Two advisers to the Obama administration during the creation of the law known as ObamaCare exposed in the New York Times on Wednesday one of the predictable consequences of that law: the end of health insurance companies in America.

Authors Ezekiel Emanuel and Jeffrey Liebman then reviewed all the ways that the new “accountable care organizations” will allegedly improve the delivery of healthcare after those greedy, nasty, selfish, profit-seeking insurance companies are out of the way. The article is so filled with misstatements, half-truths, and just plain lies that only a few of the more egregious ones can be addressed here:

Health insurance companies usually…provide insurance; they take a premium and assume financial responsibility for paying the bills. But the amount of risk sharing that is accomplished is limited because the insurance companies charge premiums that vary, depending upon the health of an individual or a group…. [They] use their data and market power to identify healthy people to cover and unhealthy people to exclude from coverage.

Correction: Health insurance companies, in a free and open market, provide insurance by contracting with individuals or groups to provide a service: coverage according to that contract. Premiums are charged according to the best estimate those companies make about what it will cost for them to provide the coverage. They do not “take” premiums by force, but try to

In the summary of its “Budget and Economic Outlook” published on Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) noted the supportability of deficit spending even under its “alternative” analysis. Noted the CBO: “Even if the fiscal policies specified by current law come to pass, budgetary challenges over the longer term remain—and the challenges will be much more acute if those policies do not remain in place.” It added:

Under both CBO’s baseline and its alternative fiscal scenario, the aging of the population and rising costs for health care will push spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health care programs considerably higher as a percentage of GDP. If that rising level of spending is coupled with revenues that are held close to the average share of GDP that they have represented for the past 40 years (rather than being allowed to increase, as under current law), the resulting deficits will increase federal debt to unsupportable levels.

In non-economic terms, then, the CBO is saying that no matter how one looks at the numbers, the United States is headed for disaster.

Using assumptions that current law remains in place—with the Bush tax cuts disappearing—revenues in 2013 and beyond will increase by an astonishing $800 billion, and yet even that enormous tax hike isn’t enough to close the gap between expenditures and taxes. The CBO even took into account that inflation will drive peoples’ incomes into higher tax brackets, subjecting more of their taxable income to higher rates of taxation, and still that wasn’t enough. In that “steady-state” scenario the national debt, currently pushing $16 trillion, would

Continue reading CBO Report: U.S. Deficits “Unsupportable”

• Defends the mandate-and-regulate approach to health care he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts
• He favors strong government surveillance powers to combat terrorism, and has praised the PATRIOT Act as a useful information gathering tool.
• previously backed ... No Child Left Behind.
• He's conveniently in favor of subsidies for corn-based ethanol.

• Opposes Obamacare but in 2005 joined Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) in "appearing to endorse proposals to require all individuals to have some form of health coverage."
•  Gingrich joined Obama's "Race to the Top" in 2009, calling Education Secretary Arne Duncan “a serious innovator."
•  Gingrich likes ethanol subsidies and has accused "big cities" and "big urban newspapers" of trying to hurt the farmers who benefit from them. Also likes fossil fuel subsidies and said in 2010 that "a low-cost energy regime is essential to our country." Supported cap and trade in 2007,

•  While he was in office ... his record was, in the Club for Growth's words, "plagued by the big-spending habits that Republicans adopted during the Bush years of 2001-2006." He was a strong supporter of dairy subsidies, voted for Medicare Part D and the 2005 highway bill
• Sen. Santorum voted for the Sarbanes-Oxley law that he now wants to repeal. He also backed steel tariffs and was a player in the GOP's corporatist K Street Project. After initial opposition to the program, he became a big AmeriCorps booster.
• "This idea that people should be able to go and do whatever they want and it doesn't really matter as long as it doesn't hurt anybody, that's not our founders' view of freedom."
• He joined Hillary Clinton's crusade against violent video games, used campaign finance regulations to threaten critics' freedom of speech, and favors a porn crackdown.
•  ... he has warned against "the 10th amendment run amok."
•  He also has a history of supporting national schooling standards. He voted for the No Child Left Behind bill in 2001.
•  ... he has an on-again, off-again history of support for energy subsidies as well. In 2008 he called for Washington to "mandate that all cars sold in the United States...be 'flex-fuel vehicles'—that is, they should be able to run on a blend that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline."

