Following last week’s Supreme Court arguments, supporters of the President’s health care law are once again criticizing opponents of the law for failing to offer their own alternative. They are wrong. The Heritage Foundation, for example, has outlined a detailed and comprehensive approach to reforming health care in Saving the American Dream. There are four core elements of this conservative alternative. 1. Repealing Obamacare Patient-centered, market-based health care is incompatible with the fundamental construct of Obamacare. Obamacare is based on turning more power over health care dollars and decisions to …
Once again, Congress is scrambling to stop a scheduled 27 percent payment cut to physicians who serve Medicare patients. This frequent exercise serves as a perfect example for the need to move Medicare away from its current price control model toward a market-based, premium support model. Congress should take immediate action to link any “fix” with structural Medicare policy reforms. The “Sustainable Growth Rate” (SGR) is in no way a sustainable long-term solution for Medicare. This complex government formula sets payments to physicians for providing Medicare services. When enacted as part …
As expected, the Supreme Court has decided to take up the court cases challenging Obamacare’s individual mandate and the question of whether the whole law should be struck down if the Court finds the mandate unconstitutional. This is another important step toward undoing this unpopular and unworkable health care law. Recall the process by which the law came to be: Due to the special circumstances of Senator Scott Brown’s election, the House and Senate (under duress) jammed through the poorly drafted health care law, bypassing the normal conference process intended …
On Friday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius admitted that the CLASS program can’t work. After months of insisting that it could meet a 75-year actuarial soundness test and keep with the statutory requirements, Sebelius acknowledged that “despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time.” The CLASS Act was a key provision included to pass Obamacare. It would have established a new, government-run long-term-care insurance program. But it was also used to claim that the health care …
If the goal is producing $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in 10-year savings, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction must think big and produce recommendations with real substance. Nothing could be truer than dealing with the health care savings component. Typically, these negotiations are so focused on reaching the savings target that the policy gets neglected, or worse hijacked in the wrong direction. One only needs to look at the 1997 Balanced Budget Act to see this in action. Yes, a Republican Congress and Democratic administration were able to join …
In its yearly survey of health insurance coverage, the U.S. Census Bureau published figures that underscore the trend toward greater dependence on government for coverage. The percentage of Americans on government health programs continues to grow, while employer-based coverage continues to decline. According to the latest Census report, 31 percent of the population received coverage through the government in 2010 compared to 23 percent in 1987. In contrast, 64 percent of the population had private coverage in 2010, compared to 75.5 percent in 1987. Employer-based coverage declined from 62.1 percent …
There is an obvious omission from all the previews of the President’s upcoming speech on jobs: Obamacare. Obamacare is perhaps the most damaging of the Administration’s policies that are impeding the country’s recovery. At a time when there should be a focus on cutting spending, reducing regulation, and lowering taxes, Obamacare does the complete opposite. It spends more, imposes costly new mandates and regulations, and raises taxes on individuals and businesses. This is no way to get the economy up and running again. More Spending. While proponents argue that Obamacare …
Conservatives should beware of policies that simply meet a budget target number without considering whether the underlying policy changes move a program in the right direction. Case in point: the Medicaid blend rate, which would replace the various federal matching rates for different categories of enrollees with one unified federal rate. Yes, those on the left are attacking the blend rate proposal that would set one federal match rate in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). That could lead conservatives to think it must be a good idea. …
Red Alert! Conservatives in Congress and elsewhere should be warned: The Administration’s latest signal for “compromise” may end up as little more than an expansion of existing bad policy, rather than a serious effort to enact substantive reforms. And only substantive reforms can change the perverse incentives that plague giant entitlement programs and have worsened America’s deepening financial crisis. Consider some of the latest ideas that have surfaced in the media for finding “savings” in health policy: Importing Medicaid drug policy into Medicare. In Medicaid, patients do not have the …
Right now, states across the country are trying to figure out what to do in response to Obamacare and its health insurance exchange architecture. In Oklahoma, the question has gone even further as the state government debates whether or not to accept federal funding, appropriated in the Obamacare statute, to create a state information technology system for a health care exchange. In Ed Haislmaier’s recent paper, he describes this dilemma: Trying to shoehorn patient-centered, market-based reforms into the bureaucratic architecture of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges is not a viable strategy, …
