The public option has reared its head once again. Last week, H.R. 5808 was introduced in the House Ways and Means Committee to add a public option to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The plan would be administered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Payment rates for providers would be set at Medicare rates plus 5 percent and would grow according to increasing physicians’ costs. The plan would be required to maintain solvency, so premiums would have to cover benefits offered and administrative costs. Momentarily …
Like many federal efforts in Washington, last week’s reintroduction from House Democrats to create a public health insurance option, which would become part of the 2014 insurance exchanges created by Obamacare, is a bureaucratic redundancy. Stuart Butler points out that the health reform law already has its own “public option” through expanded powers to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Calling the House bill a “smokescreen” for the nation’s opposition against a public option, Butler says the real story is in the “OPM alternative.” “Far from being an alternative, it …
In the depressing aftermath of Congress’s passage of the Democratic health-care legislation, there has been an understandable temptation among conservatives to think that all their effort over the last year to derail what was coming down the tracks may have been for naught. After all, the bill did pass. The president and his allies got their signing ceremony and their victory lap, as well as a barrage of premature but predictable pronouncements from the national media that we are now witnessing a historic moment of irreversible liberal progress. And there’s …
Earlier this month, President Obama held a press conference at the White House with white coated physicians in his push for a government overhaul of the nation’s health care system. Though the presence of physicians in support of the Democrats’ plans for health care “reform” created the illusion that the medical profession is in strong support of the legislation, it remained just that—an illusion. Recent reports show that the health care legislation does not have the broad support among physicians. A poll by The Medicus Firm posted in the New …
Most Americans now believe that major health care legislation will not pass this year. But as Heritage Vice President Stuart Butler explains in The New England Journal Medicine one seemingly minor proposal in the Senate health care bill could end up having huge repercussions for our entire health care system: The Senate legislation contains strong directives to the OPM, requiring it to negotiate medical-loss ratios (the percentage of premiums that insurers actually spend on medical care for enrollees), minimum benefits, profit margins, premiums, and “such other terms and conditions of …
In order to secure the votes to pass a health care bill, Senate Democrats were forced to scrap the widely-unpopular public option. But before chalking this up as a victory for opponents of government-run health care, though, its replacement deserves a closer look. As described in Sec 1334 of the Senate bill, the Director of the Office for Personnel Management (OPM) would now be charged with sponsoring a set of multi-state health plans to compete with private insurers. As a recently published detailed analysis by Heritage’s Bob Moffit and Kathryn …
In the wake of widespread public backlash over his eleventh-hour deal to get increased federal taxpayer Medicaid funding for his vote, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has been hitting the media circuit, assuring reporters that he won’t vote for any merged health care bill that funds abortions with taxpayer dollars or has a government-run health insurance plan. “There is zero chance (of a public option),” he said to The Chadron Record. “I’ve made it so clear. It isn’t going to happen.” But Sen. Nelson has already allowed a “public option” to …
In the ongoing attempts of Congress to find an alternative to the “public plan” in health reform, the Senate bill includes a provision to give the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) a new role: sponsoring health plans to compete against private health plans in every state in the nation. Heritage expert Ed Haislmaier has studied the provisions responsible for this new role for OPM, and finds that OPM’s new power would go well beyond its current capacity and allow for the …
The Washington Post’s EJ Dionne’s had an op-ed yesterday detailing six policy areas where House Democrats believes they can pull the Senate health care bill further to the left. For every issue that Dionne identifies, a House victory would lead America even further down the path to government run medicine: 1. A National Health Insurance Exchange A national exchange would create a vehicle for federal regulation of insurance policies and one-size-fits-all health plans that don’t necessarily meet the needs of all Americans. This threatens the federalist division of power between …
In the ongoing attempts of Congress to find an alternative to the “public plan” in health reform, the Senate bill includes a provision to give the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) a new role: sponsoring health plans to compete against private health plans in every state in the nation. As Kay Cole James, a former director of OPM, points out in a recent op-ed, the FEHBP works because OPM plays the neutral role of an umpire: federal employees choose the private …
