Free Republic

Florida Senator Marco Rubio admits that the Republican tax cut plan to aid corporations and the wealthy will require cuts to Social Security and Medicare to pay for it. Rubio told reporters this week that in order to address the federal deficit, which will grow by at least $1 trillion if the tax plan passes, Congress will need to cut entitlement programs such as Social Security. Advocates for the elderly and the poor have warned that entitlement programs would be on the chopping block, but this is the first time a prominent Republican has backed their claims. “We have to...

ObamaCare has caused hard-to-quantify economic damage, but some of the law’s regulations may be lethal—literally. Consider a Medicare hospital payment initiative, which a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Cardiology suggests may have contributed to an increase in deaths. Readers are likely familiar with ObamaCare’s mandate and subsidies to impel individuals to obtain health insurance. But the law also included monetary incentives and penalties aimed at inducing changes in health-care delivery and spending reductions. The government rolled out these payment models nationally without careful study, and they are having unintended side effects. A case in point...

Healthcare costs for four common procedures are rising as hospitals and health systems employ more physicians, according to a new study. A 49% increase in hospital-employed physicians between 2012 and 2015 led to a $3.1 billion increase in Medicare costs related to four specific procedures in cardiology, orthopedics and gastroenterology, according to analysis from consulting firm Avalere Health. Medicare paid $2.7 billion more for diagnostic cardiac catheterizations, echocardiograms, arthrocentesis and colonoscopies delivered in hospital outpatient settings than it would for treatment in independent facilities, while beneficiaries footed a $411 million higher bill. Hospital-employed physicians performed more services in costlier hospital...

Conservatives have always advocated the idea of keeping the safety net intact, while reforming the big three entitlement programs: Medicare; Medicaid; and, Social Security. Reform is different from cutting programs. The left constantly accuses the right of advocating deep cuts to entitlement programs that benefit low income Americans. The correct position for conservatives is to advocate strong reform to attack waste, fraud and abuse without cutting essential services that people rely upon – especially the elderly. One plan that falls into the category of a “cut” and not a “reform” is a current plan to cut home health benefits provided...

All the calls trying to get me to use a particular service have stopped.

Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All Act, introduced last Wednesday, outlaws private health insurance. Curiously, not one of the Democratic presidential wannabes crowding around Sanders for photo ops mentioned this alarming fact. If Sanders has his way, 180 million Americans who currently have private coverage would have it ripped away and be automatically enrolled in public insurance. Kids would be enrolled at birth. Medicare for All doesn’t just offer government health insurance to the needy. It makes private coverage illegal, including the health coverage you get at your job. Employers are prohibited from covering workers, retirees and their families. Sanders’ bill...

Americans are not prepared to take big chunks out of their paychecks for socialized medicine, and they’re not keen to move far left. Today is single-payer day. Bernie Sanders is introducing the Medicare for All Act of 2017, and this time he’s no lone socialist crying in the progressive wilderness. A total of 15 Democratic senators are backing his bill, including most of the top Democratic contenders for the presidency. As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observed yesterday, “The dam is breaking.” The New Republic, among others, is even arguing that single-payer is becoming the newest “litmus test” for the...

A video from 1987 shows Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) has not always considered single-payer health care a slam dunk for progressive reformers. Sanders said Medicaid for every American "would bankrupt the nation" while he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in a clip posted by the NTK Network. Speaking with physician Milton Terris on his local television show "Bernie Speaks with the Community," Sanders discussed the possibility of implementing single-payer health care in the U.S. "You want to guarantee that all people have access to health care as you do in Canada," Sanders said. "But I think what we understand...

Back in 1987, a much younger Bernie Sanders ... warned that expanding Medicaid, the jointly run federal-state health care program for the poor and disabled, to everyone in the country would "bankrupt the nation." "If we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody. Give everybody a Medicaid card—we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation." Medicaid, notably, is far less generous than Medicare, the health program for seniors that Sanders wants to expand. Medicaid's provider networks are narrower, and its benefits are generally more limited. It pays doctors quite a bit less than...

A video from 1987 shows Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) has not always considered single-payer health care a slam dunk for progressive reformers. […] “You want to guarantee that all people have access to health care as you do in Canada,” Sanders said. “But I think what we understand is that unless we change the funding system and the control mechanism in this country to do that—for example, if we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody,” Sanders added. “Give everybody a Medicaid card—we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation.”

On Monday, two seemingly unrelated headlines made the news. The first: America's national debt had finally reached $20 trillion. The second: New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker had finally come out in favor of Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders' magical, mythical "Medicare-For-All" plan. Of course, the two aren't unrelated at all. Once again, the Democratic Party is signing checks the country can't cash. Sanders' Medicare-For-All scheme would add some $13.8 trillion in spending over the first decade alone. Medicare already carries $58 trillion in unfunded liabilities, according to National Review. How unrealistic is Medicare-For-All? It's so unrealistic that the state...

