Playing the race card: Minorities impacted most by raising the Medicare eligibility age.
Myth exposed: Suicides don’t peak during holidays.
Alcoholism is the reason the crude death rate in Russia soared by 40% between 1990 and 1994.
The White House can decriminalize medical marijuana without any act of Congress.
Avik Roy tells us:
Under a new provision in ObamaCare, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — CMS — created a pilot program called the Financial Alignment Initiative to put dual-eligibles under the management of private insurers…
For states to gain CMS’ approval to participate, CMS required that states promise that the private plans they employ cover the full range of traditional Medicare benefits, and that the savings would benefit both Medicaid (which is partially funded by the states) and Medicare. 15 states have already been approved for the program, and 26 more have applied for it.
Lest we forget, Roy reminds us:
During the campaign, President Obama blasted away at Mitt Romney’s proposal for Medicare reform, because, according to Obama, “no American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies.”
When there’s a difference between the charge and the insurance reimbursement, and a health care provider tries to collect the difference from the patient — that is balance billing.
Those bills can be enormous. A 2010 report by America’s Health Insurance Plans said out-of-network providers often charge exorbitant rates, as high as 70 times the Medicare reimbursement for a similar service. A report issued by New York State in March cited the case of a patient who went to an in-network hospital emergency room after severing his finger in a table saw accident. The finger was reattached by a nonparticipating plastic surgeon, and the bill was $83,000. The insurer estimated the going rate for the procedure was only about $21,000.
More on the effects of balance billing in The New York Times.
The law’s new 3.8% tax on “high-income” individuals…will hit more and more individuals over time — because the “high-income” thresholds are not indexed for inflation. The Medicare actuary has predicted that the tax will hit only 3 percent of filers when it goes into effect next year, but nearly 80 percent of filers in the long term.
Source: Chris Jacobs.
Why we don’t have a flat tax: current total tax expenditures in the United States hover around $1 trillion, with over 80 percent accruing to individuals and the remainder to corporations.
The morning after Tuesday’s vote, there is one thing every commentator agreed on. The election of Barack Obama guaranteed that his signature piece of legislation — health reform — can now go forward. Republicans are powerless to stop it.
Yet there is something all these commentators are overlooking. There are six major flaws in ObamaCare. They are so serious that the Democrats are going to have to perform major surgery on the legislation in the next few years, even if all the Republicans do is stand by and twiddle their thumbs.
Here is a brief overview.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrtMemDVp-k
But can you save me
Come on and save me
Tasks that once took seconds to perform on paper now require multistepped points and clicks through a maze of menus. Checking patients into the office is an odyssey involving scanners and the collection of demographic data — their race, their preferred language, and so much more — required by Medicare to prove that we are achieving “meaningful use” of our EMR. What “meaningful use” means no one knows for sure, but our manual on how to achieve it is 150 pages long…
When the clicks don’t get me what I want, I naughtily handwrite a prescription. I skip ordering certain tests I might want because it takes too much time — I’ll do it next visit. I dreaded the arrival of this season’s flu-shot supply — now there were more orders to input!
Anne Marie Valinoti’s editorial in the WSJ.
