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 our health care system — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars through 2022.
Tag: obamacare
Headwinds for Health Insurers as Obamacare Stumbles
(A version of this Health Alert was published by Forbes). You might think this headline is a gag, given how deeply health insurers are dug into Obamacare. Only a month ago, I wrote that health plans’ mastery of Obamacare poses challenge to repeal. Losses in Obamacare’s controversial exchanges are not yet apparent in the publicly listed insurers’ financial statements. However, exchanges comprise of a small (but not trivial) market of about 11 million people. Through 2016, health plans losing money in Obamacare can rely on taxpayers to help them out. After that, they are on their own. Already, many plans are finding participation painful and increasing Obamacare premiums significantly for 2016. According to Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal, In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is
Preventive Care Does Not Want To Be “Free”
One conceit behind Obamacare is that if the government mandates preventive care be “free”, people will use it. The notion should appeal to free-market types, too: As the price of a service drops, the quantity demanded should increase. However, it is not that simple in health care. Let’s take another dive into the always heated and controversial discussions about preventive care for women (such as our recent entry about mammography). New research shows that women under 65 are over screened for osteoporosis, and women aged 65 and over are under screened, although older women get screened for “free”: Osteoporosis screening rates jumped sharply at age 50, despite guidelines suggesting that screening only begin at age 65, unless a woman has certain risk factors. However, the study also found that
Price’s Health Reform Hit From The Right
I recently discussed Rep. Tom Price, MD’s Empowering Patients First Act in quite positive terms. Not everyone is on board. My good friend Dean Clancy labels the bill Health Care Cronyism: Section 401, for example, authorizes new federal “best practice” guidelines written by medical societies, designed to give physicians extra protections from malpractice lawsuits. These guidelines aren’t merely educational, though. They’re established as powerful litigation tools in state courts. If a physician can show he followed them, his accuser must meet a higher burden of proof to establish negligence. That may be a good idea, but it’s unconstitutional. The power to regulate civil justice is reserved to the states under our federal system. There’s neither a legal nor a practical justification for federal
Think About the Worst Corporate Merger Ever – Then Add Obamacare
I hate to recycle the old slight about “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” but the latest news from state exchanges makes it impossible to avoid: Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government gave states a collective $4.8 billion to set up and customize their own exchanges for their own state residents. The idea was that the federal government would help prop up the exchanges, and then states would have to make them self-sustainable by this year. However, a number of states including California and Oregon are having trouble financing their exchanges now that federal funding is drying up. Covered California, for example, is running a deficit of $80 million. To save on costs, California is reportedly in talks with Oregon, another