Behind closed doors, the House and Senate leaders are trying to cobble together very different and complex provisions of their respective bills. A key issue is the impact of the public plan, a government run health plan intended to compete against private health plans. In the House version of the bill (H.R. 3200), payment to doctors and hospitals will be pegged to Medicare rates. Specifically, the bill calls for payment for medical services to be set at Medicare payment levels with a 5 percent increase for only certain physicians. In …
Once left for dead, it now appears likely that the health legislation Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will introduce sometime this week will include a government run health insurance program. One of the biggest reasons leftists support a government run plan is because they believe government run programs, like Medicare, have lower administrative costs than private plans. First of all, as the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson notes today, that is simply not true: on a per person basis Medicare actually has higher administrative costs than the private sector. More importantly, …
Under the Baucus plan, just about everyone who is not covered by a government health program will be required to purchase insurance by 2013. To help pay for the mandated minimum coverage, individuals and families with incomes below four times the poverty line will receive a subsidy calculated on a sliding scale worth a percentage of their income, while those with incomes up to three times the poverty line will also qualify for a cost-sharing subsidy. However, even with help from the government subsidies, families will be required to pay …
Healthcare with Heritage: Nina Owcharenko
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvHPTq3L4Y4[/youtube] David Goldhill is President and CEO of the Game Show Network and has run numerous businesses during his career. When his father died of a hospital-borne infection two years ago he began researching the entire U.S. health care system, analyzing it with the keen eye of a businessman. What he learned is that intermediaries like insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid distort a system that is supposed to provide health care to individuals into one that serves faceless and, largely, uncaring bureaucracies. Case in point: 100,000 people die every year in America …
In what was billed as doctors trekking across the country to enthusiastically support President Barrack Obama’s health care agenda, his press conference at the White House on Monday was in need of serious resuscitation. From a lackluster response among the 150 doctors (outfitted in their “spiffy-looking” white coats lest we forgot who they were) at the event to Obama’s same go-to talking points to justify massive federal spending and Washington control of health care, it’s hard to understand how this conference added any value or differentiation from the dozens of …
The Washington Post front page blares today: “Prospects for Public Option Dim in Senate.” Don’t believe it. Yes, the Senate Finance Committee did vote down two amendments that each would have added a government-run insurance plan to the committee’s health care bill. But two key Democrats who voted against Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WV) public plan, Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Tom Carper (D-DE), voted for Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) version. According to an independent analysis of Senate Democrat public statements on the public option, that raises the number of Democrats on …