Keep it up everyone!

Since federal Medicaid funds are a huge portion of all states’ budgets, the effect is to subordinate state fiscal policy to the whim of federal officials. This is clearly unconstitutional.

Stay tuned for details and PDF of the other amicus. It will focus on the unconstitutionality of the individual health insurance mandate. Word is, Rob and Dave work their magic on the Commerce Power and the Necessary and Proper Clause. I also hear that they plan to sit down for an iVoices.org podcast with my main minion Justin Longo on both briefs. I’ll post the brief and the podcast here when they come out.

Until then, say NO to bullying.

With the announcement by Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, that Trustmark Life Insurance Company’s recent increases in premiums for their health insurance were “excessive” comes the certain result: A few may be helped, but many will be harmed.

She declared, “It’s time for Trustmark to immediately rescind these rate [increases], issue refunds to consumers or publicly explain their refusal to do so.” Under ObamaCare’s usurpations of prior state law, any premium increases of more than 10 percent are to be reviewed and if determined to be unreasonable, made subject to public exposure and pressure to abide by the agency’s dictates as to what is reasonable.

A spokeswoman for Trustmark, Cindy Gallaher, responded to Sebelius: “We respectfully disagree with the assumptions and conclusions drawn today by the Department of Health and Human Services. Our premiums are driven by the rising cost and increased utilization of medical services.”

Those premium increases affect about 10,000 policyholders in five states, including Alabama where Trustmark has raised its premiums by 27 percent over the last year, Arizona with raises of 18 percent, and Pennsylvania with increases of 15 percent.

At present, Sebelius can only complain publicly about Trustmark’s premium increases, as ObamaCare does not yet contain the power to block those increases. The Obama administration sought such powers but

Continue reading Obamacare, Price Controls, and Theft

On Monday the Family Research Council (FRC) filed a “friend of the court” (amicus curiae) brief with the Supreme Court that makes its case that if the mandate forcing citizens to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty is ruled unconstitutional, then the entire 2,700-page Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care law should be thrown out as well.

The brief, co-authored by two attorneys, Ken Klukowski and Nelson Lund, called the hotly contested mandate the “linchpin” for the entire law and if it fails, the whole massive superstructure fails with it. Klukowski stated:

After almost two years of impassioned debate, Obamacare will finally have its day before the Supreme Court. The “individual mandate” in Obamacare that requires all Americans to have health insurance is unconstitutional. And for the reasons we explain in this brief, 135 years of Supreme Court precedent show that this is one of those rare instances where striking down the individual-mandate provision requires the Court to strike down this entire 2,700-page law.

We have high hopes that the Supreme Court will recognize that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, and will act to safeguard the freedoms of all Americans by holding the individual mandate “nonseverable,” and strike down every part of Obamacare.

There is no “severability” clause in ObamaCare—it was deliberately left out during negotiations between the House and the Senate—which means that if part of the law is deemed unconstitutional,

Continue reading Family Research Council: Individual Mandate Unconstitutional, Thus Whole Law

Colorado’s all-payer database poses serious risk, little gain

By Amy Oliver Cooke and Linda Gorman

Colorado state government, and local foundations and health policy elites, have become so ideologically invested in failed health reform policies that they now see nothing wrong with forcing Colorado citizens to give their medical records to a centralized repository, free from scrutiny by state auditors, open records requests and open meeting requirements.

In 2010, state lawmakers passed HB 1330, which created the All-Payer Claim Database. It was an exceedingly vague piece of legislation. It created the usual sycophantic advisory committee to give an illusion of public control, but the real power was given to an “Administrator” empowered to collect whatever medical data it wished from every “payer” in the state. The Administrator may impose unspecified fines on payers who refuse to comply. The database was to be operational only if private funding could be found. With funding already in place from private sources intent on promoting government-controlled health care, the Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC) was appointed as the Administrator for the database. CIVHC promptly converted itself from an entity subject to public oversight to a private 501(c)3 nonprofit.

CIVHC supporters claim the database will be secure, that individual identities will be protected by encrypted Social Security numbers, and that individual privacy is protected by HIPAA.

