More health care fun

First of all, that CMS report was apparently given to HHS a week before the voting took place:

OFFICE POLITICS

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

"The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think." (Yea, I think.)

The analysis, performed by Medicare’s Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a "nonpolitical" office, set off alarm bells when submitted. "We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff," says the HHS staffer, "and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary’s office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report."

In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote — the review by the secretary’s office reportedly took less than three days — and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration…

We have to say that we are not surprised.

But we are still appalled.

This is not quite the ‘open government’ we were promised.

Secondly, despite the fact that we were told were were being raped with this for our own good (to "bend the cost curve down") Dems are now scurrying around like rats trying to get price controls on insurance rates:

When President Obama signed his health-care reform last month, he declared it will "lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government." So why, barely a month later, are Democrats scrambling to pass a new bill that would impose price controls on insurance?




In now-they-tell-us hearings on Tuesday, the Senate health committee debated a bill that would give states the power to reject premium increases that state regulators determine are "unreasonable." The White House proposed this just before the final Obama- Care scramble, but it couldn’t be included because it violated the procedural rules that Democrats abused to pass the bill.



Some 27 states currently have some form of rate review in the individual and small-business markets, but they generally don’t leverage it in a political way because insolvent insurers are expensive for states and bankruptcies limit consumer choices. One exception is Massachusetts: Governor Deval Patrick is now using this regulatory power to create de facto price controls and assail the state’s insurers as cover for the explosive costs resulting from the ObamaCare prototype the Bay State passed in 2006.



National Democrats now want the power to do the same across the country, because they know how unrealistic their cost-control claims really are. Democrats are petrified they’ll get the blame they deserve when insurance costs inevitably spike. So the purpose of this latest Senate bill is to have a pre-emptive political response on hand…



In Massachusetts, Mr. Patrick says his price-control sally will be followed by reviewing what doctors and hospitals charge—or in other words for price controls on the medical services that make up most health spending. ObamaCare will gradually move in the same direction.



Or maybe not so gradually, judging by the study released last last week by Richard Foster, the Obama Administration’s Medicare actuary. Mr. Foster predicts net national health spending will increase by about 1% annually above the status quo that is already estimated to be $4.7 trillion in 2019. This is one more rebuke to the White House fantasy that a new entitlement will lower health costs.



"Although several provisions would help to reduce health care cost growth, their impact would be more than offset through 2019 by the higher health expenditures resulting from the coverage expansions," Mr. Foster writes—and that’s assuming everything goes according to plan. He considers it "plausible and even probable" that prices in the private market will rise as greater demand due to subsidized coverage runs into the relatively fixed supply of doctors and hospitals.



Most of ObamaCare’s unrealistic "savings" come from cranking down the way Medicare calculates its price controls, and Mr. Foster writes that they’ll grow "more slowly than, and in a way that was unrelated to, the providers’ costs of furnishing services to beneficiaries." He expects that 15% of hospital budgets may be driven into deficits, thus "possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries." Isn’t reform grand?



The official who will preside over this fiscal trainwreck is Donald Berwick, the Harvard professor and chief of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement who the White House has nominated to run Medicare. Dr. Berwick explained in an interview last year that the British National Health Service has "developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn." He added that "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly."



In fact, the real choice with medical care, as with any good or service, is between rationing via politics and bureaucratic lines or via a competitive market and prices. As Democrats are showing by trying to pass a new insurance bill, they want all U.S. health care to function like price-controlled Medicare. Dr. Berwick’s job as the country’s largest purchaser of health care will be to find ways to offset the higher insurance and medical costs that ObamaCare’s subsidies and mandates will cause, which will inevitably mean political rationing of care.



In a 17-minute, 2,600-word answer to a question about tax increases in Charlotte, North Carolina earlier this month, Mr. Obama mentioned that "what we’ve done is we’ve embedded in how Medicare reimburses, how Medicaid reimburses, all these ideas to actually reduce the costs of care." The embedding via price controls is already underway.



As usual, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page gives us more news than is usually found on the front pages of most newspapers.



This piece actually explains in English the cryptic and probably purposefully confusing article that the Associated Press buried published yesterday.



In a nutshell, the Democrats now wants to give states the power to control how private insurance companies reimburse for medical treatments, just like how the federal government controls how and for what Medicare reimburses.



(And we have all seen how well that has worked out.)



The Democrats in Congress know that the results of this new power will be so ugly — rationing, in one form or another — that they want the states to take the political hit.



Why else would Congress give away a power they could have for themselves?

This is exactly what has happened to Medicare....Congress will only allow the doctors and hospitals to be compensated at a lesser rate; many doctors and hospitals have already begun to refuse new Medicare patients.


You cannot push 34 million people in to an industry, then turn around and tell them they can't adjust their prices.


The health care industry will have to hire an unimaginable amount of staff and purchase unfathomable amounts of supplies to accomodate the additional tens of  millions of people...things ranging from bandages right on up to MRI machines and plenty more millions of dollars worth of malpractice insurance, and the Dems expect them to do so without raising prices?


34 million people might mean they'll need a few more hospitals, ya think??? But Obama and Pelosi tell them they can't raise their rates? Is the money gonna come straight out of Obama's ass, or what?


What kind of fucking morons did those Kool-Aid drinking 52% elect, anyway?? Obviously neither Odumbo nor the Democratic members of this Congress nor the ignorant idiots who voted for him have the slightest understanding of business or economics, and apparently they don't possess even a modicum of basic math skills.



H/T Sweetness and Light