Bernie Sanders' government plan to provide "Medicare for All" is getting increasing support from prominent Democrats and appears headed to become an important part of the party platform in the future. The idea to put the entire health care industry under government control for all 320 million Americans is not popular. A Pew survey from last June shows only 33% support the idea of single payer. More importantly, a large percentage of Americans strongly oppose the idea. In short, using Sanders' plan as a catalyst for a takeover by Democrats  of the House and Senate would cost more votes than...

The bipartisan Washington, DC “consensus” has so many blind spots, you’d think its exponents lived in a black box. Recently, it has become clear that one of the biggest of those blind spots is the federal government’s treatment of the pharmaceutical industry.This can be most clearly seen in the troubling continuity between the favored policy of pharma-friendly elements within the Trump administration, and the Obama administration’s own weakness on a critical policy in the battle over drug prices: namely, the 340B drug pricing program.As granular followers of pharmaceutical policy will already know, 340B is a program passed during the first...

Next week, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce his long-awaited single-payer health care bill with a cadre of the Democratic 2020 prospects expected to sign on as co-sponsors. Not long afterward, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, another potential 2020 candidate, will propose an alternative: Allowing individuals and businesses to buy into Medicare. Both ideas have, at times, been labeled "Medicare for all." But their differences also offer a glimpse at what's likely to be a defining debate within the Democratic Party in its next nominating contest: A full shift to a government health insurance system versus a partial step away from...

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,The point is the present system cannot endure.Despite all the happy talk about "recovery" and higher growth, wages have gone nowhere since 2000--and for the bottom 20% of workers, they've gone nowhere since the 1970s.Gross domestic product (GDP) has risen smartly since 2000, but the share of GDP going to wages and salaries has plummeted: this is simply an extension of a 47-year downtrend.Last month I posted one reason Why We're Doomed: Our Economy's Toxic Inequality (August 16, 2017). The second half of why we're doomed is stagnant wages. Why do stagnating...

There has been a strong demand here and elsewhere for plans based on catastrophic insurance. Those plans are only suitable for those with substantial amounts of savings of at least $10,000. If you are thinking of $5,000, that would be a typical PPACA bronze plan. Healthy people often want catastrophic plans to get the potentially massive cost-savings of substantial self-insurance. Fortunately, the people most likely to have very high premiums, people aged 50 to 64, often have $10,000 or much more. Payment for hospital-billed care, in-patient and out-patient, would come from the patient, and if the case was expensive enough,...

Medicare’s trust fund will run out of money in just over 10 years, according to a new report from the program’s trustees. Once that happens, the federal government won’t collect enough in payroll taxes to cover beneficiaries’ hospital bills. Congress could hike taxes to cover the shortfall. Or it could ration care to save money. Or it could modernize and restructure Medicare — by giving beneficiaries means-tested vouchers to buy private insurance. Doing so would protect taxpayers now, preserve the program for future generations and even provide higher-quality care to seniors. Medicare‘s spending isn’t sustainable. Congress can stave off massive...

According to DNC Vice Chairman Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) secretly supports Medicare for all. The video of Ellison, first reported by the Daily Caller, shows him speaking before a local Democratic party meeting in Minnesota last Wednesday. "I’m signed onto H.R. 676 which is a single-payer health care act," Ellison said. "They call it Medicare for all. Yeah, universal health care. Real single-payer health care. I’m on that." Ellison stopped to explicitly ask if he was being recorded before explaining that Pelosi backed this bill as well. "You may have heard that...

Why thieves love America’s health-care system! INVESTIGATORS in New York were looking for health-care fraud hot-spots. Agents suggested Oceana, a cluster of luxury condos in Brighton Beach. The 865-unit complex had a garage full of Porsches and Aston Martins—and 500 residents claiming Medicaid, which is meant for the poor and disabled. Though many claims had been filed legitimately, some looked iffy. Last August six residents were charged. Within weeks another 150 had stopped claiming assistance, says Robert Byrnes, one of the investigators. Health care is a tempting target for thieves. Medicaid doles out $415 billion a year; Medicare (a federal...

The US government should allow insurers to sell Pretty Good Quality (PGQ), Medicare-like policies with the federal government generally paying the percentages listed in parentheses of a person's maximum silver plan subsidy amount as premium subsidies. The monthly basic drug coverage subsidy would be computed without adjusting for household income, so young, healthy and affluent people would want to buy drug coverage too. The monthly basic drug coverage subsidy amount for coverage on a US citizen might be: $1 for each year of age less 20% if no recombinant auto-immune drug is covered less 10% if no standard anti-HIV regimen...