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Today we spend most of our time on healthcare. John Steele Gordon picks up on a NY Times idea for health care cost reform.
… Two weeks ago, I wrote about the medical outrage called the chargemaster, the exhaustive list of prices for procedures, drugs, and medical equipment that every hospital maintains and which every hospital refuses to reveal—until they send the bill. Interestingly, even the avidly pro-ObamaCare New York Times editorial page has noticed that price transparency is a big problem in the American medical marketplace.
Tina Rosenberg writes in today’s Sunday Review section:
“Here is a basic fact of health care in the United States: Doctors and hospitals know what they charge, but patients don’t know what they pay. As in any market, when one side has no information, that side loses: price secrecy is a major reason medical bills are so high. In my previous column, I wrote about the effect of this lack of transparency on the bills patients pay out of pocket.”
Here is an obvious reform that wouldn’t cost the federal government one cent and would exert an immediate and powerful downward pressure on medical costs: require that medical service providers make those chargemasters public. Market forces would instantly force the prices down towards the low end.
The natural forces that dominate an economy would do the work, and the Republicans can have the credit for lowering medical costs. What’s not to like?
Next a couple of items from Debra Saunders from SF Chronicle. First, she asks if the president owns obamacare.
If House Republicans had somehow erased chunks of the Affordable Care Act — the employer mandate, the ability to screen who gets subsidies and the annual cap on out-of-pocket costs for a year — the Democrats would have blasted those moves as unconscionable acts of sabotage. But the GOP didn’t sneak in those changes. President Barack Obama did.
The New York Times reported this week that the administration didn’t even announce its decision to delay a cap on copayments in many health care plans. “The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoted,” the Times reported.
Democrats argue that because Republicans don’t like Obamacare, they shouldn’t complain when the White House delays provisions.
This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius slammed Republicans who want to overturn Obamacare. She said: “It was passed and signed three years ago. It was upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago. The president was re-elected. This is the law of the land.”
OK, then, who made Obama king, and how does he get to override a law passed by Congress? …
Next Ms. Saunders writes on the president’s maneuver to exempt congress and its staff from healthcare reform.
… As a result of that brilliant maneuver, senators and congressmen will be able to exempt their staffers if they so choose. Capitol Hill, it turns out, is one colossal golden-domed exemption.
In pushing his amendment in 2010, Grassley rightly argued: “It’s only fair and logical that administration leaders and congressional staff, who fought so hard to overhaul America’s health care system, experience it for themselves. If the reforms are as good as promised, then they’ll know it firsthand. If there are problems, public officials will be in a position to really understand the problems, as they should.”
But there’s this ugly reality on ObamacareIsland: The rules do not apply to the people who make them.
Andrew Stiles writes about the coming “train wreck.”
The White House plans to delay yet another provision of Obamacare, the New York Times revealed on Monday, in what was described as “another setback for President Obama’s health-care initiative.” Indeed, it seems that every week the administration offers up a new example of the implementation “train wreck” of which Obamacare architect Max Baucus (D., Mont.), among others, has warned.
Here are nine examples of how Obamacare implementation hasn’t gone according to plan:
1. Caps on Out-of-Pocket Insurance Costs
The Obama administration plans to delay until 2015 a provision that limits out-of-pocket health-care costs, including deductibles and co-payments, for individuals ($6,350) and families ($12,700). In the meantime, many insurers will be able to set higher limits on out-of-pocket costs, or no limit at all.The obscure ruling, which received attention this week despite being published on the Labor Department’s website back in February, has drawn complaints from advocacy groups representing individuals with chronic illnesses, who argue that patients requiring expensive drug treatments will face exorbitant out-of-pocket costs in the absence of caps. “The promise of out-of-pocket limits was one of the main reasons we supported health-care reform,” Theodore M. Thompson, a vice president of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, told the New York Times.
President Obama repeatedly touted the limits on out-of-pocket expenses in his effort to win support for the law. “No one should go broke because they get sick,” Obama told a joint session of Congress in September 2009. In explaining the decision to delay the requirement, a senior administration official told the Times, “We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health-plan sponsors and carriers” who “asked for more time to comply.” …
It is so bad, CNBC is running pieces on how to avoid the con-artists that are swarming to obamacare.
As the debate rages over who benefits from the Affordable Care Act, one thing is becoming clear: The controversial program is a dream come true for rip-off artists.
Consumer experts warn that the program has created a huge opportunity for swindling people by stealing their money and their sensitive personal information.
“Any time you roll out a big government program like this, confusion is inevitable,” said Lois Greisman, an associate director in the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission. “This confusion creates a tremendous opportunity for the fraudster.”
Scammers have been at it for more than a year now, but consumer advocates and security experts warn that the problem will worsen as we get closer to Oct. 1. That’s when the millions of uninsured Americans can use a health insurance exchange, set-up by their state or by the federal government, to shop for coverage.
“I believe the incidents are going to skyrocket as that date approaches,” said Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center. “And even people who are smart and savvy could get taken, so we are very concerned about the potential for some serious financial harm.” …
For a welcome change of pace, we go to Birmingham, MI, in suburban Detroit for last weekend’s dream cruise. The story is from the NY Times.
It’s Dream Cruise week in metro Detroit, and Woodward Avenue, main street to the American auto industry for more than a century, is dancing to the rumbling beat of some 30,000 muscle cars, street rods and classics.
A crowd estimated at more than one million has been gathering for days to witness Saturday’s bumper-to-bumper parade of automotive excess. The revelers are celebrating what the MotorCity does — and honoring the Woodward tradition of cruising, an automotive ritual of youth that’s generations old and hit a peak in the 1950s and ‘60s, glory days for Detroit’s industry.
The first Woodward Dream Cruise — a fund-raiser for a soccer program — took to the streets in 1995 and proved far more popular than organizers had anticipated. It returned the next year and each year since. Today, it is a mammoth outdoor party that’s a pilgrimage for enthusiasts who make the trek and a marketing showcase for automakers and sponsors.
Among those enjoying the festivities are Dave and Shirley Ziolkowski. The Ziolkowskis are well into retirement; he’s 70 and she’s 66. Their home is a modest ranch house in the quiet suburb of Sterling Heights, and their car is a 1988 Dodge Shadow, just the sort of thrifty transportation one might expect to find in the garage of seniors.
But the Ziolkowski’s Shadow shares little with the 93-horsepower front-drive compact that Chrysler built in 1987-94.
In the lexicon of hot rodders, it’s a pro-street custom, with flaming-red sheet metal that conceals a professional-grade racecar frame and a brawny Chrysler V-8.
Subtlety is not part of the package: