Tag Archives: health care

Federal Funding for Medicaid

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Medicaid is a State-run program for providing a measure of medical service for that State’s relatively indigent citizens.  The program is State-run, but it’s jointly funded by the State’s taxpayers and by the nation’s taxpayers via Federal funds transferred to each State for the purpose.  I’ve often written that Federal funds for Medicaid should be ended and that the States should  be allowed to fund and manage their Medicaid programs alone—without Federal funding and associated Federal interference.

Here’s another reason to end Federal funding for a State’s Medicaid program.

US District Judge Kristine Baker issued a preliminary injunction preventing Arkansas from suspending payments to Planned Parenthood for any services to Medicaid patients in the state. Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson last year terminated the organization’s Medicaid contract because of secretly recorded videos made by an anti-abortion group.

Baker also expects that Planned Parenthood would win at trial, hence her injunction.

Unfortunately, the Federal judge is right on the law, if only on 14th Amendment grounds, and on the courts’ Taney-esque position that unborn babies aren’t fully human.

Other than changing that law, though, the way around this sort of thing is that elimination of Federal funds for any State’s Medicaid program.  With that elimination, States that disapprove of Planned Parenthood’s funding of abortions could stop funding Planned Parenthood, and States that approve of easy abortions could continue to do so.

Obamacare Fail

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The headline of this Wall Street Journal piece pretty much says it all: Average Cost of Employer Health Coverage Tops $18,000 for Family in 2016.

The sub-head, with careful reading, adds clarity: Pace of cost increase slowed by accelerating shift into high-deductible plans, new survey shows.

That cost of employer coverage, buy the way, refers to the premiums employees must pay: $18,142 for a 2016 typical employer-offered family plan, and employees have to pay 30% of that, typically, up from 29%.  Like a sergeant I once worked with liked to say, sort of, “Holy cats.”

Is that cost increase rate actually slowing, though, where it matters to the individual—the employee?  Not in the deductibles.  Shifting into high-deductible plans means the policy holder—the employee—has to pay lots more out of his own pocket just to get to the point where the coverage plan begins to pay its 50%, or 60%, or maybe as high as 80% of the medical costs.  For that year.  Then the deductible has to be paid anew.

Notice another part of that sub-head: accelerating shift into high-deductible plans.  That means that in that next year, the erstwhile high-deductible plan may not be available: the employee may be stuck with purchasing a different plan, perhaps with an even higher deductible, perhaps with higher yet premiums, perhaps with coverage not as useful to the employee.

This is what Obamacare, not the employers, has wrought.  This is what needs to be tossed in its entirety into the medical waste disposal and replaced with a more honest environment within which actual insurance can be had, and competitively so.

The Progressive Socialist Goal Made Manifest

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In the context of Aetna’s decision to sharply curtail its participation in ObamaMart—because such participation was costing Aetna millions of dollars—Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has said openly

The provision of health care cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private insurance companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible.

Because making money—the engine of economic growth and the economic welfare of all Americans—is inappropriate when it’s done outside Government control.  American businesses and Americans can’t be allowed to earn more than Government deems fit.  President Barack Obama (D) has held this before Sanders became a public fixture:

I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service.

Of course, the Progressive-Democrat Obama considered it to be Government’s role to determine the goodness of that product or service, not the private citizens choosing to buy, not to buy, that product or service.

Sanders’ disdain for private insurers’ market projections and their goal to make as much profit as possible are easily extensible to the economy as a whole.  That Progressives in the Democratic Party are demanding a government option to “compete” with private enterprise in ObamaMart is a clear demonstration of where that Party will take our economy the moment they gain control of our government.

You can bet Progressive-Democrat and Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton soon will be echoing Sanders’ call for government control of our economy in her effort to retain Sanders’ supporters and to extend Obama’s policies.

This will be the Progressive Socialist economy.

If You Like Your Plan

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Aetna Inc will withdraw from 11 of the 15 states where it currently offers plans through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, becoming the latest of the major national health insurers to pull back sharply from the law’s signature marketplaces after steep financial losses.

This is playing out exactly as President Barack Obama (D) and his Democratic cronies knew it would ‘way back in 2010—they knew because health experts told them.  These experts advised the Democrats that mandating insurance purchases and paying the sick to get it (those Federal subsidies) while requiring plan providers (no longer can they be called insurers) to provide coverage to all at the same “low” price would emphasize the sick over the healthy getting coverage.  The experts also pointed out that this emphasis on sick customers relative to healthy ones would explode plan providers’ costs.  Obama and his, though, chose to disregard this advice and to go with what they wanted to hear: the self-serving huzzahs of the likes of AARP, who thought they could make money by fronting for the plan providers and collecting a piece of the resulting premium stream through referrals and reselling plans.

Recall, too, that Aetna has merger plans with Humana that Obama’s Department of Justice is suing to block on the speculative grounds that at some future date the new entity might engage in anti-competitive practices.  Never mind that the merger might also have allowed the combined insurers to be large enough to remain in Obamacare.

I wonder if anyone in the Obama administration might know of some beachfront property north of Santa Fe that they might be interested in selling us.

FDA and Funding

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Moves in Congress to link billions of dollars in new medical research funding to revised standards for drug and medical-device approvals are troubling some public-health experts, who say the combination makes it too easy for lawmakers to support lower patient-safety standards.

This is a cynical distortion of the situation.  With the FDA’s suppression of Sarepta, a drug that has helped—a lot—boys with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and that, so far, has shown no deleterious side effects standing as a shining example, of course it’s necessary for Congress to exercise its power and authority of the purse string to bring an out of control, scleroticlly bureaucratic agency to heel.