J.D. Kleinke in The Wall Street Journal: The Myth of Runaway Health Spending
New data show that health spending over the past several years has been normalizing toward the rate of general inflation, rather than growing higher and higher, as had been the case almost continuously since the 1970s. This moderation in the growth rate of spending predates the national recession. And it puts the lie to the claim that we need government to put the brakes on an "out-of-control" health-care system.
Avik Roy in Forbes: Burr-Coburn: The Best Medicare Reform Proposal Yet
Sens. Burr and Coburn have put forth a new Medicare reform proposal, the Seniors’ Choice Act, which combines the ideas behind the best two bipartisan plans that came out last year. Burr-Coburn incorporates something quite similar to the Wyden-Ryan system of competitive bidding and premium support, in which retirees would be able to choose among private plans and a “public option” of traditional Medicare. Sens. Burr and Coburn have released some additional materials related to the Seniors’ Choice Act, including: responses to anticipated policy questions; how the proposed Medicare Consumers’ Protection Agency compares to IPAB; how the act builds onbipartisan proposals; and four illustrative scenarios of how differing seniors would be affected by the proposal.
Bob Moffit on The Foundry: Building a Better Medicare Program: The Burr–Coburn Proposal
Senators Richard Burr (R–NC) and Tom Coburn (R–OK) have just unveiled a bold Medicare reform proposalbased on the free-market forces of choice and competition. The Senators’ proposal adds further momentum to the effort to reform and improve America’s largest and most challenging entitlement program. The Burr–Coburn proposal is a welcome addition to the emerging consensus on Medicare reform. Baby boomers — the next generation of retirees — need the guarantee of higher quality of care at competitive prices. The alternative is current law: guaranteed Medicare payment cuts, reduced access to doctors and hospitals, and dangerous levels of debt.
Charles Krauthammer: Overreach: Obamacare vs. the Constitution
Give him points for cleverness. President Obama’s birth control “accommodation” was as politically successful as it was morally meaningless. It was nothing but an accounting trick that still forces Catholic (and other religious) institutions to provide medical insurance that guarantees free birth control, tubal ligation and morning-after abortifacients — all of which violate church doctrine on the sanctity of life.
RAND Corporation: The Effect of the Affordable Care Act on Enrollment and Premiums, With and Without the Individual Mandate
This study finds that the elimination of the individual mandate leads to a 12.5-million–person reduction in the number of newly insured individuals and increases government spending per newly insured individual by a factor of more than two. While the study finds that average exchange premiums increase by approximately 9.3 percent when the individual mandate is eliminated, this finding is mostly driven by compositional efects. The increase in premiums that would be faced by any given individual is only 2.4 percent.
Scott Gottlieb in The Wall Street Journal: Meet the ObamaCare Mandate Committee
Offended by President Obama’s decision to force health insurers to pay for contraception and surgical sterilization? It gets worse: In the future, thanks to ObamaCare, the government will issue such health edicts on a routine basis — and largely insulated from public view. This goes beyond contraception to cancer screenings, the use of common drugs like aspirin, and much more. Under ObamaCare, a single committee — the United States Preventative Services Task Force — is empowered to evaluate preventive health services and decide which will be covered by health-insurance plans.
Devon Herrick: The Job-Killing Medical Device Tax
In 2010, Congress passed a tax on medical devices to offset a portion of the $1 trillion cost of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act(ACA). Beginning in 2013, a 2.3 percent tax will be imposed on the manufacture and importation of medical devices. Devices typically sold by retailers to consumers — including toothbrushes and bandages — are exempt from the tax, whereas devices purchased from wholesalers by health care providers, such as tongue depressors and ultrasound equipment, will be taxed. Though seemingly small, if this tax is implemented it will destroy jobs and stifle innovation.
EBRI: Employer and Worker Contributions to Health Savings Accounts and Health Reimbursement Arrangements, 2006–2011
Enrollment in health savings accounts (HSAs) and heath reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) continues to grow, but contribution patterns to these account-based health plans are changing. According to the latest EBRI/MGA Consumer Engagement in Health Care Survey, there was $12.4 billion in HSAs and HRAs, spread across 8.4 million accounts in 2011. This is up from 2006, when there were 1.3 million accounts with $873.4 million in assets, and 2010, when 5.4 million accounts held $7.3 billion in assets. This growth reflects the increasing number of employers that offer these account-based health plans.
David Rivkin, Jr. and Edward Whelan in The Wall Street Journal: Birth-Control Mandate: Unconstitutional and Illegal
In an effort to rally its base in the upcoming November election, the Obama administration seems more interested in punishing religiously based opposition to contraception and abortion than in marginally increasing access to contraception services. It is the combination of the political motive, together with the exclusion of so many employers from the mandate, that has profound constitutional implications. It transforms the mandate into a non-neutral and not generally applicable law that violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. In short, the birth-control mandate violates both statutory law and the Constitution. The fact that the administration promulgated it so flippantly, without seriously engaging on these issues, underscores how little it cares about either.
William Winkenwerder in Forbes: Reform Of the Health Care System That Is Overdue
The nation’s two largest private health insurers, UnitedHealth Group and Wellpoint, have recently decided to change the way they pay physicians and in some cases the way their network hospitals are paid. It is about time. America’s traditional medical payment system, fee-for-service, based on a labyrinth of codes and procedures and slowly adjusting arcane price schedules, has been broken for decades. Fee-for-service medicine, backed up for more than forty years by the federal government and its two biggest programs Medicare and Medicaid (also partly funded by the states), rewards volumes of medical services that drives up spending, and it thwarts coordination of care that can make healthcare more effective and less expensive.
Merrill Matthews in Forbes: Contraceptive Coverage — One More Unconstitutional Mandate
The Obama administration’s decision to require all employers — excluding houses of worship but including religiously affiliated organizations such as hospitals and universities — to provide contraceptive coverage created a national outcry that the president realized he was losing. So he tweaked his coverage commandment in an effort to stem the public relations nightmare without really changing anything.
Joe Antos on The Hill: President Obama’s Medicare cuts don’t cut it
The president took an extra week to develop his budget, but the extra time was apparently not enough to yield Medicare policies that could produce real savings. The 2013 budget relies on the same tired proposals that we have seen previously. Provider payment cuts, delicately referred to as “modifications,” account for $267 billion in savings over the next decade. For a program that will cost taxpayers more than $6.7 trillion, this is a disappointingly modest savings target—and even so, it is not likely to be met.
Michael Ramlet and Nicole Fisher: Primer — Essential Health Benefits (EHB)
Instead of setting a single uniform standard for national health benefits, the Obama Administration has proposed using a state-based benchmark plan approach, which eventually could affect nearly 70 million Americans. This primer explains how the proposed benchmark approach is supposed to work and the red flags that have been raised since the bulletin’s release.
Holtz-Eakin Leads 215 Economists and Experts in Amicus Brief Against PPACA
The American Action Forum filed its third amicus brief in the Supreme Court of the United States in support of the case to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The brief, signed by 215 experts including 2 Nobel Laureates, dissects the flawed economic logic used by the administration to justify the individual mandate.
Michael Cannon in Huff Post Politics: The Illiberality of ObamaCare
Even though the contraceptives mandate exempts parish priests and the Church hierarchy, it still violates Catholics’ religious liberty in at least four ways. First, the mandate fines Catholic institutions like Notre Dame and the Eternal World Television Network that adhere to the Church’s teaching that contraception “is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.”
Manhattan Institute Video: 2010 Health Care Law: Amend or Repeal It?
This debate features Paul Starr of Princeton University,and the Manhattan Institute's Avik Roy and Howard Husock.
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