From the Washington Examiner

From Washington Examiner

From the Washinton Examiner

Physicians at McBride Orthopedic Hospital had ambitious plans for their Oklahoma City hospital before Obamacare. Two new operating rooms and a four-bed intensive-care unit were part of a multimillion-dollar expansion project that promised to bring competition and more health care choices to the community.

But once President Obama’s signature was dry on the 2,409-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, so, too, was the McBride project. The recently enacted law imposed a series of new federal regulations on physician-owned hospitals, including an immediate ban on expansion.

“We pulled the plug when the law was signed,” McBride Chief Executive Mark Galliart said. “We were ready to break ground. We had everything approved by the state. We had the construction agreement in place. We were going to meet our timeline until the legislation passed.”

Within days of enactment of the new law, developers across the country nixed plans for 24 new physician-owned hospitals under construction. It will be a struggle for an additional 47 new such hospitals under construction to meet an Obamacare-imposed deadline of Dec. 31 to be finished and have their Medicare certification.

Galliart is now preparing McBride for other onerous requirements imposed by Obamacare on the nation’s 260 physician-owned hospitals. In addition to limits on expansion and new construction, the law restricts new investments, requires new annual reports to the government and sets fines for hospitals that fail to abide by transparency rules.

Imagine if the government owned General Motors and the Congress passed a bill that barred Ford from producing “any new cars and couldn’t expand on its existing cars,” Galliart said. “What other industry would put up with this? If we were spending money recklessly and harming people, that’s one thing. But physician-owned hospitals are doing it better and more efficiently.”

Read the rest of the story.

From John Goodman’s blog

Rick Foster is the Chief Actuary of Medicare, and his office has just released a devastating critique of the Administration’s health reform law.

Before getting to details, let me say there is nothing in the report that is surprising to independent health economists. The conclusions are consistent with everything The Lewin Group and other private estimates have been saying for months. What is surprising is that one of the most respected agencies of the U.S. government is completely undermining the Alice-in-Wonderland fables being spun by the White House, on Capitol Hill and in the mainstream media. To wit:

• You cannot take close to one trillion dollars away from one group of people and spend it on another group of people and somehow leave those footing the bill better off.
• You cannot give millions of people large increases in medical care without creating any new doctors, new nurses or other paramedical personnel.
• You cannot arbitrarily reduce what you are paying providers by billions of dollars and still expect to get the same quantity and quality of care.
• You cannot give millions of patients and thousands of doctors new incentives to waste medical resources and then expect health care spending to go down.

In other words, the Chief Actuary is simply saying reality is reality. Economics is economics. A is A.

Convenient summaries of the Actuary’s report have been produced by the Republican staff of the House Ways and Means Committee and by the Senate Republican Policy Committee. Although these are partisan groups, the summaries appear to be quite faithful to the source. Here are the salient findings (with page numbers in the Actuary’s report):

• Health care costs will go up, not down. National health expenditures will increase from 17 percent of GDP now to 21 percent under the new law and will be higher than without the legislation. [Page 4] Net federal spending on health care will also increase.
• Health care shortages are “plausible and even probable.” Because of the increased demand for health care, “supply constraints might initially interfere with providing the services desired by the additional 34 million insured persons.” [Page 20]
• 14 million employees will lose their employer coverage. Employees of small firms are especially at risk (despite small employer tax credit subsidies). [Page 7]
• 2 million employees who lose coverage will have to enroll in Medicaid. [Page 3]
• A Medicaid insurance card is not a guarantee of care. An estimated 18 million people will be added to Medicaid. [Page 3] However, because there is no corresponding increase in the supply of caregivers, “it is reasonable to expect that a significant portion of the increased demand for Medicaid would be difficult to meet, particularly over the first few years.” [Page 20]
• One in ten insured workers will see their health benefits taxed. By 2019, more than 10% of insured workers will “be in employer plans with benefit values in excess of the thresholds (before changes to reduce benefits) and this percentage would increase rapidly thereafter.” [Page 13]
• Higher taxes will lead to higher premiums. The new taxes on medical devices, prescription drugs, and insurance plans “would generally be passed on through to health consumers in the form of higher drug and device prices and higher insurance premiums.” [Page 17]
• There are more than one-half trillion in Medicare cuts. The new health law cuts “$575 billion” from Medicare. [Page 4]
• Medicare cuts would threaten almost one in every seven hospitals. About “15 percent of Part A providers would become unprofitable within the 10-year projection period.” [Page 10]
• Overall access to care for seniors would go down. Because of the law’s payment reductions, “providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program. [Page 10]
• 7.4 million people will lose access to Medicare Advantage plans. Enrollment in MA plans will be cut in half (from its projected level of 14.8 million under the current law to 7.4 million under the new law). [Page 11]
• False advertising: The new “Medicare Tax” doesn’t go to Medicare. “Despite the title of this tax, this provision is unrelated to Medicare; in particular, the revenues generated by the tax on unearned income are not allocated to the Medicare trust funds.” [Page 9]
• False advertising: Budgetary double-counting does not improve Medicare’s solvency. Medicare cuts “cannot be simultaneously used to finance other federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions) and to extend the [life of the Medicare] trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.” [Page 9]
• The new long-term care insurance plan (CLASS Act) is unsound. The program faces “a significant risk of failure” because the high costs will attract sicker people and lead to low participation. [Page 15]
• The promise to those with pre-existing conditions is unfunded. “By 2011 and 2012 the initial $5 billion in Federal funding for [high risk pools] would be exhausted, resulting in substantial premium increases to sustain the program.” [Page 16]
• The law does almost nothing to limit actual fraud and abuse. The fraud provisions in the law will save only about two percent of $47 billion in suspect claims.

Rep. Dave Camp, ranking Republican of the House Ways and Means Committee, has compiled this list of when different aspects of the recently passed healthcare legislation will go into effect.  Click here for a PDF version of the document.

2009

• 2-year tax credit (total cap of $1 billion) for new chronic disease therapy investments
• Medicare cuts to hospitals begin (long-term care (7/1/09) and inpatient and rehabilitation facilities (fiscal 2010)) 2009

2010

• States and federal officials review premium increases
• FDA authorized to approve “follow-on” biologics
• Increase brand name pharmaceutical Medicaid rebate (from 15.1% to 23.1%)
• Medicare payments to physicians in primarily rural areas increase (2 years)
• Deny “black liquor” eligibility for cellulosic biofuel producers credit
• Tax credits provided to certain small employers for health care-related expenses
• Increase adoption tax incentives for 2 years
• Codify economic substance doctrine and impose penalties for underpayments (transactions on/after 3/23/10)
• Provide income exclusion for specified Indian tribe health benefits provided after 3/23/10
• Temporary high-risk pool and high-cost union retiree reinsurance ($5 billion each for 3.5 years) (6/23/10)
• Impose 10% tax on indoor UV tanning (7/1/10)
• Medicare cuts to inpatient psych hospitals (7/1/10)
• Prohibits lifetime and annual benefit spending limits (plan years beginning 9/23/10)
• Prohibits non-group plans from canceling coverage (rescissions) (plan years beginning 9/23/10)
• Requires plans to cover, at no charge, most preventive care (plan years beginning 9/23/10)
• Allows dependents to stay on parents’ policies through age 26 (plan years beginning 9/23/10)
• Provides limited protections to children with pre-existing conditions (plan years beginning 9/23/10)
• Hospitals in “Frontier States” (N.D., Mont., Wyo., S.D., Utah) receive higher Medicare payments (fiscal 2011)
• Hospitals in “low-cost” areas receive higher Medicare payments for 2 years ($400 million, fiscal 2011)

