Blog and News

Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.

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"Health Spending Down Because People Are Avoiding Care", Heritage Foundation

D4PC: Obama administration officials are overjoyed at recent news about overall US health spending and would like Americans to believe that the decrease over the past year is due to their healthcare law. This assumption however, is false since the most significant and expansive parts of the law will not be implemented until 2014. The sad reality is that healthcare expenditures have decreased due to a protracted economic downturn, high unemployment with a subsequent loss of medical insurance coverage for millions of Americans and patients actually choosing to defer doctor visits and delaying treatment and more expensive medications. So, if the Obama healthcare law is largely non-operational and you believe their claim that the economy is on the rebound, then why are so many Americans not taking advantage of the law's purported wonderful benefits?

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Obamacare and Medicaid: What the healthcare law will do to your state budget.

"On average, state Medicaid spending currently represents about 20 percent of state general-fund revenues. As the table shows, that average is projected to be 25.75 percent in 2013. That percentage reflects baseline trends in health care cost growth and illustrates why state lawmakers across the country are already concerned that state funding obligations for Medicaid, even as the program is currently configured, are steadily crowding out funding for other state budget items".

"The steadily increasing fiscal burden that Medicaid imposes on state budgets is already a major problem for state lawmakers, and the PPACA’s Medicaid expansion will only make that problem worse in 2014. States argue that they cannot afford their current Medicaid programs, much less the scheduled expansion".

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"Colorado High-Risk Health Insurance Pool Runs Up Claims Twice The US Average", Denver Post

D4PC: One year into a 4 year plan, Colorado is just one of a dozen states who have already burned through the federal funds allocated to set up this program. It's deplorable that even before the poorly designed Obama healthcare law is implemented, the bureaucracy claiming it will cover the "uninsurable" is already over budget and asking for a federal bailout. If this administration understood the healthcare marketplace and truly wanted to provide these high risk patients with affordable medical insurance options, they would unleash the power of the national marketplace by changing the rules that currently revert these patients from "pooling" their risk and using the resulting "purchasing power" to shop across state lines. More can be learned by reading the D4PC Prescription at www.d4pc.org.

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"The Fog of Mediscare", Commentary Magazine

The "politics" of reforming Medicare and how it will play out in the 2012 elections.