Blog and News

Docs 4 Patient Care member Paul Hsieh, M.D. was featured today on Townhall.com, where he exposes the fallacy of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), a central part of President Obama's government-run healthcare plan.

"Suppose President Obama proposed reviving the faltering American economy by creating a federal 'Department of Technology' to encourage Silicon Valley technology companies to merge into large consortiums. Bureaucrats would then tell these companies what products they should produce and sell. Most Americans would consider that approach ridiculous. They know that innovations such as iPads and smartphones were created by entrepreneurs competing in a free market, not by government central planners. Yet the Obama administration is committing the same error by pushing doctors and hospitals into government-supervised 'Accountable Care Organizations.'"

Read the full column here.

 

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This week, the United States Senate had an opportunity to consider an amendment offered by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. Her amendment, numbered 423, would completely halt all implementation until of PPACA until the courts have completed their review of the constitutionality of the individual mandate and the overall law.

The Senate did not vote on this amendment this past week but may have a chance to vote on the amendment when the Senate returns to complete its work on the underlying bill in the week of June 20th.
 
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David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Lee A. Casey have an excellent commentary on why the Obama Administration is having trouble in the courts. They suggest that the Administration has consistently changed their arguments defending the law as the previous argument is exposed for its constitutionally suspect nature.

They write that:

In enacting the individual mandate, Congress purported to rely on its power to regulate interstate commerce and, in the process, reach individuals who are already engaged in that commerce. But the individual mandate does not regulate commerce, interstate or otherwise. It simply decrees that all Americans, unless specially exempted, must have a congressionally prescribed level of health-insurance coverage regardless of any economic activity in which they may be engaged. Requiring individuals to act simply because they exist is the defining aspect of the general police power that Congress lacks.

The government's lawyers, recognizing this fundamental constitutional reality, have tried to rewrite the law so that it can withstand judicial scrutiny. They have claimed that the individual mandate is a tax, despite common sense, judicial precedent, and numerous statements to the contrary by the law's sponsors and President Obama. They have also argued that ObamaCare does not actually impose a mandate on inactive citizens, but rather regulates how individuals will pay for their health care. As Solicitor General Neal Katyal recently put it, the mandate is "about failure to pay, not failure to buy." This is plainly wrong. The law requires that everyone have health insurance—without regard to whether or how they buy or pay for medical services.

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Sally C. Pipes has a wonderful piece that points out that even ObamaCare's most strident supporters oppose ObamaCare's rationing board known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). Pipes writes that IPAB "will be charged with making recommendations for reducing Medicare spending if costs exceed a specified cap. Those recommendations will automatically become law unless Congress blocks them and offers equivalent spending cuts in their place."

Even liberal Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) has, according to pipes, “called IPAB a ‘dangerous provision’ that ‘sets [Medicare] up for unsustainable cuts’ and endangers patients’ health. And the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare — a prominent supporter of Obamacare — is now agitating for the Board’s repeal.”

Pipes also makes comparisons between IPAB to the British health system's equivalent.

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Reason's Peter Suderman has an interesting article the explains that regulations promulgated as a result of ObamaCare will not be subject to President Obama's executive order to agencies to review potentially burdensome regulations.

Suderman notes that The Hill reported that Sherry Glied, an official with HHS, commented that HHS was confident in its analysis of the impact of the ObamaCare regulations and that HHS doesn’t need to review those rules again. Glied testified: “nothing has changed to make [HHS] look at them” (meaning ObamaCare regulations).

Questioning this assertion, Suderman stated: “Nothing, eh? Not the widespread rejection of the proposed rules governing ObamaCare's accountable care organizations? Not the consternation over the law's medical loss ratio requirements, which the administration has already waived for Maine after noting that the rule “has a reasonable likelihood of destabilizing the Maine individual health insurance market?” Not the 1,000-plus individual waivers the administration has granted allowing businesses and unions to get out of a number of the law's specific requirements? No, I guess there's no reason at all to think that any of the health care law's rules might be in need of review.”

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Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post's Opinion section delves into the issue of cost-shifting and the role this issue has played in the appeal of the Florida multi-state lawsuit. During oral arguments before the 11th Circuit, the government argued the law was constitutional and the individual mandate was necessary to remedy the alleged burden placed on the healthcare system by cost-shifting.

Rubin first points out that: "As a preliminary matter, this sort of rationale is inappropriate for constitutional analysis. If the Constitution prohibits the government from forcing you to buy something you don’t want, why does a policy argument (cost-shifting) suddenly bestow constitutional legitimacy on the individual mandate?"

Rubin then points out that not only is the basis for the individual mandate on shaky constitutional ground but it is also unsupported by the facts. She cites a Yuval Levin June 9, 2011 post on National Review Online and a Wall Street Journal article by John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard and Daniel Kessler that demonstrates that Congress relied, as Rubin says, "on sloppy, flawed studies to come up with the cost-shifting rationale."

Read the full article here... 

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