2011

• Medicare Advantage cuts begin
• No longer allowed to use FSA, HSA, HRA, Archer MSA distributions for over-the counter medicines
• Medicare cuts to home health begin
• Wealthier seniors ($85k/$170k) begin paying higher Part D premiums (not indexed for inflation in Parts B/D)
• Medicare reimbursement cuts when seniors use diagnostic imaging like MRIs, CT scans, etc.
• Medicare cuts begin to ambulance services, ASCs, diagnostic labs, and durable medical equipment
• Impose new annual tax on brand name pharmaceutical companies
• Americans begin paying premiums for federal long-term care insurance (CLASS Act)
• Health plans required to spend a minimum of 80% of premiums on medical claims
• Physicians in “Frontier States” (N.D., Mont., Wyo., S.D., Utah) receive higher Medicare payments
• Prohibition on Medicare payments to new physician-owned hospitals
• Penalties for non-qualified HSA and Archer MSA distributions double (to 20%)
• Seniors prohibited from purchasing power wheelchairs unless they first rent for 13 months
• Brand name drug companies begin providing 50% discount in the Part D “donut hole”
• 10% Medicare bonus payment for primary care and general surgery (5 years)
• Employers required to report value of health benefits on W-2
• Steps towards health insurance administrative simplification (reduced paperwork, etc) begins (five year process)
• Additional funding for community health centers (five years)
• Seniors who hit Part D “donut hole “in 2010 receive $250 check (3/15/11)
• New Medicare cuts to long-term care hospitals begin (7/1/11)
• Additional Medicare cuts to hospitals and cuts to nursing homes and inpatient rehab facilities begin (fiscal 2012)
• New tax on all private health insurance policies to pay for comp. eff. research (plan years beginning fiscal 2012)

2012

• Medicare cuts to dialysis treatment begins
• Require information reporting on payments to corporations
• Medicare to reduce spending by using an HMO-like coordinated care model (Accountable Care Organizations)
• Medicare Advantage plans with a 4 or 5 star rating receive a quality bonus payment
• New Medicare cuts to inpatient psych hospitals (7/1/12)
• Hospital pay-for-quality program begins (fiscal 2013)
• Medicare cuts to hospitals with high readmission rates begin (fiscal 2013)
• Medicare cuts to hospice begin (fiscal 2013)

2013

• Impose $2,500 annual cap on FSA contributions (indexed to CPI)
• Increase Medicare wage tax by 0.9% and impose a new 3.8% tax on unearned, nonactive business income for those earning over $200,000 or $250,000 for families (not indexed to inflation)
• Generally increases (7.5% to 10%) threshold at which medical expenses, as a percentage of income, can be deductible
• Eliminate deduction for Part D retiree drug subsidy employers receive
• Impose 2.3% excise tax on medical devices
• Medicare cuts to hospitals which treat low-income seniors begin
• Post-acute pay for quality reporting begins
• CO-OP Program: Secretary of Health and Human Services awards loans and grants for establishing nonprofit health insurers
• $500,000 deduction cap on compensation paid to insurance company employees and officers
• Part D “donut hole” reduction begins, reaching a 25% reduction by 2020

2014

• Individuals without government-approved coverage are subject to a tax of the greater of $695 or 2.5% of income
• Employers who fail to offer “affordable” coverage would pay a $3,000 penalty for every employee that receives a subsidy through the Exchange
• Employers who do not offer insurance must pay a tax penalty of $2,000 for every full-time employee
• More Medicare cuts to home health begin
• States must have established Exchanges
• Employers with more than 200 employees can auto-enroll employees in health coverage, with opt-out
• All non-grandfathered and Exchange health plans required to meet federally mandated levels of coverage
• States must cover parents /childless adults up to 138% of poverty on Medicaid, receive increased FMAP
• Tax credits available for Exchange-based coverage, amount varies by income up to 400% of poverty
• Insurers cannot impose any coverage restrictions on pre-existing conditions (guaranteed issue/renewability)
• Modified community rating: individual or family coverage; geography; 3:1 ratio for age; 1.5:1 for smoking
• Insurers must offer coverage to anyone wanting a policy and every policy has to be renewed
• Limits out-of-pocket cost-sharing (tied to limits in HSAs, currently $5,950/$11,900 indexed to COLA)
• Insurance plans must include government-defined “essential benefits ” and coverage levels
• OPM must offer at least two multi-state plans in every state
• Employers can offer some employees free choice vouchers for health insurance in the Exchange
• Government board (IPAB) begins submitting proposals to cut Medicare
• Impose tax on nearly all private health insurance plans
• Medicare payment cuts for hospital-acquired infections begin (fiscal 2015)

