With Experts Like These. . .

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Michigoose

Suzanne Somers is an Expert, who knew?

Somehow I don’t think that this is quite what the WSJ anticipated when it gave the former actress and lifestyle guru access to their editorial pages:

CORRECTIONS AND AMPLIFICATIONS:

An earlier version of this post contained a quotation attributed to Lenin (“Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state”) that has been widely disputed. And it included a quotation attributed to Churchill (“Control your citizens’ health care and you control your citizens“) that the Journal has been unable to confirm.

Also, the cover of a Maclean’s magazine issue in 2008 showed a picture of a dog on an examining table with the headline “Your Dog Can Get Better Health Care Than You.” An earlier version of this post incorrectly said the photo showed and headline referred to a horse.

And, in case you didn’t know, evidently Obamacare is taking the place of Medicare, if what Ms Somers writes in her editorial is true about Obamacare’s effect on the elderly. You heard it here first!

Filed under: 2013 and beyond, PPACA | Tagged: | 54 Comments »

What’s Next

Posted on June 28, 2012 by jnc4p

The PPACA extends the current system to more people to increase coverage, but doesn’t fundamentally reform health care at the delivery level. As such, it will not succeed in bending the cost curve to make the growth rate of health care spending sustainable. The interesting question now is what path it takes when it inevitably collapses. I see one of two options: 
 
1. “Individual Market Based” – Some combination of Ron Wyden’s and Paul Ryan’s reforms are enacted eliminating the employer based tax preferences and replacing them with individual tax credits, thus eliminating the already tenuous “firewall” between the exchanges and the employer based system.  
 
Medicare and Medicaid (and potentially TriCare) are voucherized and integrated into the existing subsidy system in the exchanges so that all health insurance is purchased by individuals in the exchange system with varying levels of subsidies and tax credits based on age and income. About as close to “Free Market” as you are likely to get. 
 
2. “Single Payer (sort of)”. Medicaid for all is enacted replacing the exchange system entirely with a universal minimal standard insurance package provided by the government. Coverage and reimbursement is dictated by a more robust version of the Medicare Payment Advisory board that strictly limits name brand drugs and other expensive treatments in favor of generics and applies similar cost/benefit analysis to approved procedures (and reimbursement rates). The ability to see specialists without a referral or otherwise go “out of network” is curtailed, as are end of life procedures.  
 
In parallel with the public system, private insurance and medical care remain to provide enhanced care for those who can afford it.  
 
Eventually, the public system comes to resemble public schools vs private schools as taxpayers who opt for the private system are not receptive to tax increases to maintain and improve a public system that they themselves do not participate in, thus regulating the public system to a second tier level of care, much like Medicaid is today.

Filed under: aca, Affordable Care Act, healthcare, PPACA | 53 Comments »

Dé-CLASS-é

Posted on October 17, 2011 by quarterback

The CLASS program has ended in failure even before beginning, with the administration finally admitting that it was unworkable, just as prophesied by Paul Ryan and other Republicans.

Somewhere there is a museum of perpetual motion inventions. Likewise, CLASS seems to me a perfect example of the quixotic liberal quest to invent the free lunch. Democrats fought with arithmetic to the bitter end, but in the end arithmetic won, and it was revealed that, as always with the free-lunch skunkworks, the real long game for CLASS was to raise more taxes and wrest more of our freedom and money away from us and into the hands of government. The promise, of course, was that this was a gift to us of super-competent technocrats who, now at last fully in charge, could fix things for “us” that only government could fix. Politics as usual.

What do you think?

Filed under: Affordable Care Act, PPACA | Tagged: | 147 Comments »

%d bloggers like this: