Tag Archives: Medicaid

Is Death An Excuse For Missing Work?

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Is death an excuse for missing work? I don’t mean a death in the family–I mean your own death. Well, not in New York City. The New York Post reported that that Medicaid-eligibility specialist Geoffrey Toliver was fired after not showing up for his hearing where he was to be accused of going AWOL because he had not shown up for his job since November 2013. Toliver died at age 65 on Dec. 8, 2014.

 

The article reports:

“How do you fire a man who is already dead? He deserves better. The agency itself should have known,” said Ted Willbright, who added that he considered Toliver as a brother.

“Some people he worked with were very supportive, so how did HRA the organization not know? He’s dead, and they’re saying he abandoned his job. He didn’t abandon his job, his job abandoned him. He was a good man. Truly, truly a good man.”

HRA officials said they sought to remove Toliver from his $38,000-a-year job after they couldn’t reach him for well over a year.

They marked the start of his absence as Nov. 12, 2013, and said calls and certified letters mailed to his home were never answered.

“We did everything we could to contact him and his family,” said HRA spokesman David Neustadt. “This employee was not paid when he wasn’t working, but we left his job open in case he recovered.”

He said that now that the agency knows of his “unfortunate death,” it would take no further action.

What would be the appropriate further action to take against a dead man?

Here’s One Place We Can Cut Government Spending

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The Washington Examiner posted a story today about Medicaid fraud. Medicaid is the federal program that provides medical care to people who can’t afford it.

The article reports:

Healthcare providers banned from Medicaid may have been reimbursed $213 million in federal money, thanks to a state agency oversight, a government watchdog reported.

Valid identification numbers — identifiers that ensure providers are eligible for Medicaid reimbursements — were missing from 800,000 Colorado claims in 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services inspector general reported Wednesday.

The state reimbursed the providers $424.4 million for the claims, of which, $213 million was federal money.

Regardless of how you feel about government-provided healthcare and whether or not it is constitutional, a $213 million dollar savings in federal spending would be nice. If one state has that much Medicaid fraud, how much do the other states have?

The article goes on to explain that the computer system in Colorado was not able to alert officials to missing or incorrect identification numbers and that the problem would not be corrected until 2016. However, the agency is now denying claims with invalid or missing numbers. It sounds like Colorado is working with the same programmers that designed the ObamaCare website.

The Cost Of Immigration

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America is a country that was built by immigrants. People came here from Europe and other places to celebrate freedom, escape religious persecution, or simply to begin again. The Catholics fled the potato famine, the Jews fled the pogroms, and others came to buy land to farm and support a family.

Well, not all of today’s immigrants have the same sort of ambition. National Review reported today that 42 percent of new Medicaid recipients are immigrants.

The article reports:

Federal law bans the admission of immigrants who are likely to be significant beneficiaries of welfare, technically a “public charge,” but that definition doesn’t consider in-kind welfare programs like Medicaid: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services defines being a public charge as “the receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance or institutionalization for long-term care at government expense.” The USCIS union president has recently complained that President Obama is not enforcing public-charge laws.

Illegal immigrants are ineligible for Medicaid currently and are technically ineligible for the Medicaid expansion or any other direct Obamacare benefits, but fraud in the program is rarely investigated and recipient-level eligiblity is rarely investigated.

The article also reminds us that Medicaid has been expanded so that people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line are eligible. This greatly increased the cost of the program.

I am not opposed to immigration, but I question the wisdom of an immigration policy that allows people to come here and be a burden on the federal government. Our federal deficit is out of control, why are we passing laws that make it worse?

Once The Camel’s Nose Is Under The Tent

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On Monday, Byron York posted an article at the Washington Examiner about the problems involved in getting rid of ObamaCare as it becomes entrenched in American medicine.

The article reports:

What is different about Republican calls for repeal today — as opposed to calls for repeal from 2010 to the end of 2013 — is that Obamacare is now in place. It exists. Exchanges are running — many of them badly, but running. Subsidies are being paid. Insurance companies have changed the way they do business. Medicaid has been expanded. Special taxes are being collected.

Even though the system is new, millions of Americans have gone to a lot of trouble to adjust to it, and it would be disruptive to them to just stop cold. Halt subsidies? Undo Medicaid expansion? Just as last fall, when millions of Americans received coverage cancellation notices, millions more would face new burdens under the repeal of Obamacare.

This is not good news for the American healthcare system, but it is not unexpected news. Just as ObamaCare was extremely disruptive to the system in place, repealing ObamaCare is going to be disruptive to what has been put in place since the law was passed.

Meanwhile, in an effort to avoid a stunning defeat in the mid-term elections, the rules of ObamaCare have been changed again.

The Washington Post reported yesterday:

The Obama administration has decided to give extra time to Americans who say that they are unable to enroll in health plans through the federal insurance marketplace by the March 31 deadline.

Federal officials confirmed Tuesday evening that all consumers who have begun to apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, but who do not finish by Monday, will have until about mid-April to ask for an extension.

Under the new rules, people will be able to qualify for an extension by checking a blue box on HealthCare.gov to indicate that they tried to enroll before the deadline. This method will rely on an honor system; the government will not try to determine whether the person is telling the truth.

The rules, which will apply to the federal exchanges operating in three dozen states, will essentially create a large loophole even as White House officials have repeatedly said that the March 31 deadline was firm. The extra time will not technically alter the deadline but will create a broad new category of people eligible for what’s known as a special enrollment period.

This is another example of the Obama Administration moving the goal posts when it is to their political advantage to do so. It would be nice if someone in Congress had the backbone to stand up for the Constitution.

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Where Does Your Tax Money Go

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Investor’s Business Daily posted an article showing some of the details of President Obama’s proposed budget.

The article includes the following chart:

This chart illustrates the fact that 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals.

The article reports:

In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP.

…Where do these checks go? The biggest chunk, 38.6%, goes to pay health bills, either through Medicare, Medicaid or ObamaCare. A third goes out in the form of Social Security checks. Only 21% goes toward poverty programs — or “income security” as it’s labeled in the budget — and a mere 5% ends up in the hands of veterans.

The fact that so much of the federal spending is going toward direct payments makes it very difficult to cut the budget. Rather than cut these payments, the government is forced to cut programs it is actually constitutionally required to fund, such as defense.

The bottom line here is simple. We need to elect fiscal conservatives to Congress. We have reached the point where Democrats and establishment Republicans are no longer fighting over cutting spending–they are simply fighting over who will control the out-of-control spending. It is time for a change. It is also time to understand that Democrats and establishment Republicans will be working against that change.

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Beware Of The Small Print In ObamaCare

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Yesterday the Seattle Times posted an article about a provision of ObamaCare that has come as a surprise to some of the elderly people who are subscribing to the program.  The story deals with Sofia Prins and Gary Balhorn, both 62, who after reading the fine print in Medicaid that has changed as a result of ObamaCare, decided to get married.

The article explains the problem:

Medicaid, in keeping with federal policy, has long tapped into estates. But because most low-income adults without disabilities could not qualify for typical medical coverage through Medicaid, recovery primarily involved expenses for nursing homes and other long-term care.

The federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) changed that. Now many more low-income residents will qualify for Medicaid, called Apple Health in Washington state.

But if they qualify for Medicaid, they’re not eligible for tax credits to subsidize a private health plan under the ACA, which requires all adults to have health insurance by March 31.

Prins, an artist, and Balhorn, a retired fisherman-turned-tango instructor, separately qualified for health insurance through Medicaid based on their sole incomes.

But if they were married, they calculated, they could “just squeak by” with enough income to qualify for a subsidized health plan — and avoid any encumbrance on the home they hope to leave to Prins’ two sons.

The article further reports:

Late Friday, Gov. Jay Inslee’s office and the state Medicaid office said they plan to draft an emergency rule to limit estate recovery to long-term care and related medical expenses.

They hope to be able to change the rules before coverage begins Jan. 1.

Fixing the problem will cost the state about $3 million a year, said Dr. Bob Crittenden, Inslee’s senior health-policy adviser, but it’s the right thing to do.

“There was no intent on the part of the ACA to do estate recovery on people going into Medicaid (for health insurance),” Crittenden said. “The idea was to expand coverage.”

One of the problems with ObamaCare is that it will move many people who previously had basic health insurance into Medicaid. Unfortunately, Medicaid cannot support this increase–it is already going broke. The increase in Medicaid enrollment will put a severe financial burden on states, and create budget problems for the states that have formed healthcare exchanges.

The article explains the risk of the fine print in ObamaCare:

For health coverage through Medicaid, income is now the only financial requirement.

At first, Prins was pleased at the prospect of free coverage.

