It’s easier to apply for green card than ObamaCare.
As economy flails, debtors’ prisons thrive: jailing for failure to pay traffic fines and court fees.
Because of the sequester cuts, cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Why can’t they drop the “free” wellness exams instead?
The annual cost of dementia is between $157 billion and $215 billion — that’s as much as $2,000 per household per year.
Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin proposed a Republican health reform plan in National Review. This led to petty carping by Matt Yglesias, a response by Levin, clarification by Ben Domenech and more petty carping by Ezra Klein.
Here’s the problem. The Republican reformers are talking mechanics and not principles. They propose a list of changes they would like to make, but are unclear on why they would like to make them. Therefore, they open the door to the critics — who are more than happy to divert everyone’s attention away from the huge problems with ObamaCare.
There are two central questions to be asked about any health care system:
Answers below the fold.
It’s not just sore throats and flu shots anymore. Walgreens today became the first retail store chain to expand its health care services to include diagnosing and treating patients for chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes and high cholesterol…
Retail clinics generally appeal to consumers looking for convenience and cost savings. Costs are roughly 30 percent to 40 percent less than similar care at doctor’s offices and 80 percent cheaper than at an emergency room, according to a 2011 study published in the American Journal of Managed Care.
This is from Kaiser Health News.
Across-the-board deductibles don’t make a lot of sense. In Priceless, I argued that whole categories of care should be transferred to the patient in some cases and there should be first-dollar coverage for other kinds of services. Austin Frakt seems to agree, reproducing this graph from the book, and remarking:
LASIK is an elective procedure, the purpose of which is well understood by the patient. I’m on board with the idea that insurance shouldn’t cover such things, or if it does, not the full cost and certainly not the marginal cost. All health procedures just like this are good candidates for the purview of John Goodman’s “New HSA.”
The issue is not whether the procedure is like LASIK surgery, however. The issue is whether choices by the individual will create costs for other members of the insurance pool. Where there are no “financial externalities,” the case for individual decision-making is strong.
And also for seniors. Sarah Kliff reports:
The Obama administration reversed a proposed 2.3 percent pay cut for private Medicare plans, replacing it with a 3.3 percent raise…
Wait, how exactly does a pay cut become a pay raise? When I asked Medicare acting administrator Marilyn Tavenner about the proposed pay cut, back in February, she said it was due to a slowdown in Medicare cost growths…
Medicare costs haven’t changed in the past two months — but two other things did.
First, political pressure ratcheted up. As my colleague Sandhya Somashekar reports, over 100 legislators pushed Medicare to reverse the cuts. America’s Health Insurance Plans, which lobbies for the industry, aired television ads titled “Drastic” and “Too Much.”
The untold story of the Massachusetts reform is that the small business community has been paying more for health insurance since the commonwealth’s 2006 reform merged sicker individuals into the same risk pool. The legislature has only made matters worse by passing 12 additional mandated benefits since 2006, a cost borne completely by small companies and individuals.
Now the future looks even bleaker for small business. Not only will their highest-in-the-nation premiums go up because of these new [ACA] regulations, but they will be paying on average $8,000 per family, per plan more in taxes over the next ten years.
More from Josh Archambault.
State budgets are still under stress because revenues are not growing fast enough to replace the funding from the federal stimulus program. And now states are being pressured to expand Medicaid.
According to the National Association of State Budget Officers, Medicaid will account for 23.9 percent of total state expenditures in fiscal 2012. In most states, able-bodied working age adults are not eligible for Medicaid. One of the pillars of ObamaCare was the provision requiring states to either expand Medicaid to everyone with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level (plus a five percent income set-aside) or lose all of their federal matching funds. This provision was struck down by the Supreme Court.
But state governments are still being pressured to expand Medicaid, even though estimates suggest that more than 25 percent of people in the expansion group have private health coverage and that a sizeable fraction of them are college students. The federal government promises to pay 100 percent of Medicaid medical costs for the first three years of the expansion, and 90 percent of them in 2020 and thereafter. A variety of interest groups think that it would be a shame to leave this “free” money on the table.
Current law requires:
More from Chris Conover.
Here we go again. Once an idea gets fixed in certain minds, it never goes away. Politico reports –
The National Commission on Physician Payment Reform is calling for eliminating the fee-for-service model within seven years, starting with a five-year transition period to a blended payment system.
This commission is chaired by Bill Frist, MD, former Senate Majority Leader. He also wrote an op-ed with Steven Schroeder in which he says we can abolish FFS within five years. He writes –
Lawmakers, care providers and insurers must act now to change physician pay incentives to ultimately improve how care is delivered and ensure that the cost of that care is affordable for generations to come. That means moving away from fee-for-service now.
