newsletter

Forbes: How American Doctors Lost Their Professional Autonomy About the same time that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was botching the rollout of healthcare.gov, the agency also announced its successful creation of two mobile apps designed to help doctors keep track the stuff they get from drug makers. It lets doctors electronically tabulate (and report to the Feds) each consulting fee, pen, and jelly doughnut that they receive, right on their I-Phone. The aim of this de rigueur...

Associated Press: Cost-Control Plan For Health Care Could Cost You [This so-called reference pricing, when presented as a choice as a health care contract in a free market is one efficient way to increase competition and reduce costs – but it should not be centrally planned by the federal government] The Obama administration has given the go-ahead for a new cost-control strategy called "reference pricing." It lets insurers and employers put a dollar limit on what health plans pay for some...

Bloomberg: Best Argument Yet Against Medicaid Expansion Opponents of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion have traditionally argued that it will significantly burden state budgets and provide people with substandard health coverage. A new academic paper suggests what may be the strongest argument yet against the expansion: that it will keep many beneficiaries in poverty because it creates strong disincentives for work. ...a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper [argues] that...

From TribTalk: One San Francisco billionaire with a Super PAC shouldn’t be able to deprive thousands of lower- and middle-class Americans from good-paying energy jobs. Yet this is exactly what hedge fund manager turned green energy investor Tom Steyer has pledged to do by promising up to $100 million to Democrats for the 2014 elections on the condition that they oppose construction of the Keystone pipeline. Of course, Steyer is free to exercise his First Amendment rights, but it’s a...

Washington Examiner: Obamacare insurer says Americans have to break the 'choice habit' In a line that says a lot about where health care is heading under Obamacare, an insurance executive offering plans through the law was quoted in the New York Times on Tuesday as saying, “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.” Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, made the remark in an article describing the trend toward narrow networks in health care...

New York Times: More Insured, but the Choices Are Narrowing These so-called narrow networks, featuring limited groups of providers, have made a big entrance on the newly created state insurance exchanges, where they are a common feature in many of the plans. While the sizes of the networks vary considerably, many plans now exclude at least some large hospitals or doctors’ groups. Smaller networks are also becoming more common in health care coverage offered by employers and in private...

Forbes: New McKinsey Survey: 74% Of Obamacare Sign-Ups Were Previously Insured The new McKinsey report…indicates that the proportion of uninsured individuals paying for coverage has shot up, from 53 percent in February to 83 percent in April. For previously insured individuals, the percentage of payers increased from 86 to 89 percent. The proportion of individuals purchasing ACA plans who had been previously uninsured remained low. In February, McKinsey reported that only 27 percent of...

CNBC: One by one, states shutter health insurance exchanges Massachusetts' crippled Obamacare exchange is just the latest to throw in the towel and scrap its existing software, but health-care experts said it likely won't be the last. Those same observers Tuesday told CNBC that almost half of the existing state-run Obamacare marketplaces could, in the coming years, end up turning enrollment operations in private insurance plans over fully to the federally run HealthCare.gov for a variety of...

The New York Times: Insurers Say Most Who Signed Up Under Health Law Have Paid Up [but importantly, many of these are duplicate enrollments] Most of the people choosing health plans under the Affordable Care Act — about 80 percent — are paying their initial premiums as required for coverage to take effect, several large insurers said Tuesday on the eve of a House hearing about the law. But the health insurance industry said the total of eight million people who signed up included...

You do some strange things in politics…but petting a pig in a bandana is a first! All to emphasize the Citizens Against Government Waste 2014 Pig Book, released today, chronicling government waste. Too bad our government's pork problem isn't as cute as this fella. pic.twitter.com/L3Q3QtfXDw — Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) May 7, 2014  

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. Sen. Cruz has been documenting the Obama Administration’s lawlessness and other abuses of powers in a series of reports, beginning in April 2013. The Legal Limit Report No. 1: U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Department of Justice’s Expansive View of Federal...

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Own a small business? Brace for Obamacare pain ["The changes put as many as 90,000 policies across Nevada at risk of cancellation or nonrenewal this fall…"] Local insurance brokers are reporting spikes ranging from 35 percent to 120 percent on policies that renew from July to December. The increases are especially acute among employers with workforces made up of younger, healthier men. That’s because Obamacare prohibits offering lower rates to healthier...

Washington Examiner: Obamacare youth sign-ups at or below 25% in 15 states ...This is far below the 40 percent threshold White House officials initially said was required to ensure healthy insurance exchanges…nationally, about 28 percent of those signing up through the exchanges were aged 18 to 34. But national numbers are only a rough indicator of the state of play on the exchanges, because in reality, the insurance market is made up of 51 different risk pools - one for each state, plus...

The Federalist: No, Obamacare Did Not "Save The Economy" Last Quarter GDP growth figures for the fourth quarter of 2013 were released by the federal government, and the numbers were not good. The economy just barely avoided painful contraction, posting annualized growth of only 0.1 percent. But for the Obamacare Truther Brigade, there was a tiny glimmer of hope. It turns out that higher than expected health care spending growth was just enough to keep that quarterly growth number out of the...