Obamacare's 7 pages of healthcare's future

How do we slow down the increasing cost of healthcare? 

If we can find the answer to this question, we will get future costs of Medicare under control and we can stop all the proposals to end this popular program as we now know it.

Buried in the Obamacare statute is a proposal for insurance companies to create Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) made up of doctors, hospitals and other medical providers who would be paid for keeping Medicare patients healthy instead of being paid a fee for services.  The latter approach is widely criticized as an inducement for healthcare providers to perform more services than the patient needs in order to receive more compensation.

Will these ACOs work?  Apparently Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is in the middle of such an effort with promising results saving 1.9% in medical costs the first year and 3.3% in the second year. 

If these ACOs prove to be a success in getting Medicare costs to the federal government under control, everyone will win except those who would rather privatize Medicare and repeal all of Obamacare—including the 7 pages that encourage these innovative ACOs.

Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings, Analysts Say

New York Times
August 22, 2012

By Jackie Calmes

Mitt Romney's promise to restore $716 billion that he says President Obama "robbed" from Medicare has some health care experts puzzled, and not just because his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, included the same savings in his House budgets.

The 2010 health care law cut Medicare reimbursements to hospitals and insurers, not benefits for older Americans, by that amount over the coming decade. But repealing the savings, policy analysts say, would hasten the insolvency of Medicare by eight years — to 2016, the final year of the next presidential term, from 2024.

While Republicans have raised legitimate questions about the long-term feasibility of the reimbursement cuts, analysts say, to restore them in the short term would immediately add hundreds of dollars a year to out-of-pocket Medicare expenses for beneficiaries. That would violate Mr. Romney’s vow that neither current beneficiaries nor Americans within 10 years of eligibility would be affected by his proposal to shift Medicare to a voucherlike system in which recipients are given a lump sum to buy coverage from competing insurers.

For those reasons, Henry J. Aaron, an economist and a longtime health policy analyst at the Brookings Institution and the Institute of Medicine, called Mr. Romney’s vow to repeal the savings “both puzzling and bogus at the same time.”

Marilyn Moon, vice president and director of the health program at the American Institutes for Research, calculated that restoring the $716 billion in Medicare savings would increase premiums and co-payments for beneficiaries by $342 a year on average over the next decade; in 2022, the average increase would be $577.

Beneficiaries, through their premiums and co-payments, share the cost of Medicare with the government. If Medicare’s costs increase — for instance, by raising payments to health care providers — so, too, do beneficiaries’ contributions.

And those costs would be on top of the costs involved with a full repeal of the health care law, which would eliminate expanded coverage of prescription drugs, free wellness care and preventive checkups.

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Raising revenue OK with SC Republicans

Thank goodness South Carolina Representative James Clyburn is on the Super Committee otherwise the results of a recent poll might not get to his fellow Committee members.

A just released Winthrop University poll has found that 73.2% of South Carolina Republican or Republican-leaning voters receiving Social Security or Medicare do not want those benefits cut to reduce the national deficit.  Of the same group who are not receiving those benefits 53.6% don’t want those programs cut.  And 52.9% of all of these South Carolina GOP voters do not want the defense budget lowered for deficit reduction.

A plurality in this Republican-only voter’s survey, 46.6%, said that it is not possible to address the deficit problem without a tax increase.

If protecting Social Security, Medicare and defense by increasing revenue to reduce the deficit is OK here in South Carolina, the Super Committee’s job should be easier than we thought it would be.