These claims are disingenuous at best. Encrypted Social Security numbers do not protect individual identities in a database that also contains information on an individual’s gender, address, race, spouse, children, dependents, insurance group, insurance contract and member number, and the doctor, place of treatment, time of treatment, diagnosis, place of care, prescription drugs, and payments for all medical treatments for everyone covered under any insurance policy or making a cash payment.

Centralized electronic medical records have been maintained by Britain’s National Health Service for almost a decade with predictable and disastrous results. In April 2010, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that private detectives were selling top-secret patient information for up to £300 a pop. This means that if you or your spouse or children have ever seen someone for psychiatric care, an abortion, a sexually transmitted disease, or substance abuse, anyone with access to the database will be able to figure out who you are and use that information against you. Alternatively, you could be wrongly diagnosed as an alcoholic or a sexual abuser, have the diagnosis entered in your record, and be threatened by a blackmailer.

Good luck proving a negative.

CIVHC supporters say the All-Payer Database is essential because they cannot “manage what they cannot measure.” Never mind that people who pay for their own health care are perfectly competent to manage it themselves or hire others to do so, or that CIVHC’s form of centralized management has failed everywhere it has been tried. Claims that the database will improve medical care are nonsense because it does not collect the detailed physiographic information required by clinical studies that do. What it will do is add substantially to medical care costs.

All existing public information suggests that CIVHC plans to use the All-Payer Database to bring private medical care under the control of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. Its metrics emphasize imposing price controls on insurers, and physicians, targeting people who are obese, limiting physician freedom to recommend treatments, making sure that individuals have “advance directives” in place, monitoring the amount spent on the last six months of life, and limiting Colorado health spending to a fixed percentage of the state’s gross state product.

As it is cheaper to let people die than treat them, it is but a short step from this to copying the European tradition of letting underweight babies die, forcing the elderly to accept palliative care, and denying advanced care to the disabled and seriously ill.

Amy Oliver Cooke directs the Colorado Transparency Project (COST) at the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Colorado. Linda Gorman is director of the Independence Institute’s Health Care Policy Center.

After asking 501 practicing physicians about the future of health care in the United States, The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions’ conclusions were hardly surprising. Under ObamaCare:

• More people will demand medical care.
• There will be fewer doctors to handle them.
• Those who do will get paid less.
• Those who do will be subject to increasingly onerous regulations.

In its heavy-handed attempt to provide medical coverage to some 34 million Americans, ObamaCare is going to provide it to them for free. But those “free” services are predictably going to increase the demand for medical care while simultaneously reducing the number of doctors available to supply it.

According to the Deloitte study, only one out of four doctors think ObamaCare will reduce healthcare costs, while half of them expect access to such care to be increasingly restricted. Those surveyed think there will be fewer hospitals and fewer physicians. And many of those remaining are likely to seek administrative positions in the healthcare industry rather than continuing to provide hands-on primary care of patients.

Three-quarters think that as primary care doctors get busier, patients needing immediate attention will increasingly be sent to emergency rooms, which is likely to extend waiting times there as well. Four out of five are certain that it will be increasingly difficult for their patients to obtain

Continue reading Don’t Get Sick! ObamaCare Means More Government, Fewer Doctors

First Independence Institute intern and president of the Denver chapter of Liberty on the Rocks Donovan Schafer explains why hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is nothing to panic over. Writes Donovan:

In a recent report, the EPA linked groundwater contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming to the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) used to extract oil and gas. You can almost hear the collective “Hooray!” from anti-fracking advocates. But the actual data in the EPA report make it clear that fracking is safe.

Check out the whole thing here in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Also be sure and check out II’s Amy Oliver Cooke and Linda Gorman in the Summit Daily as they point out the huge threat to medical privacy from Colorado’s “All-Payer Claim” database. According to Cooke and Gorman:

Colorado state government, and local foundations and health policy elites, have become so ideologically invested in failed health reform policies that they now see nothing wrong with forcing Colorado citizens to give their medical records to a centralized repository, free from scrutiny by state auditors, open records requests and open meeting requirements.

Read the whole thing here.

And don’t miss Senior Fellow in Technology Barry Fagin writing for the Colorado Springs Gazette’s editorial board on the Stop Online Piracy Act, which Barry calls a “bipartisan pile of waste making its way through the bowels of Congress…”

Check it out here.