By Terence P. Jeffrey, CNSNews
President Barack Obama today circumvented the Senate confirmation process by granting a recess appointment to Dr. Donald Berwick to be director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid.
Berwick, a professor at Harvard Medical School and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (a think tank), has expressed his disdain for free-market medicine and his “love” for Great Britain’s government-run health-care system, while advocating health-care rationing and using the health-care system to redistribute wealth.
The directorship of CMS normally requires confirmation by the Senate, which currently has a 59-member majority of President Obama’s party (counting Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats).
Obama initially sent Dr. Berwick’s nomination to the Senate in April, where it was assigned to the Senate Finance Committee chaired by Sen. Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat, who had worked closely with the Obama White House in developing the national health-care law that President Obama signed in March. Baucus had not yet scheduled a confirmation hearing for Dr. Berwick.
Tags: Donald Berwick, Marxist, Medicare, Obama, Obamacare, SenatePart of the health care overhaul due to kick in this September could strip more than 1 million people of their insurance coverage, violating a key goal of President Barack Obama’s reforms.
Under the provision, insurance companies will no longer be able to apply broad annual caps on the amount of money they pay out on health policies. Employer groups say the ban could essentially wipe out a niche insurance market that many part-time workers and retail and restaurant employees have come to rely on.
This market’s limited-benefit plans, also called mini-med plans, are priced low because they can, among other things, restrict the number of covered doctor visits or impose a maximum on insurance payouts in a year. The plans are commonly offered by retail or restaurant companies to low-wage workers who cannot afford more expensive, comprehensive coverage.
Depending on how strictly the administration implements the provision, the ban could in effect outlaw the plans or make them so restrictive that insurance companies would raise rates to the point they become unaffordable.
Read More: By JENNIFER HABERKORN, Politico
Tags: Barack Obama, drop your pants and your wallet, ObamacareA Virginia-based insurance company says "considerable uncertainties" created by the Democrats’ health care overhaul will force it to close its doors by the end of the year.
The firm, nHealth, appears to be the first to claim that the new law has driven it out of business. "We don’t know what the rules are going to be and, as a start-up, our investors need certainty," nHealth CEO and president, Paul Kitchen, told POLITICO. "The law created so much uncertainty that is beyond our control."
a company closes down due to Obamacare
In a letter to the company’s 50 or so employees last week, executive vice president James Slabaugh said nHealth has stopped accepting new group customers and will terminate all business by Dec. 31, 2010.
"The uncertainties in the regulatory climate coupled with new demands imposed by national healthcare reforms have made it challenging to sustain the level of sales required to remain viable over the long run," Slabaugh wrote.
The company’s finger-pointing — first reported by Richmond Biz Sense — must be read with caution: For years now, health insurance brokers and employers alike have struggled to keep pace with steeply rising health care costs.
Read More: By SARAH KLIFF, Politico
Tags: Barack Obama, closes down nHealth., Obamacare"Unexpected" has become the term of choice for the mainstream media to excuse the Obama administration’s economic failures.
Yesterday I read an article in The NY Times about something unexpected in Obamacare, and one term jumped out at me (emphasis mine):
About one-third of employers subject to major requirements of the new health care law may face tax penalties because they offer health insurance that could be considered unaffordable to some employees, a new study says…. It suggests that a little-noticed provision of the law could affect far more employers than Congress had assumed.
it’s shocking how much was in the bill that was “little noticed”
That term, "little-noticed," sure sounded familiar. It seems that we hear that term a lot.
I didn’t intend on this post being so long, but the examples are so numerous:
"Tucked inside the huge health reform bill signed into law last week were many surprising and little-noticed provisions that will affect consumers in ways large and small."
"Deep within the massive health-care overhaul legislation, a few little-noticed provisions have quietly reignited one of the bitterest debates in medicine: how to balance the right of doctors, nurses and other workers to refuse to provide services on moral or religious grounds with the right of patients to get care."
"A little-noticed provision of the health legislation has rescued federal support for a controversial form of sex education: teaching youths to remain virgins until marriage."
"A little-noticed provision in the health reform bill will shed significant light on the payments drug and device companies make to doctors and teaching hospitals in California and the rest of the nation."
"A little-noticed provision in the new health care law may not only dramatically increase paperwork for small businesses, but also put them at a disadvantage against their larger competitors."
Read More: for more “little noticed” things in Obamacare By William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection
Tags: Barack Obama, little noticed, Obamacare, secret provisions, slipped through the cracksBuried in the recently passed health-care reform bill is a new law granting one of the nation’s largest corporate lobbyists what it has been targeting for years: Death to its competition, and, consequently, a heavy blow to patient choice.
Section 6001 of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is responsible for Obamacare’s first casualties: a reported 60 physician-owned hospitals, which had promised to offer an innovative alternative to big, corporate and non-profit facilities, but under the new law are now "virtually destroyed," according to advocates. Another 200-plus doctor-owned hospitals already in existence may soon be put out of business by the health-care reform law.
To Molly Sandvig, executive director of Physician Hospitals of America, the move to cut doctor-owned hospitals out of the national health-care system is a foolish blow to both the industry and the patients it serves.
"The American people need more access, not less," she said in a statement. "We need high quality, efficient, patient-centered care, not more of the same high-cost, inefficient, bureaucratic-minded care. The impact of the health-care reform bill on physician-owned hospitals is truly illogical and unfortunate."
Read More: By Drew Zahn, WND
Tags: hospitals, life support, ObamacareCongressional Budget Office estimates released Tuesday predict the health care overhaul will likely cost about $115 billion more in discretionary spending over ten years than the original cost projections.