But the more she thought about the fine print, the more upset she got. Why was this provision only for people age 55 and older? Why should those insured by Medicaid have to pay back health expenses from their estates when people with just a bit more income who get federal subsidies don’t? Why didn’t she and Balhorn know about this before getting to the application stage?

As Prins began searching for answers, she found that even those trained to help people sign up for insurance under the ACA weren’t aware of this provision, nor were some government officials.

Around the country, the issue has sizzled away in blogs and commentaries from both right and left. The National Women’s Law Center noted the ACA and its regulations prohibit age discrimination in programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the politically conservative Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, writing in the The Washington Times, called the recovery provision “a cash cow for states to milk the poor and the middle class.”

“People will think this is wonderful, this is free insurance,” Orient said in an interview. “They don’t realize it’s really a loan, and is secured by any property they have.”

Even states that are now limiting estate recovery, she warned, can change the rules again if budget problems become more intense.

When you think about it, taking money from the estates of the middle class is simply another way to redistribute wealth, one of the major results of the implementation of ObamaCare. It is becoming very obvious that ObamaCare is a nightmare for the states, the insurance companies, and the insured. It needs to be repealed and replaced.

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I Have A Card, Why Can’t I See A Doctor?

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One of the distinctions that has not been clearly made in the discussion of ObamaCare is the difference between having a card that says you have medical insurance and actually being able to obtain medical care when you need it. Somehow that has been pretty much left out of the discussion. Well, as theory meets reality, access to care (regardless of whether or not you have insurance) will become an issue.

Yesterday the New York Times posted a story about what is happening to California’s Medicaid program as a result of ObamaCare.

The article tells the story of one California doctor:

Dr. Ted Mazer is one of the few ear, nose and throat specialists in this region who treat low-income people on Medicaid, so many of his patients travel long distances to see him.

But now, as California’s Medicaid program is preparing for a major expansion under President Obama’s health care law, Dr. Mazer says he cannot accept additional patients under the government insurance program for a simple reason: It does not pay enough.

“It’s a bad situation that is likely to be made worse,” he said.

His view is shared by many doctors around the country. Medicaid for years has struggled with a shortage of doctors willing to accept its low reimbursement rates and red tape, forcing many patients to wait for care, particularly from specialists like Dr. Mazer.

In theory, ObamaCare was supposed to help people who were not able to afford health insurance to get medical care. In practice, ObamaCare will probably result in less care and more people with serious health issues not getting the care they need. The promise of “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” has been proven to be false, and now the promise of access to medical care for all Americans is also turning out to be false.

The article further reports:

In California, with the nation’s largest Medicaid population, many doctors say they are already overwhelmed and are unable to take on more low-income patients. Dr. Hector Flores, a primary care doctor in East Los Angeles whose practice has 26,000 patients, more than a third of whom are on Medicaid, said he could accommodate an additional 1,000 Medicaid patients at most.

“There could easily be 10,000 patients looking for us, and we’re just not going to be able to serve them,” said Dr. Flores, who is also the chairman of the family medicine department at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles.

We need to repeal ObamaCare before it does any more damage and replace it with a private-sector-based plan that actually works. If we don’t stop this train wreck now, we may not be able to stop it later.

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A Simple Guide To ObamaCare

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Heritage.org posted an article detailing who is impacted by ObamaCare. The simple answer is everyone, but they posted an detailed list:

If You Have Insurance Through an Employer:  The administration claims that employee-provided coverage will not change–but it will. The administration promises better coverage, but there is a large price tag on that coverage. ObamaCare also requires maternity care for men and for women past child-bearing age. They have to pay for that coverage.

If You Buy Insurance Yourself:  If your insurance is not Obama-compliant, you will lose it. Your new policy will have higher premiums and a smaller network of doctors and hospitals.

If You Qualify for Subsidized Insurance:  Many Americans will be forced to buy insurance plans they do not want subsidized by other taxpayers. The $1.8 trillion spent on exchange plans and Medicaid will be a burden for future taxpayers.

If You Are a Senior Citizen on Medicare:  Half a trillion dollars was taken out of Medicare to fund ObamaCare. The reductions in Medicare spending could cause 15 percent of hospitals to become unprofitable by 2019, and 40 percent to become unprofitable by 2050. That could significantly impact senior citizens access to healthcare.

This really does not sound like a good deal for anyone.

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ObamaCare Is Coming

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The Heritage Foundation produced a video by doctors on the impact of ObamaCare. The video is found at the Heritage Foundation website and on YouTube.

