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Obamacare and the Politics of Ignorance, Hate, and Fear
Everyone knows that the current healthcare system is broken, unsustainable, and is bankrupting the country (while providing inadequate access to what has become substandard healthcare). Nevertheless, Republicans remain focused on repealing the only meaningful piece of healthcare reform legislation passed in years. Obamacare is not perfect, and politicians should be working to improve it.
But they’re not.
So, let’s just be honest.
The fight against Obamacare is nothing about healthcare. Any one with any knowledge of Obamacare knows it, because there is nothing about Obamacare that explains the rabid Republican-led reaction against it. Instead, the fight is about a deep hate and fear of the President, of the poor, of the foreign, and of the non-white. This hatred, this racism is obvious and clear.
Granted that there may be a “principled” argument to be made against the individual mandate, but, really, is that what is upsetting people?
The misinformed public has no understanding of the benefits of Obamacare. They are victims of the purposely false and deceitful campaign of misinformation waged by Republican leaders, who never mention that Obamacare makes health insurance available and affordable, it eliminate lifetime caps and preexisting conditions, it fights healthcare fraud, and it moves to less expensive preventive care. There are no death panels, there are no governmental bureaucrats making healthcare decisions.
Unfortunately, logic and reason are no match against ignorance, racism, and hate. Patriotism seems to have lost out also.
Florida Cares About Healthcare … Not
I have been very remiss about posting for the last several weeks.
Being a Floridian is very depressing. Florida’s elected and administrative leaders have done everything they can to misinform Floridians about Obamacare, to keep the needy from accessing care, to prevent the uninsured from being able to purchase affordable health insurance, and to force healthcare providers to provide unreimbursed care.
Earlier today, Health News Florida reported on how politics over healthcare reform has become more important than either healthcare or meaningful reform.
- The New York Times reported on Tuesday that “Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican-dominated [Florida] Legislature have made it more difficult for Floridians to obtain the cheapest insurance rates under the exchange and to get help from specially trained outreach counselors.”
- The Miami Herald reported also on Tuesday that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, stated that Florida officials are “keeping information from people” in a political effort to foil the effort to enroll Floridians for health insurance.
- Florida AG Pam Bondi and CFO Jeff Atwater have also joined in the campaign of misinformation and deceit.
The list of wasted Florida tax dollars and loss of Federal funding in trying to impede Obamacare was reported by Health News Florida earlier this week. Florida’s list of shame includes the following:
- Leading the court challenge on the constitutionality of Obamacare in 2010 soon after it was signed into law. Attorney General Pam Bondi made it one of her high-profile issues, becoming a regular guest on Fox News to attack it.
- After the Supreme Court ruled the law was constitutional, the Florida Legislature told state agencies not to implement it because lawmakers felt sure the Republican party Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, would win the election in 2012 and repeal the law.
- After Romney lost the election, governor and legislature pressured the agencies not to apply for grants related to the law; some agencies had to give back grants they had already been awarded.
- The Legislature this year voted against Florida having its own electronic marketplace for health-plan shopping, even though the state had already spent five years and several million dollars building an online shopping site, Florida Health Choices, that has yet to be used.
- After months of hearings and negotiations, the Florida Senate came up with a compromise plan on Medicaid expansion that would accomplish several things — reduce the number of uninsured Floridians by about 1 million by using federal funds, save millions of state dollars now being spent on the uninsured, and continue privatization of the Medicaid program, already well under way. But the House said no.
- The Legislature voted to strip the Insurance Commissioner’s authority to regulate health premiums for two years.
- Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty issued a report that predicted health premiums in Florida’s individual market would soar 30 to 40 percent, thereby producing scandalous headlines. Later, others would note that the figure failed to make adjustments for the tax credits most of those shopping in that market would qualify for. He also failed to mention that the sector he was describing accounts for only 5 percent of policies.
It’s all really quite pathetic and disgusting. It’s time to vote the bastards out.
Protect Healthcare Reform
There is no greater battle before us than to fight the ignorance and misinformation campaign of those who would seek to defund Obamacare. The outcome may well affect the well being of generations of Americans.
Presidents since Teddy Roosevelt have understood the need and the importance of reforming healthcare in America. Obamacare may well be President Obama’s greatest achievement and will be long remembered after everyone has forgotten that he was the first African American president. The law’s flaws do not outweigh its many benefits, the most important of which is that it has shifted the focus of healthcare from procedure based to performance based — doing tests on sick patients is no as profitable to healthcare providers as keeping patients from getting sick.
We must not let this important first step to fix to the healthcare system to die by the actions of a narrow minded minority. Contact your Senators and Representatives.
Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face
Honest, rational, intelligent Americans must stand-up to the new nit-wit movement of some fringe members of the Republican Party to defund ObamaCare, at whatever cost, including shutting down the United States government.
Most people who oppose ObamaCare refuse to understand it, and politicians shamelessly promote and take advantage of that ignorance.
Let’s try to be honest. ObamaCare is an historic first step at fixing an out of control and hopelessly broken healthcare system. The Deloitte 2013 survey of U.S. physicians found that most physicians “believe that the performance of the U.S. health care system is suboptimal, but the Affordable Care Act [i.e., ObamaCare] is a good start to addressing issues of access and cost.” ObamaCare is already making positive changes in healthcare, and millions of middle-class Americans are currently being helped by ObamaCare. No more pre-exiting conditions and arbitrary lifetime caps. By requiring healthcare insurance to contain minimum benefits that are needed by most Americans, we can purchase a policy and know what is covered and what is not and not fear denials later when we need to use our coverage. There are many examples of how ObamaCare is helping patients and providers.
