By Michael F. Cannon
What the media blare: Levinson Snags $515 Million in Health Care Fraud More than 100 Charged in Massive Medicare Fraud Busts in 7 Cities in Scams Totaling $452 Mil What I hear: Drip . . . . . . . . . . drip . . . . . . . . . . . . [...]
Medicare Fraud Posse Cackles as If They Laid an Asteroid is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
By Michael F. Cannon
According to WSFA-12 News, Alabama legislators are working on legislation to create an ObamaCare Exchange. But: Governor Robert Bentley [R] will likely veto the bill. “This legislation is premature. The federal government has yet to establish clear guidelines for a health insurance exchange,” said Deputy Communications Director Jeremy King, in a statement to WSFA 12 News. “Also, [...]
Alabama Gov. Vows to Veto ObamaCare Exchange is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
By Michael F. Cannon
Here’s the story from WIUS, the NPR affiliate at the University of Illinois Springfield: A health exchange is one of the main initial components of the Affordable Care Act. It’s basically a table of insurance plans people who don’t currently have coverage could choose from once the national health care law hits its stride. If [...]
From the Annals of ObamaCare: ‘Illinois Suspends Insurance Exchange Setup’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
The contraception mandate has met yet another foe. On Monday, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) filed a complaint against Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius on behalf of Hercules Industries, Inc., a family-owned HVAC manufacturer based in Denver, Colorado. Hercules Industries is owned by five family members, all practicing Catholics, who seek to operate the business in accordance with their beliefs. As such, the self-insured company’s health plan does not include coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, or sterilization procedures—and had no intention of doing so. Until Obamacare, … More
The House Ways and Means Committee just released a report that shows that the most successful companies would save billions of dollars if they stopped offering coverage to their employees and dumped them into the taxpayer-funded Obamacare exchanges. On a confidential basis, 71 Fortune 100 companies supplied information to the committee regarding the cost and coverage of their health insurance plans. The committee used the data to calculate the potential savings of dumping employees into the exchanges and paying the employer mandate penalty. The report’s findings will likely scare the … More
The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health held a hearing last Friday to discuss the bipartisan effort behind competing premium support plans. These plans would restructure traditional Medicare and guarantee its fiscal stability in the future. As Chairman Wally Herger (R–CA) said: Unless Congress acts, the Medicare program that seniors and people with disabilities rely on will go bankrupt in just a few short years.… The premium support model holds promise to place Medicare on sound financial footing while transforming and modernizing the program to provide greater choice for … More
In a recent article for MarketWatch, Andrea Coombes writes, “Whatever their opinion of the health-care reform law, wealthy Americans have a lot of money at risk in the Supreme Court’s coming decision on the law’s constitutionality.” Yes, the rich will pay higher taxes under Obamacare. But they aren’t the only ones. Obamacare raises taxes by more than $500 billion in a decade, and a number of these will hit Americans at all levels of the income scale. The specific tax hikes Coombes describes are initially intended to impact just the … More
By Michael F. Cannon
Politico has run my letter to the editor regarding their article on states refusing to create ObamaCare’s health insurance Exchanges: “Right winning war on state health-insurance exchanges,” (POLITICO, Apr. 18) is false or misleading on several points. It mislabels me a conservative and the Cato Institute a “national conservative organization,” when both are libertarian. Cato scholars [...]
Letter Correcting Politico Article re States & ObamaCare Exchanges is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
A new study by the Urban Institute reconfirms a vital fact: Medicare’s massive increase in enrollment, largely attributable to retiring baby boomers, is driving its fiscal instability. This is an important finding, because during the health care debate of 2009, advocates of Obamacare insisted that excess health care cost inflation was the more urgent problem contributing to Medicare’s fiscal nightmare. A recent report by Charles Blahous, a public trustee for Medicare, explains: This viewpoint increased in prominence when Peter Orszag, one of [Obamacare’s] leading advocates, was named to head the … More
One of the biggest fears Americans have about Obamacare is who will ultimately control health care decisions: the government or patients and their doctors. New research by Heritage health policy analyst Kathryn Nix explains that while the law does not explicitly put those decisions in the hands of the government, it does allow government bureaucrats to unduly influence medical care. Enter comparative effectiveness research (CER), which compares different methods for preventing, diagnosing, or treating a specific disease or condition. In her paper, Nix explores the many ways CER might be … More
