It’s long been established that part of controlling rising health care spending in the United States will mean enacting meaningful medical malpractice, or “tort”, reform. Though tort reform is not a silver bullet to creating savings, it is one of many changes vital to containing patients’ medical costs. Unfortunately, in passing the mammoth Obamacare, Congress and the president failed to take tort reform seriously, leaving out any serious provisions to encourage states to reform their medical malpractice laws. Instead, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act threw an illusory bone …
The Department of Health and Human Services has rolled out regulations governing health plans in effect prior to the passage of Obamacare. You know, the plans that “if you like it, you can keep it?” The new regs will mostly affect the 170 million-plus Americans who carry employer-sponsored coverage. The vast majority of them (82 percent) are satisfied with their current coverage. The new regs will make it tough for a lot of those folks to hold onto their current plans, even though the Department of Health and Human Services …
The federal government’s Head Start program comes under scrutiny today by the House Education and Labor Committee, which will examine a Government Accountability Office investigation that discovered fraudulent behavior and unlawful actions in the program’s enrollment and eligibility processes. Chairman George Miller (D-CA) called today’s 1:30 p.m. committee hearing after learning of GAO’s undercover investigation. Last week Miller asked Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to conduct an immediate review of Head Start, an early childhood education program first started in 1965. The GAO report is not yet publicly available. These …
President Obama and other supporters of increasing government spending on preschool have argued that “investments” on early childhood education yield big results later in life. As President Obama told an audience last March, “For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health care costs, and less crime.” The president and other preschool backers generally base these claims on impressive results from one or two small-scale preschool programs that existed decades ago and that have not been replicated since. Unfortunately, a …
Writing in the Carolina Journal, John Hood of the John Locke Foundation takes up the story of the overdue report on the national Head Start evaluation: For decades now, both liberal and not-so-liberal politicians in Washington and Raleigh have clung to the plausible and promising notion that spending tax money early on early childhood education can save money in the long run by boosting high-school graduation rates and reducing rates of future crime, joblessness, and welfare dependency. The notion is plausible in part because some early laboratory experiments of preschool …
Confronted by discrepancies in the number of jobs created by the stimulus bill, officials in the Obama Administration eventually were forced to concede that their numbers could not stand up to scrutiny. Unfortunately, the lesson appears to have been lost on the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in its exuberance to fire up public support for health care legislation. Once again, the Administration appears to be fudging the numbers. The Administration’s website, HealthReform.Gov, which is maintained by DHHS, includes a feature, Health Insurance Reform and Your State: The …
In an arrogant and somewhat bizarre display of disinformation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is feeding local news sources with “new reports” about health insurance “reform.” Local stories have started appearing, citing new reports from HHS. A story out of northwest Indiana, for example, cites “… a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.” Given the Senate vote last Saturday, HHS clearly wants to create the impression that good news is just around the corner as a result of the legislation …
President Obama gave a nice, thematic speech Wednesday night. But that was the speech he should have given in April or May at the latest. It is now September and four congressional committees have already completed their work. The President said there is agreement on “about 80 percent of what needs to be done …”. That is probably not true because about 80 percent of what is in the current legislation is not needed in order to achieve the three basic goals outlined in the speech. The speech is a …