The additional spending — if approved over the years by Congress — would bring the total estimated cost of the overhaul to about $1 trillion.
this brings the cost to over $1Trillion for Obamacare
The Congressional Budget Office expects the federal agencies to spend $10 billion to $20 billion over 10 years on administrative costs to implement the overhaul. The CBO expects Congress to spend an additional $105 billion over 10 years to fund discretionary programs in the overhaul.
The CBO released the estimates in response to a request from California Rep. Jerry Lewis, ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. A spokeswoman for Lewis said the inquiry was filed before the House voted on the bill.
“[L]arge sums of discretionary spending in both the House and Senate versions of the health care reform bills have not yet been included in estimates by the CBO, rendering it impossible to make informed decisions regarding the outcome of this legislation,” Lewis wrote in a February letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking her to postpone votes until the discretionary spending analysis was complete.
Read More: By JENNIFER HABERKORN, Politico
Tags: $115 Billion, Barack Obama, Healthcare reform, ObamacareA"tell" in poker is a subtle but detectable change in a player’s behavior or demeanor that reveals clues about the player’s assessment of his hand. Something similar has happened with regard to the insurance mandate at the core of last month’s health reform legislation. Congress justified its authority to enact the mandate on the grounds that it is a regulation of commerce. But as this justification came under heavy constitutional fire, the mandate’s defenders changed the argument—now claiming constitutional authority under Congress’s power to tax.
This switch in constitutional theories is a tell: Defenders of the bill lack confidence in their commerce power theory. The switch also comes too late. When the mandate’s constitutionality comes up for review as part of the state attorneys general lawsuit, the Supreme Court will not consider the penalty enforcing the mandate to be a tax because, in the provision that actually defines and imposes the mandate and penalty, Congress did not call it a tax and did not treat it as a tax.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) includes what it calls an "individual responsibility requirement" that all persons buy health insurance from a private company. Congress justified this mandate under its power to regulate commerce among the several states: "The individual responsibility requirement provided for in this section," the law says, ". . . is commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce, as a result of the effects described in paragraph (2)." Paragraph (2) then begins: "The requirement regulates activity that is commercial and economic in nature: economic and financial decisions about how and when health care is paid for, and when health insurance is purchased."
In this way, the statute speciously tries to convert inactivity into the "activity" of making a "decision." By this reasoning, your "decision" not to take a job, not to sell your house, or not to buy a Chevrolet is an "activity that is commercial and economic in nature" that can be mandated by Congress.
Read More: By RANDY E. BARNETT, WSJ
Tags: Barack Obama, Insurance Mandate, ObamacareWhen President Obama signed his health-care reform last month, he declared it will "lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government." So why, barely a month later, are Democrats scrambling to pass a new bill that would impose price controls on insurance?
In now-they-tell-us hearings on Tuesday, the Senate health committee debated a bill that would give states the power to reject premium increases that state regulators determine are "unreasonable." The White House proposed this just before the final Obama- Care scramble, but it couldn’t be included because it violated the procedural rules that Democrats abused to pass the bill.
Some 27 states currently have some form of rate review in the individual and small-business markets, but they generally don’t leverage it in a political way because insolvent insurers are expensive for states and bankruptcies limit consumer choices. One exception is Massachusetts: Governor Deval Patrick is now using this regulatory power to create de facto price controls and assail the state’s insurers as cover for the explosive costs resulting from the ObamaCare prototype the Bay State passed in 2006.
National Democrats now want the power to do the same across the country, because they know how unrealistic their cost-control claims really are. Democrats are petrified they’ll get the blame they deserve when insurance costs inevitably spike. So the purpose of this latest Senate bill is to have a pre-emptive political response on hand.
Read More: WSJ
Tags: Barack Obama, Disastrous, leave the elderly behind, ObamacareA new report issued by Obama’s own experts has confirmed that everything Democrats told us about their economy-killing, debt-exploding, illegal health care takeover was wrong.
Just as conservatives had warned, ObamaCare will actually increase costs while forcing millions of seniors off Medicare and severely limiting access to care.
The findings:
Obamacare will be a total disaster
–Roughly 14 million people will lose their employer coverage by 2019 as companies terminate employee coverage (the fines are cheaper) and force workers onto Medicaid.
What was that about being able to keep your existing coverage?
–The cost "reductions" will not be "fully achievable" because millions will be forced onto Medicare, even as it is being completely gutted.
But, weren’t conservatives just "fear-mongering?"
–Crushing new fees and taxes on medical device makers will (in addition to killing innovation) "be passed through to health consumers" via higher prices and premiums on drugs and medical devices.
Welcome to "the change we need."
Read More: By Robert Moon, Examiner
Tags: Barack Obama, employer coverage, Obamacare, total disasterThree months ago, at a private meeting of nervous House Democratic lawmakers, President Obama promised to put the full weight of his office behind the marketing of the health-care bill once it became law
"We’ve spent so much time talking about the House bill versus the Senate bill that we haven’t been able to talk about how great the bill is overall. Once we have a final bill, we can really talk about how it’s going to help Americans," Obama said at the time.
Obama has stopped talking up the benefits of Obamacare
But since April 1, the subject has hardly escaped his lips publicly, and it looks like the entire month of April might go by without a presidential event focused on health care.
The White House announced Tuesday that his next swing through Main Street America — a trip to Iowa, Missouri and Illinois next week — will focus on jobs and the economy as Obama meets with small-business owners and farmers.
There was no mention of health care in the announcement.
Read More: By Michael D. Shear, Washington Post
Tags: Barack Obama, Healthcare, ignoring his policies, Obamacare, running
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