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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (45407)	8/31/2010 12:40:34 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Exclusive Video: Gov. Mitch Daniels on Obamacare’s Devastating Consequences Posted August 27th, 2010 at 8:25am in Health Care with 33 comments Print This Post Editor’s Note: On the right, please watch our exclusive interview with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and then below, please read an original guest blog to The Foundry from the Governor himself. We’ve been through a global recession. Now we’re fighting through a stalled recovery. Revenues are the lowest they’ve been in half a century. Their finances a wreck, many states have effectively sunk into bankruptcy. Indiana is still afloat. In fact, we’ve fared better than most. We continue to meet our obligations without raising taxes, and the reserves we carefully built and protected will get us through the downturn. But as if we did not already have enough on our plates, the passage and implementation of Obamacare presents us with a whole new set of challenges and a costly to-do list. I note with special sadness that first and foremost amongst the bill’s consequences will be the probable demise of the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP). This program is currently providing health insurance to 50,000 low-income Hoosiers. With its Health Savings Account-style personal accounts and numerous incentives for healthy lifestyle choices, it has been enormously popular and successful. Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, soon to cover one in every four citizens, will not only scoop up most of HIP’s participants, but will also cost the state between $3.1 and $3.9 billion over the next decade. It is hard to see how my successors as governor will be able to avoid a steep state tax increase to pay for it. Meanwhile, our medical device companies and small businesses will shed jobs as they wrestle with the taxes and penalties levied to help finance Washington’s “reforms.” Of course, it’s a misnomer to even refer to this as “reform.” It doesn’t reform anything. Instead, it perpetuates and magnifies all the worst aspects of our current system: fee for service reimbursement, “free” to the purchaser consumption, and an irrationally expensive medical liability tort system. It’s a sure recipe for yet more overconsumption and overspending. There were better options. Since my election, my state coworkers have had the choice of Health Savings Accounts in lieu of traditional health care plans. The first year this option was made available, some 4 percent of us signed up for it. Six years later, more than 70 percent of our 30,000 state workers have opted for the personal account. This trend has had a startlingly positive effect on costs for both employees and the state. State employees enrolled in the consumer-driven plan saved more than $8 million in 2010 compared to their coworkers in the old-fashioned preferred provider organization (PPO) alternative. Indiana will save at least $20 million in 2010 because of our high HSA enrollment. It has also been the source of significant changes in behavior, as state workers with the HSA visit emergency rooms less frequently and are more likely to use generic drugs than co-workers with traditional health care. Hoosiers enrolled in HIP have experienced similar changes in behavior with generic drugs now accounting for 84 percent of all prescriptions used by enrollees. This is a sharp contrast to the prevalent model of health plans in this country that encourage individuals to buy health care on someone else’s credit card. What seems free will always be overconsumed, compared to the choices a normal consumer would make. Hence our plan’s immense savings. The condescension of the “reformers” is misplaced. It turns out that typical Americans are neither too dense nor too intimidated to make sound decisions about their own health. This is, of course, a fact that national policy makers sadly ignored during their overhaul of our health are system. Now the rest of us are left to pick up the pieces. blog.heritage.org

To: TimF who wrote (45407)	9/13/2010 12:19:54 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

Sebelius Has a List Political thuggery from HHS. SEPTEMBER 13, 2010. 'As a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that's going to increase our costs—we knew that," President Obama said at his press conference Friday in response to a question about rising health spending. That wasn't how he sold the plan, but, anyway, that's a truism. Here's another: The White House was always going to blame insurance companies for any cost increases, even when its own policies cause them. Witness Kathleen Sebelius's Thursday letter to America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group—a thuggish message even by her standards. The Health and Human Services secretary wrote that some insurers have been attributing part of their 2011 premium increases to ObamaCare and warned that "there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases." Zero tolerance for expressing an opinion, or offering an explanation to policyholders? They're more subtle than this in Caracas. What Ms. Sebelius really means is that the government will prohibit insurers from doing business if reality is not politically convenient for Democrats. ObamaCare includes a slew of mandated benefits for next year, such as allowing children to remain on their parents' plans until age 26 and "free" preventative care (i.e., no direct out-of-pocket cost sharing for consumers). The tone of Ms. Sebelius's letter suggests that she doesn't understand that money is exchanged for goods and services, and that if Congress mandates new benefits, premiums will rise. The Administration estimates that these regulations should increase all premiums by 1% to 2% on average. Even if that turns out to be right—on average—that isn't what insurers are finding in practice in the local, price-sensitive individual and small business insurance markets, where coverage is typically less comprehensive to hold down costs. For some current policies in some states, the one-year increase jumps as much as 9%. ObamaCare gives Ms. Sebelius's regulators the power to define "unreasonable" premium hikes, which will mean whatever they decide it will mean later this fall. She promised to keep a list of insurers "with a record of unjustified rate increases" and then to bar them from ObamaCare's subsidized "exchanges" when they come on line in 2014. In other words, insurers must accept price controls now or face the retribution of a de facto ban on selling their products to consumers four years from now. This is nasty stuff and an obvious attempt to shift political blame for rising insurance costs before the election. It's also an early sign of life under ObamaCare, when all health-care decisions are political and the bureaucrats decide who can charge how much for a service or product. Democrats built this system and they now own it politically. The least they could do is take credit for its consequences. online.wsj.com