Health Reform Hub Issues

Issues :: Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP

Obamacare PR campaign anchored in spin, not reality
Sen. Tom Coburn
Washington Examiner, 06/10/10

President Obama and his allies kicked off an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, taxpayer-subsidized political campaign this week to sell to the public a legislative program that has already been signed into law...
On Tuesday, the president trumpeted a provision in his plan that will give seniors a $250 rebate check if they reach the Medicare prescription drug benefit “doughnut hole” coverage gap in 2010. The president also spent a great deal of time repeating his talking points from last year’s health care debate. He claimed his plan would reduce the deficit and claimed the arguments of his critics were not “anchored in reality.” As a practicing physician with more than 25 years of experience, and as a former business owner in the health care sector, I’d suggest this new PR campaign is grounded in politics rather than reality. The so-called experts behind this effort appear to be political hacks and career politicians who have zero real-world experience in the health care sector. Read more...

Federal Health Care Legislation Adds to Push for Medical Tourism
Sarah McIntosh
The Heartland Institute, 06/10/10

Changes to the U.S. health care system under President Obama’s new law may have the unintended consequence of increasing Americans’ demand for medical tourism. David Boucher, president of Companion Global Health Care, says demand will in part originate from Medicare recipients. “Now that the health care reform bill has passed, we expect more employers to seriously consider medical tourism, for several reasons,” said Boucher. “One impact of the national reform law is that more doctors are going to be giving up their private practices. “In 2008, 28 percent of Medicare beneficiaries looking for a primary care doctor had trouble finding one. Think about what that’s going to look like in a few years, considering that the number of doctors participating in Medicare has been dropping since 1990s,” he added. According to Boucher, Medicare recipients are eventually going to find it much easier and faster to get treatment outside the country as hospitals drop their coverage of such patients. Read more...

Health-care rationing Obama believes in
Nat Hentoff
WorldNetDaily, 06/09/10

...When a number of critics of Obamacare, including myself, warned that it would bring the rationing of treatments, medications and research into new procedures, the president said to the American Medical Association (June 15, 2009) that this rationing charge was a "fear tactic." The next month, he said flat out: "I don't believe that government can or should run health care" (firstthings.com, May 31, 2010). 
But in May of this year, the president nominated Dr. Donald Berwick, a professor at Harvard Medical School, to head Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) – the most powerful health-care position. As Hal Scherz underlines (RealClearPolitics.com, May 26): "CMS covers over 100 million Americans, has an annual $800 billion budget that is larger than the Defense Department's and is the second-largest insurance company in the world." Unlike Obama, Berwick is enthusiastically, openly candid in his support of Britain's socialistic National Health Service. In a 2008 speech to British physicians, our new health czar said: "I am romantic about National Health Service. I love it (because it is) 'generous, hopeful, confident, joyous and just.'" Read more...

Seniors Must Scrutinize Medicare Mailer 
Newt Gingrich and Nancy Desmond
Investor's Business Daily, 06/08/10

As weeks turned to months during the Great Debate over what to do about health care this past year, President Obama made one solemn pledge to the nation and its seniors: He said health care would not add one dime to the deficit. And if all of us liked our doctor, we would get to keep our doctor. Fast-forward almost 90 days after the passage of ObamaCare and the attitude of most Americans to that pledge is: "Prove it." In the past two weeks, the Obama administration has been trying to stem the tide of skepticism toward its health care law with a new mailer sent directly to the nation's seniors, titled "Medicare and the New Health Care Law — What it Means for You." Problem is, for anyone who has paid attention during the past 12 months, the message about the biggest government expansion into health care in our lifetime just doesn't add up. Read more...

With health reform, familiarity is breeding contempt
Michael Gerson
The Washington Post, 05/28/10

In closing the deal on health-care reform, Democratic leaders assured wavering legislators that the plan would grow more popular with time as its benefits became clear. "We have to pass the bill," argued House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, so that the public "can find out what is in it." Presidential adviser David Axelrod predicted that Republicans would pay a political price for their opposition. "Let's have that fight," he said. "Make my day."  Read more...

GOP says Medicare financed health-care brochure is propoganda
Alex Pappas
Daily Caller, 05/26/10

Republicans say a new health-care brochure for seniors financed with Medicare funds looks more like taxpayer-funded propaganda than straight information. Republican leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor Tuesday to call the flyer an “outrage.” A copy of the brochure can be viewed here. He said the leaflet from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (part of the Department Health and Human Services) tells seniors what the health care bill means for them, but much of it directly contradicts what the Obama administration’s own experts have said about the law. “This is nothing short of government propaganda, paid for by the taxpayer,” McConnell said. Read more...

Obamacare’s Cooked Books and the ‘Doc Fix’
James C. Capretta
National Review Online: Critical Condition, 05/24/10

The Obama administration continues to insist (see this post from White House budget director Peter Orszag) that the recently enacted health-care law will reduce the federal budget deficit by $100 billion over ten years and by ten times that amount in the second decade of implementation. They cite the Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimate for the final legislation to back their claims. And it is undeniably true that CBO says the legislation, as written, would reduce the federal budget deficit by $124 billion over ten years from the health-related provisions of the new law. But that’s not whole story about Obamacare’s budgetary implications — not by a long shot. Read more...

Experts: 'Doc fix' a budget band-aid
Sarah Kliff
Politico, 05/25/10

...In health policy circles, the “doc fix” has become emblematic of Washington’s worst habits: a potentially solvable policy problem run amok for about a decade now, bogged down in pure politics and accounting gimmicks. The “doc fix,” a last-minute infusion of funds to head off a looming doctor pay cut under Medicare, hits the floor this week via the tax extenders bill and, if passed, will stabilize Medicare payments through 2013 at a cost of $63 billion over the next 10 years, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate. 
Without those funds, physician payments stand to drop 21 percent June 1. < ahref="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37719.html#ixzz0ox169xvG" target="blank">Read more...

Central planning’s bad medicine
David Gratzer
Boston Herald, 05/24/10

President Barack Obama has nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to a position largely unstaffed during the Bush administration: head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the two Great Society programs. Berwick has decades of experience in health policy and, on paper, would seem a perfect candidate for the job. But he has fallen into the trap of many intellectual elites, which we might call the Harvard Disease: assuming that a government committee can guide one-sixth of the national economy into efficiency. In many ways, the Harvard professor represents all that is wrong with the Obama White House’s approach to health-care reform. As an unabashed admirer of Britain’s National Health Service, he sees only one solution: a 10-point plan, with more micromanagement by clever elites. Read more...

Obamacare: Impact on Seniors
Robert Moffit
Heritage Foundation, 05/20/10

According to surveys, no group of Americans is more skeptical of Obamacare than senior citizens—and with good reason. While bits and pieces of the massive law are designed to appeal to seniors—more taxpayer subsidies for the Medicare drug benefit, for example—much of the financing over the initial 10 years is siphoned off from an estimated $575 billion in projected savings to the Medicare program. Unless Medicare savings are captured and plowed right back into the Medicare program, however, the solvency of the Medicare program will continue to weaken. The law does not provide for that. Medicare is already burdened by an unfunded liability of $38 trillion. Medicare Advantage plans, which currently attract almost one in four seniors, will see enrollment cut roughly in half over the next 10 years. Senior citizens will thus be more dependent on traditional Medicare than they are today and will have fewer health care choices. Read more...

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