Health experts see big price hikes for Obamacare – Politico

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1. Single-Payer Extremists: Obamacare Has Increased Health System Overhead Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhander are the Bernie Sanders of health policy. For decades, they have advocated that the U.S. adopt a government monopoly, single payer, health system. They write economically illiterate articles asserting that Medicare is great because it has low administrative costs. Nevertheless, a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the good doctors’ latest article nails Obamacare for increasing the overhead of U.S. health insurance. Who would have even thought that was possible? The roughly $6 billion in exchange start-up costs pale in comparison to the ongoing insurance overhead that the ACA has added to...
2. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s Medicaid Policy––and Now His Position Not to Save Insurance Subsidies if the Supreme Court Strikes Them… Speaking to a conservative group in Wisconsin this week, presumptive presidential candidate Scott Walker said he would not move to establish a state exchange in order to preserve the Obamacare federal insurance exchange subsidies if the Supreme Court strikes them down in an expected June ruling: We're going to push back. The President of the United States––they've got to come up with a solution....
3. Obamacare: Death By a Thousand Votes? We didn't see a Republican tide on election night. We saw a Republican tsunami. A year after Obamacare went into effect and Democrats said people would come to support it voters gave one Republican candidate after another, who made Obamacare a big part of each of their campaigns, one victory after another. So, how will the Republicans use their convincing result on Obamacare? Republicans will...
4. Health Spending Unscathed In Shrinking Economy This morning’s terrible revision to first quarter GDP – from an initial estimate of 0.2 percent real growth to a real loss of 0.7 percent – confirms that health spending stands over our weak economy like a colossus. In the initial estimate, personal consumption spending on health services increased by $23 billion (chained 2009 dollars). Today’s second estimate reports $24.2 billion (Table 3, line 17). So, we can be pretty confident that the folks at the Bureau of Economic Analysis who do this good work have mastered how to measure spending on health services. This emphasizes how much of our...
5. “Transparency” Will Not Fix Medicare Physician Fees The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report criticizing the way the federal government sets physicians’ fees in Medicare. It concludes that “Better Data and Greater Transparency Could Improve Accuracy.” I doubt it. Note the mind-numbing detail of this process: The government delegates its assumed authority to a group of physicians who comprise the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC). The government “reviewed 1,278 RUC work relative value recommendations for about 1,200 unique (new and existing) services)” in the last four years. The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is the agency that supervises this mess: CMS’s process...