Senator Cassidy's King v. Burwell Obamacare Alternative Should Be A Winner

Senator Bill Cassidy. MD (R-LA) has introduced the Patient Freedom Act, in anticipation of the Supreme Court deciding for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, the lawsuit that seeks to force the administration to obey the law by not paying tax credits to health plans operating in states using a federal health insurance exchange (i.e. healthcare.gov).

Victory for the plaintiffs this summer would cause significant disruption in health insurance in the 34 to 37 states without their own exchanges because premiums for up to nine million people would increase significantly. Many would choose to drop coverage if and when they have to face paying full premium for their policies.

Americans have had their health coverage upended not only by the Affordable Care Act, but also by the allegedly illegal execution of the law by the administration. Congress has a duty to respond to a court victory with a new law. However, it has to be one that the president will sign, but will not leave the Republican-majority Congress’ fingerprints on Obamacare. This is a tricky needle to thread.

Dr. Cassidy believes he can achieve this by restoring federal funding to states that will lose tax credits, but freeing them from Obamacare.

Read the entire column at Forbes.

HSA-Eligible Plans Are Widely Available In Obamacare Exchanges

Paul Howard and Yevgeniy Feyman of the Manhattan Institute have conducted a thorough examination of plans available on Obamacare’s exchanges:

The report finds that, far from becoming obsolete under the ACA, high-deductible plans are widely available — 98 percent of uninsured Americans have access to at least one HSA-eligible plan. Moreover, these plans also make up about 25 percent of total offerings on Obamacare exchanges. We also found that they remain significantly less expensive than traditional plan designs, offering savings of about 14 percent, on average.

However, we must also recall that Obamacare exchanges encourage plans to compete by attracting the healthy and deterring the sick form applying for coverage. So, we should be careful about concluding that Obamacare’s HSA-eligible plans are really consumer-driven plans. Health insurers may be offering them as a method of selecting less expensive risks.

Read the entire column at NCPA's Health Policy Blog.

A 2003 Law Blunts The Worst of Obamacare

Health Savings Accounts, introduced in the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, have blunted the worst aspects of Obamacare.

Read the entire column in The Hill.

Number of Patient Payments to Healthcare Providers Up 72 Percent in 3 Years

Although Obamacare’s health-insurance policies are shocking people by imposing very high deductibles, high deductibles alone are a feature, not a bug, of high-performing health insurance. In the absence of over-regulation of health insurance, every dollar a beneficiary pays directly to a healthcare provider, instead of to a health insurer as premium, reduces administrative and bureaucratic costs. If very few patients incur health spending above the deductible, administrative costs and hassles should shrink.

InstaMed, a payment-processing company that specializes in healthcare, has published its latest report on Trends in Healthcare Payments, which sheds much light on the growth in deductibles and co-payments.

Read the entire column at the Independent Institute's Beacon blog.

Americans Control Fewer of Our Own Health Dollars Than Swiss, Swedes, or Canadians!

What is unique about U.S. health care? Well, not only do we control fewer of our own health care dollars directly than our friends in other developed countries do, but we've also been going in the wrong direction for over two decades.

After defeating Obamacare, breaking this long-term trend will be a critical objective of the real health reform that replaces it.

Read the entire article here.

The GOP Pledge on Health Care: "Repeal" is Great, "Replace" Needs Work

Let’s start with the good news: The GOP has pledged to repeal Obamacare “immediately” (see page 27 of the Pledge), which means it will be the first legislative order of business on Monday, January 3, 2011, if the GOP takes the House.

When it comes to “replace,” however, the Republican alternative is still significantly malformed. Indeed, there’s more than a whiff of big-government Republican in it. It completely ignores the single most important reform to private health insurance: Amend the tax code to give individuals, instead of our employers, ownership of our non-taxable health dollars.

Read my entire response at National Review Online.

Hope for Consumer-Driven Health Care? Venture Capitalists Think So

Two recent reports have made me question my pessimism about consumer-driven health care under ObamaCare. My take over at StateHouseCall.

Taking a Breather on Health "Reform": Even the NY Times wants a Do-Over

Yours truly's latest blog entry at National Review Online's Critical Condition (7/22 10:36 A.M. on the scroll).

U.S. Health Care Dysfunction & U.K. Parliamentary Expense Scandal

Today's Wall Street Journal had good editorial on taxing health care, pointing out that the President and Congress are struggling to figure out how to raise enough taxes to pay for President Obama's health-care take-over. The most likely target is the exclusion of employer-based benefits from taxation, which moves Democrats closer to John McCain's position in last year's election. However, the goal of McCain's reform was to give health-care dollars to American families instead of their employers. Obama's goal is to seize health-care dollars for the government.

The WSJ also ran an op-ed on "Parliament and the Laffer Curve" explaining that the exclusion of "expenses" - very broadly defined - from British legislators' taxable compensation has led to taxpayers paying for cleaning moats and repairing duck ponds in politicians' country estates. The op-ed diagnosed the erupting scandal in terms equally applicable to American health care: "Members of Parliament face a 100% tax rate on their unclaimed allowances."

The current tax treatment of employer-provided health insurance causes Americans to over-insure. And (unless they have a Health Savings Account) the type of insurance they have is use-it-or-lose-it. Failure to consume health services of even marginal value means forgoing those benefits forever.