The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Donald Berwick this morning is expected to testify before Congress in his first appearance since a controversial recess appointment in June. He will talk before the Senate Finance Committee. President Barack Obama’s controversial decision to sidestep protocol and appoint Berwick has been magnified by media coverage of Berwick’s publications and speeches that supported highly centralized health-care systems. While a respected health policy analyst, Berwick has what he calls “romantic” views on the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, which rations care …
While Medicare held the spotlight for much of the debate over health care reform last year, the changes to the health care program for seniors and the disabled that were most widely acknowledged were the $575 billion in cuts to the program. These cuts threaten to result in reduced benefits or access to health care providers. But this isn’t the only way in which the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will affect seniors. In recent Heritage research, Clete DiGiovanni, MD, and Robert Moffit, Ph.D., lay out …
The negative effects of Obamacare will impact every American. However, it is those who are the very backbone of the United States’ high-quality health care system who will be most severely affected: physicians. In a recent paper, Heritage’s health policy expert Robert Moffit, Ph.D., details the changes American doctors can expect to see in the way they practice medicine as a result of the recently-passed law. Moffit outlines the following as being most detrimental to the practice of medicine: Medicaid Expansion and Payment. As it is, doctors receive heavily reduced …
No one knows for sure how Senator Reid’s health care bill (HR 3590) will impact any particular person or group, but this much is fairly certain: it will cause health insurance premiums to increase faster—not slower—than they would have otherwise. Even the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s non-partisan accountants, says that premiums in the “public option” of Sen. Reid’s bill would turn out to be higher than premiums in typical private plans today. Thus, there are ways to “bend the health care cost curve” downward, but this bill does exactly the …
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 …