The article at Heritage lists the reasons the foundation believes ObamaCare should be defunded:

1. ObamaCare will cause people to lose their current health insurance and their current doctors.

2. Government boards will determine who will receive treatment–not doctors and patients.

3. Senior citizens will suffer because of the cuts to Medicare.

4. Millions of Americans will be placed on Medicaid–a system that is already broken. Heritage President Jim DeMint said in an op-ed this morning, “Expanding a broken Medicaid program is just giving millions of Americans a cruel and empty promise—an insurance card with limited access to real health care.”

We need to defund ObamaCare and put healthcare back in the hands of patients and doctors. Our current healthcare system is not perfect, but ObamaCare will be a nightmare for all Americans.

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Prepare For An Exponential Increase In Government Intrusion

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Yesterday The Examiner posted an article about a provision of ObamaCare that has not gotten a lot of publicity. The provision allows government agents to engage in “home health visits” for those in certain “high-risk” categories. Doesn’t sound too ominous until you look at the “high-risk” categories.

The article lists the categories:

• Families where mom is not yet 21;
• Families where someone is a tobacco user;
• Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities, and
• Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States.

Missing from the list given in the article is families with firearms, but that is now included in the questions your doctor is supposed to ask you.

The article explains how this program will totally invade the privacy of Americans and undermine the authority of American parents:

Constitutional attorney and author Kent Masterson Brown said that despite what HHS says, the program is not “voluntary.”

“The eligible entity receiving the grant for performing the home visits is to identify the individuals to be visited and intervene so as to meet the improvement benchmarks,” he said. “A homeschooling family, for instance, may be subject to ‘intervention’ in ‘school readiness’ and ‘social-emotional developmental indicators.’ A farm family may be subject to ‘intervention’ in order to ‘prevent child injuries.’ The sky is the limit.”

Joshua Cook said that while the administration would claim the program only applies to those on Medicaid, the new law, by its own definition, has no such limitation.

“Intervention,” he added, quoting Brown, “may be with any family for any reason. It may also result in the child or children being required to go to certain schools or taking certain medications and vaccines and even having more limited – or no – interaction with parents. The federal government will now set the standards for raising children and will enforce them by home visits.”

The Health and Human Services Department has allocated $224 million for these home visits.

This needs to be stopped before it begins.

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Why Elections Matter

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The Chippewa Herald reported on Sunday that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has signed a $70 billion, two-year state budget.

The article reports:

The budget approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature includes all Walker’s priorities, including a $650 million income tax cut, expansion of private school vouchers and changes to the state’s Medicaid and food stamp programs.

…Walker made 57 changes to the budget using a veto power that allows him to cut words from sentences to change their meaning and remove individual digits to create new numbers. His two most significant vetoes eliminated provisions creating a bounty hunter program and kicking an investigative journalism center off the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

I live in Massachusetts, where our taxes are going up and the gasoline tax is going to be indexed to inflation so it can be automatically raised without the Democrats who control the state having to take responsibility for the tax increase. Massachusetts has some of the best schools in the country and obviously some of the least educated voters. I don’t know anything about schools in Wisconsin, but obviously their voters are pretty smart.

 

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Would Taxpayer Money Flow So Freely If The Taxpayers Were In Charge Of Spending It?

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Yesterday I posted an article about the number of dead people collecting welfare benefits in Massachusetts (rightwinggranny.com). Well, it seems as if Massachusetts is not the only state that can’t keep track of where welfare dollars are going.

Yesterday the New York Times reported that prisoners in New Jersey had erroneously received welfare benefits.

The article reports:

Over a 22-month period, New Jersey paid nearly $24 million in unemployment, welfare, pension and other benefits to 20,000 people who did not qualify for them because they were in prison, according to a report from the state comptroller released on Wednesday.

…Some of the people in prison — those whose Medicaid benefits were paid out to managed care organizations, for instance — may not have been aware they were defrauding the state. In other cases, the fraud seemed deliberate; in addition to the $24 million in benefits improperly paid out, the audit found that 13 state employees had used sick leave to cover their time in prison. (The report said this resulted in “relatively immaterial amounts of improper payments.”)

One of the questions that immediately comes to mind when I read that last paragraph is, “What were the state employees doing in prison and how long were they there?” Can you imaging anyone in the private sector having enough sick leave to cover a prison term?

I think we can safely conclude at this time that the ‘safety net’ is broken. It’s not broken because it is not helping people who genuinely need it–it is broken because it is subsidizing lifestyles of people who do not need or deserve to be subsidized.

