National Review Online, 07/08/11

If revenge is a dish best served cold, the pharmaceutical industry may soon be experiencing a Siberian winter. Reports on Capitol Hill indicate that during debt-ceiling talks with the White House, some congressional Republicans are offering to institute Medicare Part D rebates as a way to raise revenue. These would hit the pharmaceutical industry hard — and as satisfying as that would be for the GOP, they should be opposed on solidly conservative grounds.
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CDHC Solutions, 07/02/11

The big news in the world of consumer-driven health was the long-awaited release of the 2011 enrollment figures for health plans that make people eligible to open health savings accounts (HSA) on June 14. A heartfelt thank you to America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) for continuing to conduct this research each year. It is the “gold standard” for HSA enrollment data which those of us who follow the industry eagerly await each year.
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Forbes, 06/30/11

Many people wrongly believe that Medicare is more efficient than private insurance; that view was often stated by champions of Obamacare during the debate preceding the law’s enactment. These advocates argued that Medicare’s administrative costs — the money it spends on expenses other than patient care — are just 3% of total costs, compared to 15% to 20% in the case of private, employer-sponsored insurance. But these figures are highly misleading, for several reasons.
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The New York Times, 06/28/11

The Obama administration said Tuesday that it had shelved plans for a survey in which “mystery shoppers” posing as patients would call doctors’ offices to see how difficult it was to get appointments.“We have determined that now is not the time to move forward with this research project,” the Department of Health and Human Services said late Tuesday. The decision, after criticism from doctors and politicians, represents an abrupt turnabout. On Sunday night, officials at the health department and the White House staunchly defended the survey as a way to measure access to primary care, and insisted that it posed no threat to privacy.
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The Wall Street Journal, 06/28/11

The Supreme Court’s most important ruling this year may have been its unanimous decision in Bond v. United States, which held that individual citizens can challenge federal statutes when they encroach on authority the Constitution reserves to the states. The decision, authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, has far-reaching implications—especially for the government’s efforts to defend ObamaCare.
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National Review Online, 06/21/11

At the time of its enactment in 2003, the Medicare drug benefit — known as Medicare Part D — had many critics. Some said the program, which is built on consumer choice and vigorous competition among private plans, wouldn’t work, because the private plans would decline to participate without a guaranteed share of the market. Others said the beneficiaries wouldn’t sign up for the voluntary benefit, because the competitive structure would be too complex to navigate. Still others said the program would explode in costs without government-imposed price controls.
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The Wall Street Journal, 06/08/11

ObamaCare will lead to a dramatic decline in employer-provided health insurance — with as many as 78 million Americans forced to find other sources of coverage.
This disturbing finding is based on my calculations from a survey by McKinsey & Company. The survey, published this week in the McKinsey Quarterly, found that up to 50% of employers say they will definitely or probably pursue alternatives to their current health-insurance plan in the years after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act takes effect in 2014. An estimated 156 million non-elderly Americans get their coverage at work, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
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Employee Benefit Research Institute, 05/11

This article examines the population with a CDHP and how it differs from the population with traditional health coverage. Data from the 2005‒2007 EBRI/Commonwealth Fund Consumerism in Health Care Survey and the 2008‒2010 EBRI/MGA Consumer Engagement in Health Care Survey are used for the analysis. Differences between the population with traditional coverage and high-deductible health plan (HDHP) enrollees are also examined. Differences discussed in the remainder of this article are statistically significant. Read more…

The Washington Times, 05/26/11

In a bizarre near-admission that the so-called “Affordable Care Act” is anything but, the White House issued a blog post defending the waves of waivers it has been issuing that exempt employers “from the annual limit provision of the law if it would disrupt access to existing insurance arrangements or adversely affect premiums, causing people to lose coverage.” In other words, Obamacare would cause people to lose their insurance coverage or cause costs to go up if they don’t grant these waivers. Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to do just the opposite? Read more…

The Gazette, 05/25/11

Alice Thepen was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer that surgery could not fix. Her doctors gave Thepen six weeks to live – but there was one hope, a new cancer medication approved by Health Canada in 2005. Unfortunately for Thepen, 53, of Montreal, bevacizumab – better known by its brand name Avastin – is not covered in Quebec. Oncologists say they are reluctant to tell their patients about new treatment options – when a medication is not publicly funded and the patient has no recourse to private insurance – for fear of creating panic. Read more…