Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Healthcare Reform WILL Raise Costs, Supressed HHS Report Said

Obama's Health and Human Services office recently admitted that they received a report from Medicare's Office of the Actuary days before the passage of the Health Care Reform package, clearly stating that the bill would raise health care costs and premiums. HHS Sec. Sibelius' office admits that they suppressed the the report so that the health care bill could pass.

This means that Obama's administration knew that their health care bill would raise costs and consumer premiums and knowingly lied when they claimed it would cut costs.

From American Spectator:
The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

"The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think."

The analysis, performed by Medicare's Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a "nonpolitical" office, set off alarm bells when submitted. "We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff," says the HHS staffer, "and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary's office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report."

In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote -- the review by the secretary's office reportedly took less than three days -- and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration.


Sunday, April 18, 2010

NY: Healthcare Reform Drives Up Premiums, Creates Massive Deficits

In an astonishingly honest article yesterday, the New York Times admits that the policy in the Democrat Health Care Reform Bill making it illegal for insurance companies to "discriminate" against people with preexisting conditions who have not paid into the system has been going on in New York since 1993, with disastrous results.
New York’s insurance system has been a working laboratory for the core provision of the new federal health care law — insurance even for those who are already sick and facing huge medical bills — and an expensive lesson in unplanned consequences. Premiums for individual and small group policies have risen so high that state officials and patients’ advocates say that New York’s extensive insurance safety net for people like Ms. Welles is falling apart.[...]

In 1993, motivated by stories of suffering AIDS patients, the state became one of the first to require insurers to extend individual or small group coverage to anyone with pre-existing illnesses.

New York also became one of the few states that require insurers within each region of the state to charge the same rates for the same benefits, regardless of whether people are old or young, male or female, smokers or nonsmokers, high risk or low risk.

Healthy people, in effect, began to subsidize people who needed more health care. The healthier customers soon discovered that the high premiums were not worth it and dropped out of the plans. The pool of insured people shrank to the point where many of them had high health care needs. Without healthier people to spread the risk, their premiums skyrocketed, a phenomenon known in the trade as the “adverse selection death spiral.”

“You have a mandate that’s accessible in theory, but not in practice, because it’s too expensive,” said Mark P. Scherzer, a consumer lawyer and counsel to New Yorkers for Accessible Health Coverage, an advocacy group. “What you get left clinging to the life raft is the population that tends to have pretty high health needs.”

Since 2001, the number of people who bought comprehensive individual policies through HMOs in New York has plummeted to about 31,000 from about 128,000, according to the State Insurance Department.

At the same time, New York has the highest average annual premiums for individual policies: $6,630 for single people and $13,296 for families in mid-2009, more than double the nationwide average, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry group.

The Democrats, have tried to prevent this from happening on a national level by forcing the well people to buy health insurance and redistributing their premiums to pay for the sick and belatedly paying people. But since they are not trying that hard to enforce this (either because they are afraid of the people revolting or because they want the system to fail: take your pick), our nation is headed down the same path of higher premiums, national debt, health care rationing and ultimately socialized medicine.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Obamacare to Cause 150,000 Doctor Shortage in 15 Years


There is already a shortage of primary care physicians and few are in the pipeline.
“The number of U.S. medical school students going into primary care has dropped 51.8% since 1997, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). Considering it takes 10 to 11 years to educate a doctor, the drying up of the pipeline is a big concern to health-care experts.”

The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates there will be a shortage of up to 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years due to passage of Obamacare. There aren't any provisions in the Democrats health care reform bill to address this serious shortage.

The WSJ reported:
The new federal health-care law has raised the stakes for hospitals and schools already scrambling to train more doctors.

Experts warn there won’t be enough doctors to treat the millions of people newly insured under the law. At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

That shortfall is predicted despite a push by teaching hospitals and medical schools to boost the number of U.S. doctors, which now totals about 954,000.