2015

• More Medicare cuts to home health begin

2016

• States can form interstate insurance compacts if the coverage with HHS approval (2016)

2017

• Physician pay-for-quality program begins for all physicians
• States may allow large employers and multi-employer health plans to purchase coverage in the Exchange.
• States may apply to the HHS secretary for a limited waiver from certain federal requirements

2018

• Impose “Cadillac tax on “high cost” plans, 40% tax on the benefit value above a certain threshold: ($10,200 individual coverage, $27,500 family or self-only union multi-employer coverage)

From the American Spectator

By William Tucer.  Two weeks ago we smashed the side view mirror on our car and had to take it to the shop. We paid $250 for a replacement.

This week I went to my dermatologist to see if I had developed any more skin cancers (red hair and all that). The doctor took a biopsy on one spot and sent if off to the lab. If it’s malignant, I’ll have to go back and have a bigger chunk of my cheek removed. The cost of all this? Zero.

This simple comparison illustrates why healthcare “reform,” as Congress has just adopted it, will probably bankrupt the country.

As far as auto insurance is concerned, we have it like almost everyone else. It covers major damage. A year ago I was in a fender-bender. The insurance paid a small portion of the repairs. Several years ago, we bought my son a car and — typically — he nearly totaled it within a week. The insurance company paid an astounding $8,000 in repairs but our premiums tripled and we spent several years paying the penalty. That’s what “underwriting” is about. After one accident you get moved into a higher risk category. It’s what you might call a “pre-existing condition.”

At the auto shop, the mechanics have high school backgrounds with two or three years of on-the-job training and use basic hydraulic lifts and wrenches. I pay them $250 for parts and an hour of labor. At the doctor’s office, the person who serves me has done four years of medical school plus another three or four years of hospital residency and uses sophisticated equipment. The lab that does the biopsy will have the latest technology. Yet because I have a part-time job with a major employer, I receive union “health benefits” that pay for everything. I would be happy to pay $80-100 for my visits to the dermatologist. After all, I pay a plumber $50 just to come to my house and look at my leaking sink. But because politicians like Nancy Pelosi have convinced people that even a $20 co-payment is an “insurance company rip-off,” I get my medical services for free.

Not that I am unaware of the dangers of falling out of this system and going uninsured. A few years ago I didn’t have coverage and was paying $500 apiece for these minor office procedures.       

As John Goodman and Robert Musgrave wrote in their brilliant analysis, Patient Power (written in 1994 and still the best critique around), what we are calling “health insurance” is not insurance at all. It is prepaid medical benefits. Insurance is a way of pooling the risk for major expenses — the kind you incur when you have an auto accident or suffer a serious illness. Prepaid benefit plans try to cover all medical expenses, no matter how small.

No insurance company could possibly provide auto insurance that paid the bills every time you changed a tire. The premiums would be impossibly expensive and people would abuse the system, running to the auto shop every time they felt they needed new windshield wipers or suffered a dent in their bumper. Likewise, no insurance company offers policies with 100 percent coverage of all medical bills. The premiums would be impossibly expensive and people would run to the doctor every time they had a sniffle or suffered a cut finger.

Instead, prepaid benefits plans were pioneered by the major corporations and their labor unions, plus federal, state and local governments and their labor unions, which are now the majority of union members and one of the principle players in this melodrama. Taking advantage of an IRS ruling that health and retirement benefits could not be taxed as income, major corporations and governments began funneling tax-free dollars to their employees as “greater take-home pay.” Instead of income, employees got first-dollar coverage of all medical bills with no co-payments and no deductibles. In other words, medical care was “free.” And of course people began to treat it that way. Writing in 1994, Goodman and Musgrave argued that it was all these people flooding into the system with cost-free health benefits that was driving up medical prices.

What corporations, governments and their unions had created was a mini-welfare state. We all know what happens to welfare states. When General Motors went under this year, it was lamenting that every car that came off the line had $1,500 in employee and retiree health benefits on board. When President Clinton tried to “reform” healthcare in the 1990s, one of the central initiatives was that the bloated healthcare commitments made by major corporations would be off-loaded onto the government.

