Massachusetts patients are demonstrating that the individual health care mandate can be gamed

Democrats claim their newly passed health insurance reform, signed in March by President Obama, will eventually provide coverage for more than 30 million uninsured people. Don't bet on it.

The key to achieving that goal, Democrats argue—along with expanding Medicaid and subsidies for buying coverage—is the individual mandate, which requires individuals to have health insurance or pay a fine. The mandate is supposed to push nearly everyone into the pool, to minimize free-riding on the system.

But what if millions of Americans decide it's a better deal to pay the fine and remain uninsured until they need coverage?

It appears that's exactly what's happening in Massachusetts, which passed its own Obamacare-like reform with an individual mandate in 2006.

Last year Charles Baker, former CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, one of Massachusetts's largest health plans, noticed some health insurance brokers posting comments on his widely read blog. They expressed suspicions that people were applying for health coverage after a medical condition developed, got the care they needed, and then dropped the coverage.

Coverage for an individual, noted Mr. Baker, now a Republican candidate for governor, might be $2,000 to $3,000 a year, whereas the penalty was only about $900. He asked his finance people to see whether they could find any discernible patterns.

Boy, did they.

Between April 2008 and March 2009, 40 percent of the individuals who applied to Harvard Pilgrim stayed covered for less than five months. Yet claims were averaging about $2,400 a month, about six times what one would expect.

White House won't support health care for injured residents and rescuers at Twin Towers collapse

The Obama administration stunned New York's delegation Thursday, dropping the bombshell news that it does not support funding the 9/11 health bill.

The state's two senators and 14 House members met with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just hours before President Obama implored in his speech to the nation for Congress to come together and deliver a government that delivers on its promises to the American people.

So the legislators were floored to learn the Democratic administration does not want to deliver for the tens of thousands of people who sacrificed after 9/11, and the untold numbers now getting sick.

"I was stunned — and very disappointed," said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who like most of the other legislators had expected more of a discussion on how to more forward.

"To say the least, I was flabbergasted," said Staten Island Rep. Mike McMahon.

The 9/11 bill would spend about $11 billion over 30 years to care for the growing numbers of people getting sick from their service at Ground Zero, and to compensate families for their losses.

Quinnipiac Poll shows split on Obama, strong opposition to health care reform proposal

American voters give President Barack Obama a split 46 - 44 percent job approval, his lowest ever, and both the health care reform package that he wants Congress to pass and his personal rating on handling health care now win support from less than four in 10 Americans, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Voters disapprove 52 - 38 percent of the health care reform proposal under consideration in Congress, and they disapprove 56 - 38 percent of President Obama's handling of health care, down from 53 - 41 percent in a November 19 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh- pe-ack) University.

But voters support 56 - 38 percent giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan, compared to 57 - 35 percent November 19.

American voters trust Obama more than Republicans in Congress to handle health care 44 - 37 percent, down from 45 - 36 percent three weeks ago. Voters disapprove 58 - 30 percent of the way Republicans in Congress are doing their job, and disapprove 56 - 33 percent of Democrats in Congress.

American voters say 63 - 30 percent that extending health insurance to all will raise their cost of health care, although they are split 47 - 46 percent on whether they are willing to pay more to make sure everyone is covered. Voters split 48 - 46 percent on whether they think covering everyone will decrease the quality of their own care, but by 71 - 21 percent they do not think universal coverage is worth lower quality of care.

"It's a good thing for those pushing the health care overhaul in Congress that the American people don't get a vote. At this time, supporters are down 14 percentage points," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

Health care issue, like a buried land mine, could wind up spoiling your day, or your life

After all the controversy over the public option, people might think that everyone can sign up right away if Congress passes health reform.

Or that insurance premiums will go down.

Or that they’ll be able to shop around for insurance if they don’t like what their company offers.

Think again.

When it comes to the public option, for instance, only about 1 in 10 Americans will be eligible, mainly people who don’t get insurance through work. Only about 6 million are expected to enroll. The plan doesn’t even start until 2013.

And most people who get insurance on the job would have to stick with it. No shopping in the new “insurance exchanges” for them.

President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress stand to reap the political rewards if they can pull off health reform, by achieving near-universal coverage, toughening regulations on private insurers and transforming the way health care is delivered.

But Democrats have glossed over nagging details of just how limited reform’s reach would be for some Americans. And if voters figure it out, experts warn there could be a political backlash.

Dems threaten reprisals against congress members who stray on health care issues

A few days ago, the left-wing activist group MoveOn.org began sending out emails seeking contributions to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who does not fully support "health care reform with a public option." Now there's an update: MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben says the group has raised $3,578,117 for the project and is thinking of new ways to punish errant Democratic lawmakers.

"It's a huge sum, and the clearest signal yet that any Democrat who helps Republicans filibuster health care reform will face an enormous backlash from the grassroots," writes Ruben. And now, working in conjunction with Howard Dean's old organization Democracy for America, MoveOn is starting a drive to take away the committee chairmanships of any Democrat who fails to live up to MoveOn's progressive standards. "Many of these senators hold coveted committee chairmanships that give them significant power within the Senate," Ruben writes. "Our friends at Democracy for America have launched an open letter urging Senate Democrats to strip committee chairmanships from any Democrat who filibusters health care." Ruben says that more than 66,000 MoveOn and Democracy for America members have pledged to contribute.

An AP story that reveals why the AP fell from grace

Here, in four paragraphs, is a distilled sample of the explanation for the AP's fall from its lofty status as the world's preeminent news agency:

WASHINGTON (AP) - What's all the fuss about? After all the noise over Democrats' push for a government insurance plan to compete with private carriers, coverage numbers are finally in: Two percent.

That's the estimated share of Americans younger than 65 who'd sign up for the public option plan under the health care bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is steering toward House approval.

The underwhelming statistic is raising questions about whether the government plan will be the iron-fisted competitor that private insurers warn will shut them down or a niche operator that becomes a haven for patients with health insurance horror stories.

Some experts are wondering if lawmakers have wasted too much time arguing about the public plan, giving short shrift to basics such as ensuring that new coverage will be affordable.

The number of people who would be covered initially by a puublic option has nothing to do with opposition to it.

Those who are opposed to a public option see it as a stalking horse for total government control of health care. A public option plan wold have no need to earn a profit. In fact, government could subsidize a public option, allowing it to undercut competitors and drive them out of business.

A public option that initially covers just 2 percent of Americans could eventually  cover 100 percen. At that point, total government control will have been effected.

Whether the AP would notice, or not, remains to be determined.

D.C. dealing: I'll buy mandatory death at 70 if you give me insurance for illegal aliens

Three months before he was elected president, Barack Obama vowed not only to reform health care but also to pass the legislation in an unprecedented way.

"I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table," he said at an appearance in Chester, Va., repeating an assertion he made many times. He said the discussions would be "televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies."

But now, as a Senate vote on health-care legislation nears, those negotiations are occurring in a setting that is anything but revolutionary in Washington: Three senators are working on the bill behind closed doors.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) sits at the head of a wooden table at his office as he and Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) work to merge two competing versions of health-care legislation into one bill. The three men will be joined by top aides as well as by members of President Obama's health-care team, led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The sessions started on Wednesday and could be completed this week.

Health care needs a series of specific surgeries, not Obama's monument building

President Barack Obama, who announced dramatically before the election that "the transnformation of America begins in five days," now argues, preposterously, that he is only cleaning up the mess left by his predecessor.

Troublle is, George Bush had no particularly troublesome role in health care, the issue that now dominates Washington's attention.

Obama and his Democrat allies point to two aspects of health care as most dire: the steadily rising cost and the absence of coverage for some 45 million people.

Instead of focusing on those aspects, however, Obama has expanded his to-do list to extend coverage to young people, who often rationally choose to forgo insurance. He is doing so to compel young and healthy people to subsidize health caree for everyone else.

Accused by Republicans of secretly planning to extend coverage to illegal alienss, Obama denied it, but then lowered the number of new people to be covered from 45,000 to 30,000, evidence that his original plan was to cover illegals.

Even in the absence of coverage under Obamacare, illegals can be expected to continue their current practice of going to hospital emergency rooms for treatment, where they can not be turned away.

The Obama administration also could attack the problem of rising health care costs directly by proposing tort reform. To protect themslves from potential lawsuits, doctors now practice defensive medicine, performing some tests and procedures largely to assemble a defense against trial lawyers seeking jackpot justice. Defensive medicine drives up health care costs.

But tort reform is unlikely to happen because the Democrat party relies heavily on substantial campaign contributions from trial lawyers. Obama, a lawyer, has shown no discernible interest in tort reform.

Obama has made health care the top priority of his admninistration, notwithstanding the fact that most insured paople are happy with their health care. Bush had little or nothing to do with the problems that Obama is tryng to fix.

Instead of tailoring modest fixes to specific problems, the president has opted for sweeping statements, describing as broken a health care system that patients from all over the world are patronizing in an atempt to get well.

For theatrics, Obama deserves a B+. For governanace, he gets an F.

Politics should be about dealing with real problems, not the building of legislative monuments to oneself.

Obama uses the Onion to explain seniors policy

"President Barack Obama held a nationally televised address Tuesday to "clarify any misunderstandings" about his health care proposal, assuring Americans that under the new bill senior citizens—and not the federal government—will have the right to choose how they are executed.

"Let me dispel these ridiculous rumors once and for all and set the record straight: Under my plan, seniors are going to be killed the way they want to be killed, end of story," said the president, who acknowledged that "wiping out" the nation's elderly population has always been his No. 1 priority. "If your grandmother would rather be euthanized in the privacy of her own home than be gutted and hanged on a high school soccer field, she is entitled to that right."

Ration the fixes, let the health care overhaul die

Only 41 percent of us still support the three-headed bill intended to hand one-sixth of the American economy, along with the power to decide who livs and who dies, over to President Obama and the deranged party he represents.

According to Rasmussen Reports, 56 percent of us are opposed.

While I would love to see the Demorats push on and, by hook or crook, enact the hideous thing, since this would speed the party's demise, caution is in order.

I suggest that the Democrats treat their health care, power grab bill the way they plan to treat your unfortunate grandmother, who is 101 and suffers from Parkinson's. Withhold the medicine and let her go guickly and gently into the good night.

Mark Steyn: Obama skips small, easy health care fixes in favor of a sweeping leftist fix

Well, says the president, not so fast. Lots of people with insurance run into problems when they change jobs or move to another state. OK, In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health care portability?

Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we're spending too much on health care. By "we're," he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.

And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to "reform" health care. Most voters don't buy it: They see it as Obama's "war of choice," and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he's having difficulty selling it, that's because it's not about "health." As I've written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture – one in which elections are always fought on the Left's issues and on the Left's terms, and in which "conservative" parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail, pledging to "deliver" government services more "efficiently."

Obama was right in his defense of Obamacare; so was the guy who called him a liar

In his appearance before Congress, President Barack Obama said this: "The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally."

To which, I reply, "So what? You answered a question, but you ducked the issue."

Illegal aliens have been getting health care, often at no cost, for years by merely showing up at hospital emergency rooms and complaining of illness or injury. National policy requires that those who show up at emergency rooms of American hospitals can not be turned away.

There is no reason to believe that that policy will be changed any time soon.

This means that Obama was technically correct in his argument.

Sow was the congressman who called Obama a "liar."

This means that, whether Obamacare is enacted or defeated, illegal aliens will continue to receive health care.

Dems don't have votes to pass health care in House

From Drudge Report

"At least 44 more moderate Members of the Democrat Caucus have gone on the record in opposition to the current health care bill in the House, Hill source claims. Likewise, at least 57 liberal Members of the Democrat Caucus have gone on the record saying they will vote against a health care bill without a strong public option.

In other words, unless multiple Democrats flip on their stated position on health care, Speaker Pelosi lacks the votes to pass a bill through the House on the strength of Democrat votes alone."

Some claim doctors in UK are too enthusiastic in diagnosing terminal illnesses in patients

"In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.

“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients."

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS."

Compulsary health insurance would drive up cost

"The most sweeping provision in the health care reform legislation before Congress is not the new government program Democrats wish to create, but the "individual mandate" that would make health insurance compulsory.

According to Cato scholar Michael F. Cannon, the individual mandate that Massachusetts enacted in 2006 shows that ObamaCare would effectively outlaw low-cost health plans, making health insurance more expensive for millions, and "would expand federal power by enabling it to ration care to patients under age 65."

UK has to fly in foreign doctors to treat patients

From Daily Mail

Foreign GPs who commute to Britain:
£100-an-hour Poles and Lithuanians
fly in for shifts our doctors won't do

"The huge extent to which the NHS needs foreign doctors to treat patients out of hours is revealed today.

A third of primary care trusts are flying in GPs from as far away as Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland because of a shortage of doctors in Britain willing to work in the evenings and at weekends.

The stand-ins earn up to £100 an hour, and one trust paid Polish and German doctors a total of £267,000 in a year, a Daily Mail investigation has found.

It raises fresh concerns that British patients are being treated by exhausted doctors without a perfect command of English.

Yesterday the Royal College of GPs and the General Medical Council called for a 'radical review' of out-of-hours care so that the NHS no longer has to rely on help from abroad.

The figures come months after an investigation was launched into the conduct of a German doctor after two patients died on his first shift in Britain.

Daniel Ubani had just three hours sleep."

Here's a Dick Morris video ad that ABC won't run

Nat Hentoff: "I am finally scared of a White House"

"I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) - as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill - decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law."

On health care, Texas took on the lawyers and won; congress chooses campaign funds over reform

Texas Gov. Rick Perry:

"In 2003, I declared the medical liability crisis an emergency item and the Legislature responded by passing sweeping reforms that protected the patient, but also shielded doctors and hospitals from unscrupulous trial lawyers eager to make a quick buck.

We capped noneconomic damages at $250,000 per defendant, or up to $750,000 per incident, while placing no cap on more easily determined economic damages, such as lost wages or costs of medical care due to injury.

We ended the practice of allowing baseless but expensive lawsuits to drag on indefinitely, requiring plaintiffs to provide expert witness reports to support their claims within four months of filing suit or drop the case.

These measures were supported by the people of Texas, who in September 2003 approved a ballot measure, Proposition 12, authorizing all the changes.

Changes were seen immediately, and continue to be felt. All major liability insurers cut their rates upon passage of our reforms, with most of those cuts ranging in the double-digits. More than 10 new insurance carriers entered the Texas market, increasing competition and further lowering costs.

As a result, Texas doctors have seen their insurance rates decline by an average of 27 percent.

The number of doctors applying to practice medicine in Texas has skyrocketed by 57 percent. In 2008, the Texas Medical Board received 4,023 license applications and issued a record 3,621 new ones.

In all, in just the first five years after reforms passed, 14,498 doctors either returned to practice in Texas or began practicing here for the first time.

And our reforms finally brought critical specialties to underserved areas. The number of obstetricians practicing in rural Texas is up by 27 percent, and 12 counties that previously had no obstetricians now have at least one. The statistics show major gains in fields like orthopedic surgery, pediatrics, neurosurgery and emergency medicine."

At boisterous Town Hall meeting, banking queen Barney Frank poses as an angry white male