The greatest demand will be for primary-care physicians. These general practitioners, internists, family physicians and pediatricians will have a larger role under the new law, coordinating care for each patient.

The U.S. has 352,908 primary-care doctors now, and the college association estimates that 45,000 more will be needed by 2020. But the number of medical-school students entering family medicine fell more than a quarter between 2002 and 2007.

A shortage of primary-care and other physicians could mean more-limited access to health care and longer wait times for patients.

Hat Tip: Bluegrass Pundit

Monday, April 12, 2010

60 Hospitals Canceled Due to Obamacare

More casualties of the disastrous Health Care legislation passed 3 weeks ago.
More than 60 doctor-owned hospitals across the country that were in the development stage will be canceled, said Molly Sandvig, executive director of Physician Hospitals of America (PHA).

“That’s a lot of access to communities that will be denied,” Sandvig told CNSNews.com. “The existing hospitals are greatly affected. They can’t grow. They can’t add beds. They can’t add rooms. Basically, it stifles their ability to change and meet market needs. This is really an unfortunate thing as well, because we are talking about some of the best hospitals in the country.”

The organization says physician-owned hospitals have higher patient satisfaction, greater control over medical decisions for patients and doctor, better quality care and lower costs. Further, physician-owned hospitals have an average 4-1 patient-to-nurse ratio, compared to the national average of 8-1 for general hospitals.

Further, these 260 doctor-owned hospitals in 38 states provide 55,000 jobs, $2.4 billion in payroll and pay $509 million in federal taxes, according to the PHA.

In one ironic aspect, President Barack Obama’s two largest legislative achievements clashed. The Hammond Community Hospital in North Hammond, Ind., got $7 million in bond money from the federal stimulus act in 2009. It will likely be scrapped because of the new rules on physician-owned hospitals, according to the Post-Tribune newspaper in Merrillville, Ind.

CNS News

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Doctor to Obama Supporters: Find Health Care 'Elsewhere'

America can't keep forcing doctors and hospitals into modern-day slavery by continually cutting their reimbursements, micro-managing their professional decisions and publicly accusing them of being greedy, and not expect to have a mass revolt on their hands. Doctors just want to make their patients better and be reasonably paid for their sacrifice of decades of intensive schooling and hours of stressful work. (They do have an average of $250k school debt to pay off, after all.) If there is anyone who should be making 6-figure-incomes in our country, it is these people who directly save lives everyday. Yet, our government is trying to force them to do more for less. You have it coming, America. Try to get our healthcare industry under your thumb and you will end up with no more good doctors or hospitals and more people dying from denied and inferior care.

A Florida doctor who opposes the new health care law posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Obama to get care "elsewhere," the Orlando Sentinel reported.

The sign on Dr. Jack Cassell's door reads, "Changes to your health care begin right now. Not in four years," the Sentinel said.

Cassell, a urologist, told the newspaper that he's not turning anyone away.

"That would be unethical," he said. "But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it."

A registered Republican, Cassell is providing his patients with photocopies of a health-care timeline produced by Republican leaders that outlines "major provisions" in the health care law -- and he's placed a sign above the stack of copies that reads, "This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it."

Cassell told the newspaper that a patient's politics wouldn't affect his care for them, but he added he would prefer not to treat people who support Obama.

"I can at least make a point," he said.

[Source: FoxNews]


Friday, April 2, 2010

Obamacare Hid New Tax on Working Families

Surprise, surprise! Hidden somewhere in the middle of the 2309 pages of the Obamacare bill is a new tax that will be automatically deduct hundreds a month from your paycheck unless you opt out in time (and no one seems to know how to opt out yet).

The hidden "Class Act" (aka. “Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act”) will cost you about $150-$240 a month (up to $2,880 a year), and more if you are older. The collected funds (estimated to total $109 billion by 2019) are supposed to go into a fund to pay for long-term care for the elderly. Critics, however, suggest that this "long-term care insurance" program will not fair any better than Medicare and Social Security, which have plunged our nation into $720 billion of debt and growing fast.