Practically every state and local government in the country has the same unfunded employee pension and health benefits threatening them with bankruptcy. Medicaid is working the same way and now consumes 25 percent of state budgets. And of course the granddaddy of all is Medicare, which now has unfunded liabilities of $90 trillion over the next seventy years and will only be payable if the dollar loses about 80 percent of its value.

So what has Congress decided to do in order to “reform” this system? Instead of getting a grip benefits and substituting a policy of health insurance, the Democrats have decided to extend the same unrealistic benefits to everybody.

Read the rest of the column.

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (MN-06) issued the following statement today after introducing legislation to repeal the Democrats’ government takeover of health care:

“It’s no secret, President Obama and Democrat leaders have ignored the will of the people and have chosen to ram through their trillion-dollar health care bill despite the American people’s overwhelming objection to it.

“It’s future generations, our children and grandchildren who will pay the price for our government’s arrogance and recklessness, and the American people won’t ever forget the irresponsible actions of this Administration and Democratic Majority. After all, government answers to the people, not the other way around. I’m asking my colleagues to join me in repealing this monstrosity of a bill.”

Click here to view the legislation .

From Washington Examiner

From the Cato Institute

By Michael D. Tanner: The crystal ball is still far too cloudy to predict whether or not Obamacare will pass, but it is not too soon to make some predictions about what the future will look like if it does pass.

The bill will cost more than advertised. It won’t be long before Congress is shocked — shocked! — to discover that health-care reform is going to cost a lot more than expected. It’s not just the budgetary gimmicks that Democrats have been employing to hide the bill’s true cost. It’s also that government programs — and government health-care programs in particular — almost always end up exceeding their cost estimates.

For example, when Medicare was instituted in 1965, it was estimated that the cost of Medicare Part A would be $9 billion by 1990. In actuality, it was seven times higher — $67 billion. Similarly, in 1987, Medicaid’s special hospitals subsidy was projected to cost $100 million annually by 1992, just five years later; it actually cost $11 billion, more than 100 times as much. And in 1988, when Medicare’s home-care benefit was established, the projected cost for 1993 was $4 billion, but the actual cost in 1993 was $10 billion.

Insurance premiums will keep rising. The president has tried to convince people that health-care reform will cut their insurance costs. They are in for a surprise. According to the Congressional Budget Office, insurance premiums will double in the next few years. The bill will do nothing to diminish that increase. In fact, for the millions of Americans who get their insurance through the individual market, rather than from an employer, this bill will raise premiums by 10–13 percent more than if we do nothing. Young and healthy people can expect their premiums to go up even more.

The quality of care will be worse. Doctors’ reimbursements for providing care will be squeezed, making it harder to find a doctor. A new survey in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that 46 percent of doctors may give up their practice in the wake of this bill. While that is probably exaggerated, many doctors will likely decide to reduce their patient loads or retire. At the same time, increased demand will create additional problems.

In Massachusetts, after the passage of Romneycare, the wait to see a primary-care physician increased from 33 to 52 days. Research and development will also be cut back, meaning there will be fewer new drugs and other medical breakthroughs. And the government will increasingly intervene in medical decision making, micromanaging medical decisions and deciding what treatments are most effective or, frighteningly, most cost-effective.

The Left will keep pushing for more. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s inner censor was clearly on the fritz this week when she said, “Once we kick through this door, there’ll be more legislation to follow.” Faced with rising costs and higher premiums, not to mention millions still uninsured, Democrats will blame the “evil” insurance companies and demand further reform. They will argue that we tried “moderate” reform and failed. Pelosi could no longer keep a lid on what the hard Left has been restraining itself from saying all along: It sees this legislation as the perfect first step in the long march to universal single-payer health care.

Republicans won’t really try to repeal it. Republicans will run this fall on a promise to repeal this deeply unpopular bill, and will likely reap the political advantages of that promise. But in reality there is little chance of their following through. Even if Republicans were to take both houses of Congress, they would still face a presidential veto and a Democratic filibuster.

But more important, once an entitlement is in place, it becomes virtually impossible to take away. The fact that Republicans have been criticizing Obamacare for cutting Medicare shows that they are not really willing to take the heat for cutting people’s benefits once they have them — no matter how unaffordable those benefits are. Paul Ryan put forth a serious plan for entitlement reform — and attracted just six co-sponsors at last count. Enough said.

