Here’s the bottom line. Any time you do a trans-national study on health care, you find that the U.S. spends way too much and gets way too little in terms of quality and outcomes.

In doing these studies the Commonwealth Fund has become the bete noir of the political right.

Why? Well it starts with data first and then draws conclusions, rather than the opposite approach followed by most on the right. And whatever way you look at the data they’ve produced over the years, it’s clear that things aren’t going well.

The Two Ted Kennedys

Jul 15, 2008• 3

By Matthew Holt

I’m up at Spot-On explaining the Ted Kennedy Medicare miracle to the masses and suggesting that there are some real long-term problems that won’t be so easy for the Dems to solve later. As ever come back here to comment.

Well, lookee there: Congressional Democrats actually won one. That’s right. After 14 years of ignoring core liberal principles – including the last 18 months when they actually had a majority – they took on the Republicans and won.

How did this happen? Well, it’s an election year, and by forcing an issue that Congress has been putting off for years — automatic cuts in Medicare physician payments — Democrats seized the chance to score a few points.

Essentially, the Democrats decided that, instead of agreeing to another fudged compromise to put off the decision to cut payments, they’d set the insurers against the doctors. So they found the money to put off those automatic cuts by taking some away from private Medicare insurers. Now, it was a bit of a surprise that so many House Republicans joined them and drop-kicked the insurers with whom they’ve been aligned for so long, although of course they’re all up for re-election. But once there was a veto-proof majority in the House, the Senate Democrats realized that they could force the issue and score a political win.

Read the rest.

Already counting down to the next physician fee cut

Jul 14, 2008• 3

By Robert Laszewski

Robert Laszweski has been a fixture in Washington health policy circles for
the better part of three decades. He currently serves as the president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates of Alexandria, Virginia. You can read more of his thoughtful analysis of healthcare industry trends at The Health Policy and Marketplace Blog.

Is the "medical home" a real solution?

Now that this year’s fight over Medicare physician fees is all but over, it is important to turn to real solutions.

The recent Senate and House vote to kill the 10.6% physician fee cut only defers the problem for 18 months.

On January 1, 2010, the Medicare physicians are slated to get an automatic 21 percent fee cut!

More importantly, the Medicare physician fee structure is grossly out of whack with primary care docs starving under the current fee system.

War on terror becomes a war on the desperate

Jul 14, 2008• 3

By Matthew Holt

I don’t go off topic on THCB much these days, but I do so after reading about the arrests of illegal immigrants at a meat-packing plant in Iowa and the treatment of those arrested.

The “war on drugs” was ramped up in 1986 after a basketball star allegedly died from a cocaine overdose and has since been perverted into a budget-busting bonanza, going largely after marijuana users who are doing little harm to themselves or anyone else. But they are still being arrested in their hundreds of thousands, and contributing massively to the budgets of law enforcement and prisons nationwide.

It was entirely predictable that the same thing would happen to the “war on terror.” In order to justify the huge and growing budget of the Department of Homeland Security’s biggest agency, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), illiterate illegal immigrants who are doing nothing more than trying to support their families are now being charged and jailed for laughable offenses using legislation put on the books to stop terrorists. The “war on terror” is now taking on the vital stronghold of rural Guatemala, via Postville, Iowa. The aim is clearly to justify ICE’s budget by pretending that illegal immigrants are serious criminals.

Just in case you thought the callous indifference of this Administration couldn’t get much worse, you should read the whole account from the interpreter who was at the court cases at Postville, Iowa. Hundreds of immigrants are being jailed for up to 5 months — at your and my expense — on the insistence of the DOJ and the ICE.

Here’s the whole account from interpreter Erik Camayd-Freixas, and I urge you to read it.

Ted Kennedy Shows Up to Vote; McCain Absent

Jul 10, 2008• 7

By MAGGIE MAHAR

When Ted Kennedy came onto the Senate floor, his colleagues cheered.

He was there to vote on the bill that would prevent a 10.6 percent cut to physicians who treat Medicare patients.

Just before Congress broke for the July 4 holiday, the bill missed the 60 votes needed to pass by just one vote.

Today, Kennedy, who is battling a brain tumor, brought that vote to the Senate floor. “Aye,” the 76-year-old Kennedy said, grinning and making a thumbs-up gesture as he registered his vote.

Meanwhile, it appeared that Republican members of the Senate had been released to vote as they wished after it became apparent that the 60-vote threshold would be met. Pressure from seniors, the AARP, and the AMA had been mounting on members who voted against the bill June 26.