On Tuesday, January 31st, e21 held an event exploring the implications of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), which was sold to the American people with the promise that “If you like what you have, you can keep it.” New academic research is clearly disproving this claim. Click to watch the video of the event.
"Obamacare’s tinkering with the current program will essentially end Medicare as we know it by replacing the existing fee-for-service (FFS) payment system, the heart of traditional Medicare, with top-down payment and delivery schemes independent of the consumer choice and competition that would enable them to prove their value. Worse, new layers of bureaucracy and compliance will discourage physicians who are already wrestling with reams of paperwork and will undermine their professional independence in the practice of medicine."
"Multiple physician groups have come out in strong opposition to the Obamacare legislation and to the under-handed, self-serving fashion in which the American Medical Association (AMA) gave its support for the law. The AMA sought to curry favor with the government to preserve their lucrative royalty monopoly on the medical billing codes that must be used to file all medical claims in the United States. These codes netted the AMA 72 million in the year 2010 alone, and evidently provided enough incentive that the AMA all but ignored the will of the majority of doctors in the country in their Obamacare endorsement."
"The hard truth is that the federal government cannot be trusted today with these kinds of decisions, and there’s no prospect of that changing anytime soon. That’s a big reason why Obamacare should never have been allowed to pass in the first place. Just the sight of Catholic leaders’ being forced to go begging before federal officials ought to be enough to convince most Americans that handing over so much power over such sensitive matters to the federal government was a terrible, terrible mistake."
"Doctors are catching on fast to the essential deficiencies of ObamaCare, but so are America's patients. The concern of doctors is reflected among the American people: Support for the law has sunk to 29% in the latest Associated Press poll. Think of ObamaCare as a heavy horse-drawn cart loaded with all of America's patients and best technologies. As the cart gets heavier and heavier, does it make sense that we don't add more horses but instead feed the ones we have less and less while expecting them to pull the additional weight?"
"Some of the carriers are leaving because of onerous state regulations, others are victims of a faltering economy, but costly new federal rules and regulations and the many more that are to come as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) are accelerating the exodus... But the Obama administration may be able to achieve liberals’ goal in a different way by suffocating private plans under a mountain of regulation and choking them with impossible cost tests."
"Physicians are tired of government meddling, as if we do not know how to care for patients. We love our profession and love to see and help patients get well. We do not love the exploding paperwork burden and the constant intrusion of the government inserting its will between our patients and us."
"Starting in 2012, the government will charge a new fee to your health insurance plan for research to find out which drugs, medical procedures, tests and treatments work best. But what will Americans do with the answers? The goal of the research, part of a little-known provision of President Obama's health-care law, is to answer such basic questions as whether that new prescription drug advertised on TV really works better than an old generic costing much less. But in the politically charged environment surrounding health care, the idea of medical effectiveness research is eyed with suspicion. The insurance fee could be branded a tax and drawn into the vortex of election-year politics."
"The final medical loss ratio (MLR) regulations will likely create a vacuum for affordable coverage that cannot be filled by Bronze plans under the state insurance exchanges. If the 'essential benefits' and 'actuarial value' requirements are equally as discriminatory, there will be no affordable options available and the cost of subsidies will skyrocket. As a result, millions of Americans that have policies today that could have qualified as Bronze plans will be forced to change their coverage or drop coverage because they can no longer afford it."
"The Goldwater Institute’s lawsuit challenges IPAB’s very existence as an unlawful delegation of congressional power. Although most of the legal challenges to Obamacare have focused on the individual mandate to purchase government-prescribed health insurance, IPAB is no less central to the overall regulatory scheme. Many members of Congress voted for Obamacare only when convinced of the dubious premise that the law would constrain health-care costs. If IPAB is removed, the flimsy cost-containment rationale will disappear as well."
