Tag Archives: Obamacare

News

Obamacare begins forcing states to cap and cut prescription drug benefits

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From Life News. (H/T Doug Ross via BadBlue)

Excerpt:

When Democrats in Congress pushed the Obamacare bill through, pro-life groups warned about rationing that could take place as a result. Although liberal groups and the mainstream media laughed at the projections, they are now coming to pass.

A new report from Kaiser Health indicates states are now moving in the director of capping or cutting prescription drug benefits.

Illinois Medicaid recipients have been limited to four prescription drugs as the state becomes the latest to cap how many medicines it will cover in the state-federal health insurance program for the poor.

Sixteen states impose a monthly limit on the number of drugs Medicaid recipients can receive and seven states have either enacted such caps or tightened them in the past two years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KHN is a program of the foundation). The limits vary across the country. Mississippi has a limit of two brand-name drugs. In Arkansas adults are limited to up six drugs a month.

Since June, Alabama has had the nation’s stingiest Medicaid drug benefit after limiting adults to one brand-name drug. HIV and psychiatric drugs were excluded. On Aug. 1 the state will relax the limit to its previous level — four brand-name drugs — after the restriction saved more money than expected and the state received money as part of a settlement with a pharmaceutical company.

Other states with Medicaid drug limits are Arkansas, California, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

[…]NRLC has said Obamacare contains “multiple provisions that will, if fully implemented, result in government-imposed rationing of lifesaving medical care.”

The department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will be empowered to impose so-called “quality and efficiency” measures on health care providers, based on recommendations by the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is directed to force private health care spending below the rate of medical inflation. In many cases treatment that a doctor and patient deem needed or advisable to save that patient’s life or preserve or improve the patient’s health but which runs afoul of the imposed standards will be denied, even if the patient wants to pay for it.

The law empowers HHS to prevent older Americans from making up with their own funds for the $555 billion the law cuts from Medicare by refusing to permit senior citizens the choice of private-fee-for-service plans whose premiums are sufficient to provide unrationed care but which HHS, in its unlimited discretion, disallows. The Obama health care law could thus lead to elimination of the only way that seniors will have to escape rationing — by limiting their right to spend their own money to save their own lives.

We should not be surprised by this. In the UK, patients regularly have treatments cut off by the government because they are deemed “lost causes” and because the government needs to cut costs. In Canada, patients are barred by law from using their own money to purchase or supplement their medical care. That’s why they have to leave the country and pay out of pocket for faster treatment when they are placed on waiting lists. Socialist health care means waiting lists and rationing by death panels. Get used to it, that’s what “equality” means. It means you pay based on income, and you are treated based on government decree – and after the bureaucrats take their cut, of course.

There is another way. We can use the forces of choice and competition to lower costs the same way that costs are lowered in the free market. In the private sector, the laptop that costed $3000 5 years ago was $1000 last year and is $400 today. That’s how the private sector works, and that’s what we need to do with health care. Get the government out it. The profit motive of business owners drives quality up and price down. It does in every area we care about, and health care is no different.

News

Department of Justice threatens to seize business from Catholics

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CNS News editor-in-chief Terry Jeffrey writes about it on Townhall.

Excerpt:

The Newland family owns and operates Hercules Industries, a Colorado-based corporation that manufactures heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment. Through their hard work and dedication, and through their willingness to reinvest their own money in building their family business, they have managed to create jobs for 265 people while exerting a positive influence on the communities they serve.

[…]The Newlands sued to protect their free exercise of religion in this regard because Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a regulation, under the Obamacare law, that requires virtually all health care plans to cover — without cost-sharing — sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.

Under Obamacare, businesses that employ more than 50 people must provide their employees with insurance or pay a penalty, and the required insurance must include the mandated cost-sharing-free coverage for sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.

At Hercules Industries, the Newlands provide a generous self-insured health-care plan to their employees. It does not cover sterilization, artificial contraception or abortifacients.

[…]In response to the Newlands’ complaint that ordering them to violate the teachings of the Catholic Church in the way they run their business is a violation of their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, the Obama administration told the federal court that a private business has no protection under the First Amendment’s free exercise clause — especially if the business is incorporated.

[…]This is just as if the Justice Department were to tell a family owned newspaper that it must publish editorials calling for a confiscatory estate tax, basing its coercion of the newspaper on the supposition (which lawyers for the Alliance Defending Freedom argue DOJ is by analogy making) that as a for-profit secular and incorporated employer, the paper has no First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

I’m a Protestant, and even I could not comply with any regulation that forces me to subsidize behavior that I consider immoral – namely, dispensing drugs that cause unborn human children to die. I would like to go through my life without murdering any innocent people, thank you very much, and it’s not the government’s place to force me to murder people. And that’s one good reason right there to oppose Obamacare, although there are others.

News

How states can resist Obamacare, and the benefits of doing so

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From the American Spectator, a look at what states can do to block the implementation of Obamacare.

Excerpt:

Although the voters can put an end to the madness on November 6, the states don’t need to wait until Election Day to take aim at a point of vulnerability that remains in place despite the Court’s latest caprice. They can refuse to implement the law’s insurance exchanges.

[…]The law calls for the states to set up these new bureaucracies, whose ostensible purpose will be to provide “marketplaces” in which people with no employer-based health insurance can shop for coverage at competitive rates. Now that the Court has upheld the individual mandate, these insurance exchanges constitute the key to the success or failure of the law. They are also its Achilles’ heel.

How’s that? Well, as the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon succinctly puts it, “Without these bureaucracies, Obamacare cannot work.” And, oddly enough, the law doesn’t actually require states to set up these “marketplaces.” Moreover, there is no rational incentive for them to do so. If a state sets up an exchange, it then must pay for it, which won’t be cheap. Cannon writes, “States that opt to create an exchange can expect to pay anywhere from $10 million to $100 million per year to run it.” This is a burden that the states, most of which are already in deep financial trouble, are not likely to embrace with enthusiasm.

The federal government can set up its own exchanges, in theory, but Obamacare stipulates that Washington would then be required to pick up the tab as well. And, as Cannon goes on to point out, “The Obama administration has admitted it doesn’t have the money — and good luck getting any such funding through the GOP-controlled House.” And it gets worse. If the federal government is forced to set up an exchange, it faces yet another huge problem. As Sally Pipes and Hal Scherz write, “The text of the law stipulates that only state-based exchanges — not federally run ones — may distribute credits and subsidies.”

Thus, if a state refuses to set up an exchange, the feds have no real ability to do so either. The states have an opportunity, therefore, to shoot a poison arrow directly into Obamacare’s Achilles’ heel.

[…]”Resisting the implementation of exchanges is good for hiring and investment. The law’s employer mandate assesses penalties — up to $3,000 per employee — only to businesses who don’t satisfy federally-approved health insurance standards and whose employees receive ‘premium assistance’ through the exchanges.”

In other words, a state that declines to set up an exchange will protect the businesses of that state from avoidable and job-killing penalties. This reality has apparently begun to sink in. There has been a noticeable decline in enthusiasm for exchanges among states that had begun work on them shortly after Obamacare passed.

The article notes that a bunch of governors and legislatures in conservative states have already taken steps to resist implementing Obamacare, including Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who is an Oxford-educated expert in health care policy.