ObamaCare’s goal is improved access to affordable healthcare — for the life of me, I cannot understand why that causes such irrational responses? Of course, ObamaCare is flawed and costly, requires too much regulation, and is full of special interest tinkerings (like all legislation these days unfortunately), and it can be (and deserves to be) much improved. To defund it or repeal it and start from scratch will leave us with the same uninsured population, spiraling out of control costs, and no hope for improvement.
Shame on Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and all the other members of the Congressional flatworld caucus. Improving healthcare in America, including making the necessary changes to ObamaCare, is a job for smart, dedicated people, not petty, stupid ones. This is a time for more conversation and less baying at the moon.
Serious Medicine Strategy: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Shifts the Paradigm on Healthcare–From Cuts to Cures.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said on Wednesday: “If you cure disease, you no longer have to spend dollars towards treating the symptoms … of those diseases.”
Bingo. Of course, cures are cheaper than care. It’s cheaper to beat than to treat. That was the lesson of polio. A cure is cheaper than care.
If we want to “bend the curve” on healthcare costs–and we all do–this is the right way to do. Also the only humane way.
“Physician-owned hospitals seize their moment” – amednews.com
Physician owned and operated facilities are not necessarily bad places to go for healthcare.
American Medical News, amednews.com, reported in April 29, 2013:
When the federal government sorted through the first round of clinical information it was using to reward hospitals for providing higher-quality care in December 2012, the No. 1 hospital on the list was physician-owned Treasure Valley Hospital in Boise, Idaho. Nine of the top 10 performing hospitals were physician-owned, as were 48 of the top 100.
Yet, physicians can no longer own hospitals to which they refer their patients and are severely restricted from expanding those hospitals whose physician ownership was grandfathered.
The continued distrust of physicians and their vilification by Congress and most every state legislature hurts healthcare. It’s time to unburden physicians from lawyer mandated restrictions that never made any sense — repeal the Stark Law and every other restriction on physicians’ referring their patients to entities that they have an ownership in. The laws and the regulations that have been put into place are beyond comprehension and require physicians who are trying to be compliant to spend unnecessary dollars on lawyers. There are many appropriate tools for dealing with fraud and abuse by physicians who over utilize, or bill for services not performed, or who perform sub-par medicine — they can be professionally disciplined, lose their license, go to jail, fined. On the private side, they can be sued. Congress adopts these strict liability patient referral restrictions because they are easy to enforce. That should not be the basis for interfering with an entire industry.
Christensen, Flier and Vijayaraghavan: The Coming Failure of ‘Accountable Care’
In The Wall Street Journal, Clayton Christensen, Jeffrey Flier and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan say that the Affordable Care Act’s updated versions of HMOs are based on flawed assumptions about doctor and patient behavior. See on online.wsj.com
Beware the nay sayers. ACOs and other accountable care measures can only succeed if there IS a change in physician behavior. Changing the way healthcare is done in this country is the basis (and only workable basis) for meaningful improvement in healthcare while controlling costs at the same time. No one ever thought it would be easy or quick.
Modern Healthcare Survey: Continued Anger over Obamacare
In an internet survey conducted after the presidential election, Modern Healthcare found that there remains “a deep vein of anger over the effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
Of the 829 people who responded to the survey, 67% said the reform law would have a negative impact on the bottom lines of their healthcare business. Only 33% said the law would have a positive impact.
Respondents listed the following issues as important ones that need to be addressed by Congress and the President:
- Medicare sustainable growth-rate payment formula
- Improving overall clarity around the schedule for implementing the law’s various goals
- Need for more primary care physicians to manage the added population of patients
GWU Face the Facts: Medicaid covers nearly half the 1.2 million Americans getting regular treatment for HIV – 47%
Nearly 1.2 million Americans get regular treatment for HIV, and Medicaid covers almost half of them – 47 percent. Only 1 percent of Medicaid clients have HIV; their care consumes 2 percent of the Medicaid budget ($5.3 billion). They represent 23 percent of all HIV-infected people in the U.S; not all those infected are receiving treatment.
African-Americans are at particular risk for HIV. Half of Medicaid HIV patients are African-American, and the CDC estimates new HIV infections run six times as high among African-Americans as for white men.
See on facethefactsusa.org
For an aggregation of other articles on Hot Topics in Healthcare Law, go to my magazine on Scoop.it – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law and Regulation and my newspaper on Paper.li – Hot Topics in Healthcare Law.
For an aggregation of other articles on improving healthcare, go to my internet magazine Scoop.it! Changing Health for the Better.
SGR Repeal Plea Backed by 110 Physician Groups
Here we go again:
More than 110 physician specialty and state medical society organizations this week renewed what has become an annual plea for Congress to repeal the sustainable growth rate formula.
If implemented according to schedule, the SGR will cut doctors’ Medicare pay 27%, leaving doctors with only 73 cents of every dollar the program pays them today starting on January 1, 2013.
The cost of repealing the SGR to restore those payments would be $245 billion over the next 10 years, according to August projections from the Congressional Budget Office.
See on www.healthleadersmedia.com
Joseph Rugg's Health Law Blog 