I suspect that what has happened in Massachusetts and New Jersey regarding welfare payments going to people who were either dead or not entitled to them is only the tip of the iceberg. We have people in this country working hard, scrimping to get buy, and being taxed to death to support fraud. It’s time we held states accountable for how they spend taxpayers’ money. If a state is not doing a good job, it’s time to elect new officials. Voters need to pay attention and take a stand.

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When Reality Gets In The Way Of Promises

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Remember the promise that ObamaCare would eventually make health care cheaper for everyone because universal coverage would make us all healthier? Well, it seems as if we tend to be as healthy as we want to be regardless of whether or not we have universal coverage.

On Friday the Daily Beast reported that a study on Oregon’s Medicaid expansion showed that the people who were now eligible for medical treatment had no improvement in their health (as measured by basic health indicators such as like blood pressure or cholesterol).

The article reports:

…health insurance doesn’t actually improve access to necessary treatment that much.  If someone else covers the cost, it can help with the financial burden of health care.  But uninsured people will mostly find a way for the most important treatments, the ones we know improve health, from stitches to control bleeding, to antibiotics, to blood pressure medication.  It’s the expensive stuff on the frontier–the stuff that’s as likely to be useless, or harmful, as it is to help–that the uninsured mostly forego. 

When you consider the fact that hospitals are not permitted to turn away patients because of their inability to pay, this makes sense.

The article concludes:

…But I think it’s instructive that the political campaign for Obamacare leaned so heavily on claims about death and untreated suffering.  Whether or not we should provide that sort of insurance, I don’t think that Obamacare would have passed if its backers had said “The best study available shows that we’ll probably get a nice reduction in depression and catastrophic expenses, but no statistically significant improvement in diabetes, mortality, or cardiovascular health.”

That should give us pause.  We passed a big, complicated piece of legislation on the assumption that Medicaid expansions like Oregon would make us healthier–so much helathier that we’d obviously be able to measure it.  It just made gut sense, after all.  And that shouldn’t just make us pause and think about Obamacare. What other policies are we pulling out of our intestinal loops?

Frankly, I think the best thing the government could do for the health of Americans would be to get out of healthcare. Repeal ObamaCare, and set up a system that subsidizes low income people who need insurance and let the free market run healthcare. There would have to be some basic guidelines set up for pre-existing conditions, but the healthcare industry knows much more about healthcare than the government does. Let’s let them take care of America.

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Another Suit Against Planned Parenthood For Billing Fraud

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CBN News is reporting today that a former Planned Parenthood official in Los Angeles is claiming that the abortion provider over-charged the state and federal government by hundreds of millions of dollars.

The article reports:

Victor Gonzalez, former CFO for Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles, alleges that Planned Parenthood received fraudulent Medicaid reimbursements in excess of $200 million after illegally billing the federal program for oral contraceptives and contraceptive devices.

…Gonzalez’s accusations support the findings of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group, which has charged the abortion organization with abuse, waste, and potential fraud totaling over $100 million in tax funding.

In August 2012, CBN News reported on another Planned Parenthood fraud case in Texas.

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While The News Media Is Focused On Sequestration…

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Today Breitbart.com reported:

In an announcement on Friday, however, the Obama administration revealed that it would be significantly reducing funding for Medicare, a move that one health insurance analyst said “would turn almost every plan in the industry unprofitable.”

…According to Richard Foster, former chief actuary to the Medicare program, ObamaCare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage will likely force half of its current participants back into the old Medicare program, originated in 1965. It is estimated that this change will cost Medicare enrollees an average of $3,714 in 2017 alone.

On July 14, 2012, I posted an article (rightwinggranny.com) explaining that the Obama Administration had launched an $8.35 billion “demonstration project” to delay Obamacare cuts to the Medicare Advantage program until after the 2012 election. This was to prevent seniors who were not paying attention from seeing what was actually happening.

To those of us that have followed Obamacare from the start, the cutting of Medicare is not a surprise. The people who were behind Obamacare were known to hold the belief that the group of people the government should spend the majority of their healthcare dollars on are those between twenty and forty–the most productive years. There was a philosophy that the younger and older members of society were not contributing as much as the group between the ages of twenty and forty, and therefore were not entitled to the same quality of healthcare. That is one of many reasons why Medicare is being cut and Medicaid is being increased. One of the other reasons is to redistribute wealth in America. Obamacare has never been about healthcare–it’s about power and wealth redistribution.

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A Sad Year For America

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CBN News reported today that during the 2011-2012 fiscal year, Planned Parenthood performed 333,964 abortions.

The article further reported:

At the same time, contraceptive services at Planned Parenthood has dropped 12 percent since 2009. Cancer screening and prevention services dropped 29 percent.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood reported a record $542 million in taxpayer funding last year. The Susan B. Anthony List reports that is 45 percent of Planned Parenthood’s annual revenue.

At some point Americans need to realize that Planned Parenthood is not providing healthcare for American women–it’s purpose is killing babies. In three years, Planned Parenthood has killed nearly one million babies.

That is truly a sad statistic.

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Coming Soon To A Hospital Or Doctor Near You

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On Sunday The Wall Street Journal posted an article detailing what has happened in Massachusetts since the legislature reformed health care in 2006. It isn’t a pretty picture.

I don’t know if Obamacare was based on what was done in Massachusetts or not, but I do know that what was done in Massachusetts would have been considerably worse if Mitt Romney had not been Governor. Although he was not successful is stopping all of the policies that were put in place, he did stop some of the more drastic ideas. Governor Patrick has worked with the legislature to make things worse.

The article reports:

The claim then, as with the Affordable Care Act, was that health care would be less expensive if everyone had insurance. Soon Massachusetts Democrats leaked that their political strategy all along was to expand coverage only, because had RomneyCare seriously squeezed providers it never would have overcome industry opposition. “Bending the curve” on costs could be saved for another day, once a vast new government liability was locked in.

RomneyCare has increased state health spending in real terms by 59%.

The article also reports:

…79% of the newly insured are on public programs. Health costs—Medicaid, RomneyCare’s subsidies, public-employee compensation—will consume some 54% of the state budget in 2012, up from about 24% in 2001.

Spending on heath care in Massachusetts has increased dramatically since RomneyCare. Heath care costs are 27% higher than the national average–15% higher when adjusted for the states wage scale and academic medical centers and specialists.

Governor Patrick’s latest reforms are aimed at keeping costs down. The article reports:

But Massachusetts takes 360-degree surveillance and converts it into a panopticon prison. An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter. (And Paul Ryan‘s Medicare projections are unrealistic?)

This is the Massachusetts ‘death panel.’

Electing Mitt Romney as President won’t solve the health care problems in Massachusetts (currently being made worse by Governor Patrick), but it will end ObamaCare.

 

 

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What Really Happened In Massachusetts

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On July 6, Mona Charen posted an article at Townhall.com explaining what happened in Massachusetts regarding healthcare and how Obamacare is different from Romneycare.

The article points out that before Mitt Romney became governor, Massachusetts had a number of laws that resulted in a very expensive healthcare system. Governor Romney was attempting to rein in those costs. Unfortunately, he was dealing with an 85 percent Democratic legislature that totally twisted his ideas and passed something very different than what he had envisioned.

The article points out:

Romney’s idea was to permit Massachusetts insurers to sell catastrophic plans. As Avik Roy explained in Forbes, “Shorn of the costly mandates and restrictions originating in earlier state laws, these plans, called ‘Commonwealth Care Basic,’ could cost much less. Romney also proposed merging the non-group and small-group markets, so as to give individuals access to the more cost-effective plans available to small businesses.” Romney’s plan would also have involved a degree of cost sharing so that those receiving subsidies would have an incentive to minimize their consumption.

This is very different from the plan that was eventually passed. The law was later changed under Governor Deval Patrick, requiring insurance companies to offer three tiers of coverage — all of them far beyond catastrophic care.

The article further reminds us:

Romney’s proposed reforms included fraud prevention measures for Medicaid, requiring the income of both parents to be considered in children’s Medicaid eligibility, medical malpractice tort reform, and giving individuals the same treatment as small businesses in the purchase of health plans. He envisioned a system of increased competition and choice.

Had the bill that Governor Romney wanted passed, healthcare in Massachusetts would be a good example for the nation. The plan the legislature passed and Governor Patrick modified is a nightmare for the sate and the nation.

 

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The Two Bright Spots In The Supreme Court’s Ruling On Obamacare

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Thank you, Justice Roberts, for energizing the conservatives in the 2012 election. I think even non-conservatives may begin to see what a nightmare Obamacare is as the lawsuits against the recent policies implemented by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius continue.

Today’s Wall Street Journal posted an article on-line about today’s decision. Included in the article are the following paragraphs:

However, the ruling may give more leeway to states that don’t want to cooperate with the law by letting them avoid punishment for refusing to expand Medicaid.

Currently, states and the federal government split the costs of Medicaid, which provides health insurance for the poor. Under the health-care law, the federal government is set to pick up most of the cost of expanding Medicaid, but states would eventually have to chip in part. If states refused to pay their part, the law allowed the federal government to threaten to withdraw all Medicaid funding.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that such a threat would amount to a “gun to the head” and effectively let Washington commandeer state spending. He said that kind of coercion was unconstitutional. But the remedy he adopted was relatively modest: He said the federal government could expand Medicaid so long as it didn’t threaten states with the withdrawal of all Medicaid funding.

The chief justice added that that the problem with the Medicaid language “does not require striking down other portions” of the law.

Twenty-six states filed suit the day Mr. Obama signed the health-care bill into law in March 2010. Lower courts issued conflicting rulings on whether the law’s insurance mandate was constitutional.

No matter what the decision was, this fight was not going to be over. The decision reached simply assures that the fight will continue at least until November. The Supreme Court did not bow to public pressure on this issue, but we need to remember that a strong majority of Americans do not like Obamacare. If those people vote in November, Obamacare as it now stands will be over.

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The Supreme Court Has Spoken

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About an hour ago, the Supreme Court released its decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. My source for this article is an Ed Morrissey article at Hot Air. The comments on the article are as interesting as the article. Some of the comments:

“You haven’t purchased a GM vehicle, Comrade. Better get moving on that. You don’t want to get taxed, do you?” — BHO

Can new taxes be passed with just a reconciliation vote?  talkingpoints on June 28, 2012 at 10:47 AM

In my opinion: with the Medicaid expansion clause, if States decide not to expand Medicaid, HHS cannot take their Medicaid funds away. Hence, if half the country doesn’t choose to participate, the Feds can’t force them to. I believe this will effectively kill the bill.

Keep calm and vote Romney.

At this time, the stock market has fallen about 150 points since the announcement. Most Americans have 401k plans that have just been negatively impacted by this decision.

Ed Morrissey reports:

After months and months of focusing on Anthony Kennedy as the weak link in the conservative chain at the Supreme Court, it turns out that Chief Justice John Roberts was the one the Right needed to fear.  With the more centrist Kennedy dissenting, Roberts signed off on the individual mandate in ObamaCare, not as part of Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause, or even the ludicrous reference to the “Good and Welfare Clause” from some Democrats, but from the more mundane and substantial power to tax.  The opinion actually ruled that the mandate violates the Commerce Clause, but as a tax that no longer matters.

The only good thing about this decision is that it will energize those Americans who believe in individual rights. This now becomes a major election issue with the debate being between those people who still believe they are entitled to a free lunch and those people who realize that someone always has to pay for a free lunch.

Upholding the law means that all the lawsuits concerning the freedom to practice religion will go forward. Some of these cases will probably also wind up at the Supreme Court. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

The future of America will depend on what happens in November. Vote!

 

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Obamacare Is Already Costing Americans A Lot Of Money

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This is a chart from the Washington Free Beacon showing the financial impact of Obamacare even before it is completely put into effect:

Obamacare's $17 trillion surprise

The article reports:

Staff at the Senate Budget Committee, which calculated the figure using methods based on those used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), found that total unfunded obligations for federal health care programs have jumped from $65 trillion in 2009 to $82 trillion in 2011.

Added to the government’s existing obligation for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the total now comes to almost $100 trillion.

That is almost seven times the United States’ annual gross domestic product (GDP).

It seems to me that it is becoming very obvious that Obamacare will not save Americans any money. There are much better ways to do healthcare reform–tort reform, portability, risk pools for people with pre-existing conditions. All of these can be done without federal control. It’s time to remind the government that they govern at the consent of the governed–we are citizens–not subjects.

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Some Things To Consider In The Budget Debate And The Obamacare Debate

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This video at YouTube shows exactly what Obamacare will do to Senior Citizens:

 

Remember, Obamacare will take $500 billion out of Medicare over the next ten years and put it in Medicaid. That is being done as the baby boomers reach the age where they will join Medicare. Medicare as it is will not exist in five years–it is going bankrupt. Don’t fall for the scare tactics being used against Republican budget plans that they will kill Medicare–they are not the ones who already took $500 billion away from it!

