Tag: policy

Finding out what’s in it: More health insurers have now calculated the costs for the first two years of Obamacare and have realized that they need double digit premium increases.

The real political bottom line here, should the Republicans not go squishy and agree to take the blame for something they had no part in, is this:

The consequences of this inevitable failure of the ObamaCare model puts Democrats in a tough spot. They have to decide whether it’s better to have this hit in October 2015 right before the primaries, or try to delay the inevitable and possibly have it hit in 2016 right before the general election. Of course, just because premiums spike upward this year doesn’t mean they won’t escalate sharply in 2016 for the 2017 plans too.

Obamacare was imposed on us by Obama and the Democrats, entirely on their own. All of its problems were caused by them alone. The last thing the Republicans in Congress should do is to help them tinker with Obamacare to try to fix it. Instead, the Republicans should loudly increase their calls for repeal and an effort to start over, from scratch.

Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare has forced doctors to increasingly replace medical care with administrative duties, much of which has been forced on them by the law’s requirement that they switch to electronic records.

The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “[electronic records just won’t save billions of dollars”—$77 billion a year, promised the administration—“and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.

It’s 2015, and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.

That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by larger entities. This hardly stays the long arm of the health care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven’t gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.

Then there is the toll on doctors’ time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency-room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family-practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data.

Forget the numbers. Think just of your own doctor’s visits, of how much less listening, examining, even eye contact goes on, given the need for scrolling, clicking and box checking.

The last point is absolutely true. I have found that with most doctors today, they spend most of my visit working their computer than looking at me. It is very bad medicine, which is why my best doctors refuse to do it. Either they have an assistant do it for them (raising costs of course) or they wait until the visit is over (which of course eats into the time available to see patients).

But who are we to argue with Obama and the Democrats? As well-meaning liberals, they know best and everyone else should just shut up and obey their orders.

Link here. Read it all, but here is a good quote to get you started:

The problem is that the deductibles on many Americans’ health insurance policies have shot up so high that as a practical matter they can’t afford care. If a couple had a deductible of, say, $500 in the past, and it’s now $3,000, that couple has to spend a lot of money out-of-pocket before reaping the benefits of coverage. And the higher the deductible, the more likely a person is going to skip some sort of needed treatment or medicine because he or she can’t afford the up-front costs. “About a quarter of all non-elderly Americans with private insurance coverage do not have sufficient liquid assets to pay even a mid-range deductible, which at today’s rates would be $1,200 for single coverage and $2,400 for family coverage,” the Wall Street Journal reported in March.

So now, many of the same groups that agitated for Obamacare are agitating for new government spending or tighter controls on the insurance industry and businesses to “solve” the problem. But perhaps the first question to ask is: How did those deductibles get so high in the first place?

The answer is Obamacare.

Bluntly, almost all the high costs and deductibles we see now in health insurance and healthcare that have appeared in the last five years have occurred because they were specifically mandated by Obamacare. So of course, according to the warped logic under which the modern Democratic Party operates, we should immediately expand Obamacare even more! Meanwhile, the Republican leadership is scrambling to prop up Obamacare due to their terror that everyone will blame them for its problems, even though they opposed Obamacare from the beginning, never wrote one word of the law, and contributed not a single vote in favor.

You can’t make this stuff up.