Blog and News

According to PharmaTimes Online, Britain's National Institutes of Health are denying lupus patients access to the first new drug for this disease in 50 years. PharmaTimes reports NIH "concluded that Benlysta (belimumab) could not be considered a cost-effective use of NHS resources for patients with active autoantibody positive systemic lupus erythematosus with a high degree of disease activity despite standard therapy." 

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President Obama recess appointed Donald Berwick to the post of CMS administrator last year to avoid a messy Senate confirmation hearing during which Berwick's prior comments about embracing health care rationing were sure to be a topic of interest. Senate Republicans were all too willing to hold the hearing - it was Senate Democrats who did not want the hearing and President Obama obliged his former Democratic colleagues by making a recess appointment. 

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The Washington Post is reporting that CMS Administrator Donald Berwick, a vocal supporter of health care rationing, has decided to resign his post. Berwick was recess-appointed to the position by President Obama to circumvent the need for a Senate confirmation vote. The Democratic Majority on the Finance Committee was unwilling to schedule a hearing on the nominee in 2010 prior to the mid-term elections. 

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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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D4PC Board Member Beth Haynes spoke out on TownHall.com on the myriad ways the government rations access to health care:

"Just over a year ago, the Christian Science Monitor reported on an antitrust case by the Department of Justice against Idaho orthopedists who, in refusing to accept government price controls, were found guilty of 'price fixing.' The DOJ hubristically declared, 'Government prices are market prices.' In this Orwellian move, the government declared voluntary prices to be price-fixing, and government-determined prices to be market prices. Anyone with common sense can see that changing terminology does not change reality. 

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Stanley Kurtz writes on National Review Online:

"The 2012 election, and the existence of a free health-care market in this country, could well depend on a little-known agency called IPAB. [Short for Independent Payment Advisory Board, it is], a vastly powerful but too often overlooked component of the president’s health-care-reform law. IPAB has not yet come into existence, but when Obamacare goes into full effect, it will be an unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic entity with nearly limitless power over federal Medicare spending. IPAB will have the power to effectively ration health care through price controls — which may not even be the scariest thing about it. That distinction arguably falls to its unprecedented overriding of congressional sovereignty, in flagrant violation of the constitutional separation of powers."

In his April 13 speech, in response to Paul Ryan’s deficit-reduction plan, President Obama pushed to give IPAB more power and more authority over Medicare pricing as part of the President's own deficit-reduction plan. Kurtz characterized the President's speech as calling for "a substantial expansion of IPAB’s already unprecedented powers," and noted that "Obama can’t begin to match Ryan’s deficit-reduction program without massive, IPAB-imposed health-care controls that would amount to rationing."

In contrast, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans have offered an alternative about which Kurtz has said: "The advantage of the Ryan plan... is its reliance on patient choice. Having been taxed throughout their working lives to support a system that offers no choice, Medicare-dependent patients lose control of funds they might otherwise have used to purchase private health insurance. Ryan’s plan returns some of that money to Americans via a tax-supported health-care voucher. This allows consumers to choose the private insurance plan that most closely matches their priorities — devoting more or less resources to end-of-life care, for example."

Read the full article here...  

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