You are no doubt tired of hearing me point out the many flaws in health care reform, perhaps you don’t care any more. That certainly seems the case with the Administration as HHS and DOL crank out regulations designed to promote their ideas taking full advantage of the many open ended provisions of PPACA . HHS’s latest effort, the Patient Bill of Rights is yet another indication they just don’t get it or don’t’ care. The Bill of Rights is no more than a rehash of all the changes designed to eliminate insurance company “abuses.” – or another way to look at it, underwriting rules designed to protect the insurance company and all its customers from risk. Here is a thought, if you buy a policy from an insurance company, you are not its patient, you are its customer. You are the doctor and hospital’s patient.
James C. Capretta, Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center writing for the Kaiser Health News does an excellent job of summarizing the serious flaws in PPACA and why the promises made by the President and members of Congress cannot be kept. Here is a sample from About Those Presidential Promises, but I urge you to view the entire article.
No, your costs are not going down
First, during the presidential campaign, Obama promised on numerous occasions that families with existing coverage would see their annual premiums fall, on average, by $2,500 per household. Jason Furman, an adviser to candidate Obama and now an economic aide in the White House, even said that the Obama campaign team believed this level of premium savings could be fully achieved, or nearly so, by the end of an Obama first term.
Squeeze the balloon in one place and it will expand in another
A recent story in the New York Times reported that employee benefit professionals expect the health law’s new insurance requirements will add 2 to 3 percent to job-based premium costs next year. One way or another, firms will pass on these added costs to their workers, in higher premiums, higher cost-sharing requirements or reduced cash wages. With the cost of family coverage at about $14,000 per year, that means the new law will cost households $400 or more in 2011. And that doesn’t yet account for the new taxes on the health sector that will get passed on to consumers, or the large premium increases expected to be imposed on younger and healthier people from the more sweeping insurance changes coming in 2014.
Changing the health care system means someone does come between you and your doctor, and that’s the truth (and not all bad).
In the meantime, the only plausible cost-cutting ideas are the “delivery system changes” promoted through Medicare. The law’s proponents are especially keen on the potential of Accountable Care Organizations.
Under the new law, ACOs are a concept to be tested, starting in Medicare. The hope is that they will induce physicians and hospitals to practice less expensive managed care through payment incentives. But it’s far from certain that the provider community will embrace them, given the inevitable red-tape that comes with government-initiated “reforms.” Moreover, Medicare’s enrollees may rebel when they find out that the test allows the assignment of Medicare patients to ACO networks without their consent or even their knowledge. Banking on big savings from something with so many question marks and implausible assumptions is wishful thinking in the extreme. At best, it will be many years before ACOs make a difference, and there’s a good chance they never will at all.
Your employer-based health plan is at risk, your employer will react to PPACA and you will see changes and likely higher costs
In a nod toward the other key presidential promise — that you can keep what you have today — the new law includes a provision that allows “grandfathered” plans to remain in place even as new sweeping insurance regulations impose requirements, and costs, on other insurance products. But the Department of Health and Human Services has wide discretion to define what constitutes a qualified grandfathered plan under the law. And last week, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius used that discretion to essentially make it impossible for most job-based plans to qualify for the designation. Small changes in benefits and cost-sharing — the kinds of changes most employers are forced to make every year to address changing circumstances — will disqualify those plans from the grandfather designation. That means virtually all job-based health insurance will be forced to comply with the federal government’s new regulatory requirements in just two or three years — something the administration has all but admitted was their intention all along.
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QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
If it had not taken a over year to pass with negotiations with Republicans who never intended to, and never did negotiate in good faith, leading to the bill being so watered down those problems wouldn’t exist.
Even Public Option, which was not included and demonized by Republicans as being “socialist”, would have helped. What we really needed was Single Payer.
Sorry to say, but the movement of industry overseas, and the importation of illegal and cheap labor from Latin America and Asia, have rendered Capitalism obsolete. The only people who benefit are the top 5 to 10%, everyone else is just getting by or falling behind. Those manufacturing, and now programming, jobs are gone, and they aren’t coming back. It was those workers, and those companies which kept health insurance affordable. That underpinning is gone. The choices are government subsidy or Single payer. And ultimately it will be Single Payer.
And it is also tied up in petro-dollars, but I digress.
We are going to have to change, and drasticly.
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