As Scrooge asked in A Christmas Carol, “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be?” By Sunday night, we should know.

From the Wall Street Journal

By Fred Barnes: 

On Dec. 7, 1941, an announcement was made during the football game between the hometown Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles. All the generals and admirals at Griffith Stadium were instructed to report to their duty stations. Little did they know their lives would be changed forever and America would be at war, or on war footing, for the next half-century. Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

America will be in a constant health-care war if ObamaCare is enacted. Passage wouldn’t end the health-care debate. Rather, it would perpetuate ObamaCare as the dominant issue for decades to come, reshape politics, create an annual funding crisis in Congress, and generate a spate of angry lawsuits. Yet few in Washington seem aware of what lies ahead.

We only have to look at Great Britain to get a glimpse of the future. The National Health Service—socialized medicine—was created in 1946 and touted as the envy of the world. It’s been a contentious issue ever since. Its cost and coverage are perennial subjects of debate. The press, especially England’s most popular newspaper, The Daily Mail, feasts on reports of long waiting periods, dirty hospitals, botched care and denied access to treatments.

A Conservative member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, last year in an interview on Fox News denounced the NHS as a “60-year mistake,” declaring he “wouldn’t wish it on anybody.” As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher bravely cut NHS spending in the 1980s, but current Tory leaders regard criticism of the NHS as too risky. “The Conservative Party stands four square behind the NHS,” its leader, David Cameron, said in response to Mr. Hannan.

Read the rest of the column.

From the Heartland Institute

1. You Can’t Keep Your Plan Even if You Like It: The president promises you can keep your plan and doctor if you like them—polls show the overwhelming majority of Americans do—but independent analysts found Obamacare would cause a change of plan or doctor for as many as 56 percent of currently covered employees. Additionally, your doctor may not want to keep you. (See Point No. 8.)

2. Your Insurance Premiums Will Go Up:The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found Obamacare will increase the average family’s premiums by as much as 13 percent by 2016, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers found an increase of $4,000 by 2019.

3. You May Be Among the Hundreds of Thousands Who Lose Their Jobs: The nonpartisan Lewin Group predicts the massive new employer mandates would cause as many as 600,000 workers to lose their jobs under Obamacare. Other sources predict even more.

4. Your Tax Burden Will Increase: The Senate bill contains as many as 19 new taxes. The entire proposal functions as a massive regressive tax falling on the young and lowerincome workers, making them beholden to subsidies and punishing success.

5. You Will Be Forced to Pay for Abortions: The president promised no taxpayer dollars would go toward funding abortions. But the Senate bill specifically allows for such funding, and House leaders acknowledge they will not attempt to restrict abortion funding in the final bill.

6. Your Health Care Will Cost More: Obamacare’s attempt to “bend the cost curve” and slow the pace of rising health care costs is a sham. In reality, the only reductions in cost come through reduced government reimbursements to hospitals and doctors, who will be forced to lower the quality of care and pass more costs on to the taxpayers.

7. Your Employer Will Have to Pay More to the Government: Forget that raise you were hoping for. It makes economic sense for small employers facing burdensome new requirements to stay small, and for large businesses to fire permanent employees and hire contractors.

8. Your Doctor May Quit: A survey by Investor’s Business Daily found 45 percent of doctors said they “would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement” if Obamacare passes. Seventy-two percent of doctors oppose Obama’s health care plan.

9. You Will Be Forced to Purchase Insurance Approved by Bureaucrats: Do you like Medicare Advantage? Gone. Like your high-deductible HSA plan? Forget it. The bureaucrats in Washington will tell you what you can buy, and you will be required to buy something.

10. You and Your Children Will Pay for Trillions in Added Debt: Democrat Sen. Max Baucus admits the cost of Obamacare is more than $2.5 trillion over 10 years. Claims that the bill is deficit-neutral are based on budgetary gimmicks. We will pay the tab for generations to come.

From the Boston Herald

So this is what it looks like when a mild-mannered, liberal community activist goes “nuclear.”

