[A]ccording to the Congressional Budget Office, for every $500 the law spends on preventive services and prescription drugs, it cuts the rest of Medicare by $7,385. That’s a cut-to-spending ratio of nearly 15 to 1.
The liberal advocacy group, the Commonwealth Fund, is fond of publishing advocacy pieces masquerading as research. A favorite tactic of theirs is to create reports with convoluted indexes designed to make their favored proposal appear superior to what they are contrasting it against. In one of their latest examples of issue advocacy, they compare the candidates’ health plans. Of course the proposal that features less government control and more consumer choice comes up short. Their comparison can be summed up using one of their graphics.
Basically they add up benefits people will receive under ObamaCare and ignore the costs. For Romney, they count the costs and ignore the benefits. This is a study? Here is Avik Roy:
The report details on a state-by-state basis the people who would receive subsidies under ObamaCare, but it does not detail the distribution of the $1.2 trillion in tax increases and $716 billion of Medicare cuts on a state-by-state basis. Perhaps Families USA believes that ObamaCare was paid for by magic unicorns in the sky…
The report makes numerous dishonest claims about ObamaCare’s Medicare cuts, such as that they “extend the life” of the program (which they only do if they aren’t double-counted toward ObamaCare’s deficit-neutrality); and that the law expands Medicare’s benefits, when in fact it cuts benefits to Medicare Advantage and drives hospitals into bankruptcy, reducing access to care.
Avik Roy explains:
Here’s how it works. AARP isn’t your every-day citizens’ advocacy group. The AARP is also one of the largest private health insurers in America. In 2011, the AARP generated $458 million in royalty fees from so-called “Medigap” plans, nearly twice the $266 million the lobby receives in membership dues.
Medigap plans are private insurance plans that seniors buy to cover the things that traditional, government-run Medicare doesn’t, like catastrophic coverage. Medigap plans also help seniors eliminate the co-pays and deductibles that are designed to restrain wasteful Medicare spending…ObamaCare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage will drive many seniors out of that program, and into traditional government-run Medicare, which will increase the number of people who need Medigap insurance.
Benefit to AARP: $1 billion over the next ten years. Plus there is another $1.8 billion subsidy because AARP’s insurance is exempted from the general health insurance reforms. Chris Jacobs explains:
Medicare pays, on average in California, $18,000 for a total hip replacement ($16,336 to the hospital and $1,446 to the surgeon)…Cutting the surgeon’s fee by 27 percent [the SGR target] saves Medicare $390. While the numbers are higher in the commercial market, approximately the same ratio of payments exists; the bulk of the money goes to hospitals and device manufacturers.
Mark Smith at the Health Affairs Blog.
The original Medicare ad. HT Sarah Kliff.
Are dogs better research subjects than lab rats?
Virgin births are possible — for snakes. HT: Suzy Khimm.
Former Democratic Senator to his restaurant employees: “Go get [health insurance] from the exchange.“
During the 1980s and 1990s, CMS used a “demographic model” [that] included only demographic variables (gender, age, and disability and Medicaid status) as opposed to disease or health conditions. CMS found that the model explained only one percent of the variation in payments among the FFS population.
“In 2004, CMS introduced…the hierarchical condition categories (HCC) model…[using] claims data from the [Medicare] population to…predict [beneficiary] costs in the following year…The model distills the roughly 15,000 possible ICD-9 codes providers list on claims into seventy disease categories.”
Studies have found that the HCC model explains 11 percent of FFS cost for the subsequent year. [Emphasis added]
Source: Jason Shafrin.
Because wages are taxed, compensation in the form of health insurance in lieu of wages reduces government revenue. In fact, it reduces it a lot: $250 billion per year. Just to put that figure in perspective, $250 billion is almost half the Medicare budget. It is more than 3½ times the average annual cost of the Affordable Care Act’s low-income health insurance subsidies. Employer-sponsored health insurance is among the most subsidized types of health insurance in America, almost as subsidized as Medicaid.
Austin Frakt at his blog.