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Two Very Good Articles On ObamaCare On The Internet Today

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There are two very good articles on ObamaCare on the Internet today. The first was posted yesterday at Investors.com and the second is in today’s Wall Street Journal. The Supreme Court will begin arguing ObamaCare on Monday.

The Investors.com article points how ObamaCare will increase the cost of medical care and insurance for the people who are insured–not actually lower the cost for anyone.

The article reports:

…By 2019, roughly 16 million people out of the 50 million uninsured will be forced into coverage thanks to the individual mandate. Of those 16 million, some 6 million to 7 million will be covered for the first time by Medicaid and, to a lesser extent, the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Medicaid, however, provides very low reimbursement rates to participating doctors and hospitals — only 58% of those normally paid by insurance companies. Medicaid often doesn’t pay enough to cover a provider’s costs.

Under the government’s logic, hospitals and doctors will be forced to raise prices for the insured to cover their costs, which will be passed along as higher premiums. The total cost shift under Medicaid is substantially greater than for the uninsured who fail to pay their bills.

Moreover, the increased cost-shifting phenomenon used by the government to justify the individual mandate will only grow worse as Medicaid enrollment expands due to the mandate.

ObamaCare will totally ruin any part of the medical insurance and patient care system that currently works.

The Wall Street Journal article is entitled, “Liberty and ObamaCare.” It deals with the constitutional question of the individual mandate. The article also gives some insight on how the Obama Administration will argue the case:

Consider a White House strategy memo that leaked this month, revealing that senior Administration officials are coordinating with liberal advocacy groups to pressure the Court. “Frame the Supreme Court oral arguments in terms of real people and real benefits that would be lost if the law were overturned,” the memo notes, rather than “the individual responsibility piece of the law and the legal precedence [sic].” Those nonpolitical details are merely what “lawyers will be talking about.”

Does anyone remember the old lawyers’ joke, “If the law is on your side, pound the law; if the evidence is on your side, pound the evidence; if neither is on your side, pound the table.” It sounds as if the Obama Administration plans to pound the table.

Talk radio host Hugh Hewitt (a law professor and practicing lawyer) has promised to highlight the arguments on his radio show (6 pm to 9 pm East Coast Time). I am looking forward to what he has to say.

 

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The Cost Of Taking The Politically Incorrect Stand

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Big Government posted an article yesterday about a program in Texas to aid low-income women that has been defunded by the Obama Administration. Remember that this is happening at a time when the Republicans are accused of waging a ‘war on women.’ Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), stated Friday that a Texas health program for low-income women will no longer receive federal funding because Planned Parenthood has been banned from the program.

The article reports:

Two weeks ago, Texas state officials announced plans to prevent Planned Parenthood from participating in the Medicaid Women’s Health Program, which provides health screenings and contraceptive services. The state has made the decision to exclude clinics from the program that are affiliated with abortion providers, even though the clinics themselves do not provide abortions.

Ms. Sebelius said that the federal government, which has covered about 90% of the cost of the program, will gradually end the program over the next few months. “The waiver will not be extended,” she said. “We’ve put them on notice.”

Federal requirements stipulate that the state is not permitted to exclude qualified providers from the women’s program, and Texas has not received a waiver from those regulations.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has made the appropriate response, “We’re going to fund this program. Listen, we’ll find the money. The state is committed to this program…This program is not going away.”

Governor Perry has directed his state’s secretary of the Health and Human Services Commission to work with the Texas legislature to locate funding for the program. Approximately 130,000 women are enrolled in the program.

Planned Parenthood is a major source of funding for Democrat Party campaigns. Much of the money they make on Medicaid patients eventually finds its way into Democrat campaign coffers. That is one of the things that makes the battle about Planned Parenthood and anything that threatens their income so intense–you are not only taking on Planned Parenthood–you are taking on the funding of the Democrat Party.

The article concludes:

Yet, speaking of her warning to the state that their law would end funding for the program, the secretary said, “”They knew … they are not allowed to deny women the right to choose.”

First, when did something being “illegal” ever stop this administration before?

Second, is Kathleen Sebelius really hoping we haven’t noticed that, while she is telling us “it is illegal to spend any federal money on abortion,” the Obama administration is also forcing the Catholic Church and other religious groups to provide abortion-inducing drugs to their employees, free of charge?

It is illegal for federal funds to be used to pay for abortions directly, but the millions of dollars the federal government gives to Planned Parenthood provide the infrastructure so that abortion is a profitable business for Planned Parenthood. Thank you, Rick Perry, for taking a stand against this.

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