President Barack Obama didn’t use the “n” word – or even the “r” word, “reconciliation.” But he made it clear he’s ready to go to Democrat DefCon4, give the partisan launch codes and inflict Obamacare on the American people at any political cost.

In defending his decision to go nuclear, Obama talked about insurance company “abuses.” He talked about premium hikes in California. He talked about a sick mom in Wisconsin. He even talked (in extremely modest ways) about Republican ideas like tort reform and fighting Medicare fraud.

What Obama didn’t mention was Massachusetts.

In fact, despite having given (based on my calculations) some 57,432 speeches, press conferences, pep talks, pillow talks and interpretive dances on health care in the past 12 months, Obama somehow manages to leave us out of nearly every conversation.

This is telling, because we’re the one state already glowing in the radioactive haze of Romneycare, aka “ObamaCare: The Beta Version.”

Shouldn’t Obama have been bragging yesterday about bringing the benefits of Bay State reform to all of America?

As we prepare to wander into this coming nuclear winter of hyper-partisan politics – one in which we’re almost certain to see widespread political fatalities among congressional Democrats – I have to ask: If bringing Massachusetts-style “universal coverage” to America is worth this terrible price, why doesn’t Obama at least mention us once in awhile?

Maybe he thinks of us as the Manhattan Project of medical insurance reform. Too top secret to discuss. More likely, it has something to do with the nightmare results of this government-run debacle. Here are a few “highlights” of the current status of the Obamacare experiment in Massachusetts:

• It’s exploding the budget: Our “universal” health insurance scheme is already $47 million over budget for 2010. Romneycare will cost taxpayers more than $900 million next year alone.
• It’s killing us on costs: Average Massachusetts premiums are the highest in the nation and rising. We also spend 27 percent more on health care services, per capita, than the national average. Those costs, contrary to what we were promised, have been going up faster here than nearly everywhere else.
• It’s creating bizarre marketplace mutations: In Massachusetts, ObamaCare 1.0 is such a mess our governor is talking about imposing draconian price controls. He’s even suggested going to “capitation,” a system where doctors get a fixed amount of money per patient – and then that’s it. Which means it would become in your doctor’s financial interest never to see you again.

All this damage to the taxpayers, the insured and the responsible business owners . . . and for what?

The percentage of uninsured Bay State residents has gone from around 6 percent to around 3 percent.

In other words, it’s a dud.

Read the rest of the column.

From the Wall Street Journal

Natural experiments are rare in politics, but few are as instructive as the prototype for ObamaCare that Massachusetts set in motion in 2006. The bills for “universal coverage” are now coming due, and it appears the state political class is prepared to do lasting damage to one of America’s top-flight health-care systems.

Last month, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick landed a neutron bomb, proposing hard price controls across almost all Massachusetts health care. State regulators already have the power to cap insurance premiums, which Mr. Patrick is activating. He also filed a bill that would give state regulators the power to review the rates of hospitals, physician groups and some specialty providers. Those that are deemed too high “shall be presumptively disapproved.”

Mr. Patrick ad-libbed that he had “a whole bunch of pals here who are in the health-care field, and I saw the color drain out of their faces.” Little wonder. The administered prices of Medicare and Medicaid already shift costs to private patients while below-cost reimbursement creates balance-sheet havoc among providers. Now the governor wants to import these distortions to save the state’s heavily subsidized insurance program as costs explode.

It doesn’t even count as an irony that former Governor Mitt Romney (like President Obama) sold this plan as a way to control spending. As with all new entitlements, the rolling cost crisis began almost immediately. For fiscal 2010 taxpayer costs are $47 million over budget, in part due to the recession, and while the $913 million Mr. Patrick requested for 2011 is a 5% increase over 2010, spending has grown on average 6.7% per year.

Meanwhile, average Massachusetts insurance premiums are now the highest in the nation. Since 2006, they’ve climbed at an annual rate of 30% in the individual market. Small business costs have increased by 5.8%. Per capita health spending in Massachusetts is now 27% higher than the national average, and 15% higher even after adjusting for local wages and academic research grants. The growth rate is faster too.

Read the rest of the column