Health insurance

Health insurance reform proposals, legislation

While large employers expect medical costs  for their workers to rise about 9% in 2011, they will cut their health care expenditures by dumping thousands of post-65 retirees on Medicare and forcing more pre-65 retirees to buy their own insurance. They’re also shifting more health care costs to their insured workers, according to a new report, Behind the Numbers, by PrcewaterhousCoopers LLP (PwC) Health Research Institute. In 2010, medical costs are expected to rise about 9.5%.

This means that 

The 13 state attorney generals who are suing to overturn ObamaCare’s coercive Medicaid expansion that would cost states billions may be affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to University of Chicago law professor, Richard A. Epstein. Impact graph:

In Massachusetts v. EPA—the notorious 2007 decision allowing the EPA to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant—the Supreme Court recognized that the state had standing to sue to protect its own coastline from the supposed ravages of excess CO2. The Supreme Court should likewise also recognize a state’s standing to sue when the federal government seeks to command its resources to serve federal objectives. In New York v. United States (1992), the Court prevented the U.S. from forcing states to take title to nuclear waste. It can surely prevent the federal government from mandating massive expenditures of scarce state resources.

Under the Constitution the states are not wards of the federal government. Clever federal tax and spending statutes must not be allowed to reduce states to a servile status that allows the federal government to force massive wealth shifts among them.

Taking the gloves off, former Colorado Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton said in an 85-minute interview in her Centennial office today that Ken Buck, her opponent for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, is the real Washington insider and that she’s the fiscal conservative in the race.

“I am not the Washington insider in this race. That would be Ken Buck. Ken has a Washington insider 527 running over $1 million of ads on his behalf. And he received over a third of all his donations from employees of one company that relies on stimulus money and millions of dollars of special interests contracts,” Norton said.

(Her campaign provided me with a list of employees of Greeley-based Hensel Phelps Construction Co. who have contributed $141,800 to Buck’s Senate campaign.)

In reply to the Buck campaign’s charges that Norton is a Washington insider because she is backed by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and is related to a Washington lobbyist, Norton said, “Ken Buck was Governor Bill Ritter’s best man. If we’re going to play the guilt by association game, that’s an interesting connection.”

Like Buck, Norton says she would not vote for a bill that would help Colorado if it included a tax increase.

Appointed Democrat Senator Michael Bennet “is totally out of touch with Colorado values. . . He’s a rubber stamp for anything the Obama administration wants.”

As executive director of the Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment between 1999 and 2002, Norton said, “My general fund request was down 28% when I left office. We eliminated programs that were not authorized by the state statute or in the state constitution.”

Norton also noted that when she ran for lieutenant governor, she took an unpaid leave of absence from her state job. Ken Buck continues to serve as the district attorney of Weld county even though he’s often absent so that he can attend campaign events, she said.

She also clarified her role at the Englewood-based Medical Group Management Association, where she was in charge of monitoring changes in states’ laws and regulations and informing managers of some 7,000 medical group practices about how they could comply with new state laws. She wasn’t in charge of the MGMA’s lobbyist in Washington and she never managed lobbyists or served as a lobbyist, she said.

“I have never been a lobbyist,” she said.

To see the 27 questions and answers, please click on the hed of this story. If you’re viewing this story at Rocky Mountain Right or Peoples Press Collective, go to www.businessword.com.

John Dingell says ObamaCare will allow Democrats to “control the people.” The video is here.

ObamaCare will give working Americans who are smart about money strong financial incentives to become and stay uninsured until they need catastrophically expensive health care. If they recover and no longer need insurance, they’ll drop it until the next time. The number of people who can afford to buy health insurance today but don’t is about 15 million. In five years, it could be several multiples of that.

Economists are just figuring it out here and here. Even liberal bloggers are getting it.

What this means:

The Wall Street Journal editorializes that Colorado’s Attorney General and other state AGs who are challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare have good cases on at least two of three counts.

The Journal thinks 

Republicans are blathering about how they will repeal the health deform bill, HR 3590. Get real. Even if Republicans regain control of Congress someday, Democrats always will have enough votes in Congress to prevent a blanket repeal of the law. Instead, Republicans must focus on fixing the worst parts of the bill. And even that will be very difficult in a closely divided Congress no matter who is president.

Question. Will Colorado’s U.S. Senate candidates get serious about health care and health insurance reform? Will they show that they know and understand the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA)? Or will they add repealing the act to the list of impossible things they’re promising like a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution and promises to never vote for tax increases buried deep in bills that they support? Norton has  issued a good series of statements that show her opposition to ObamaCare while Buck’s web site only carries a very brief statement of opposition. It will be interesting to see whether the two leading GOP candidates for the Senate talk straight with voters about how they would try to fix ObamaCare or whether they will go with unbelievable claims that they will repeal it.

Politico summarized the health deform reconciliation bill here. The bill, HR 4872, is here. The main bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), HR 3590, is here.

Enactment of ObamaCare will open the floodgates for new federal mandates that insurers cover expensive wellness and alternative care services and send health insurance premiums soaring. While the New England Journal of Medicine says 50% of physicians will leave medicine because of ObamaCare, it’s more likely that the number of practicing physicians will shrink by 10% to 15% over the next five years. This will force Congress to boost payments to physicians to keep them in Medicine and to get them to accept more Medicaid and Medicare benefiaries. So taxes and Medicare premiums will rise even faster. ObamaCare encourages more people and employers to drop health insurance and game the system. Therefore, we’ll see as many uninsured Americans citizens who aren’t covered by various government programs as we see now. But they may be the higher-income folks who are smart enough to game the system.

Meanwhile, the hospitals who think that they will be the biggest winners because there will be fewer uninsured and few patients whose bills won’t be covered by the government will wind up the big losers. State and federal legislators will tax the not-for-profits and cut margins for the investor-owned hospitals to the bone. Long-run, they’ll lose physicians and money. Same for drug companies. Now that politicians control health insurance companies and markets more than ever, they’ll use the insurers and various forms of price and utilization controls to make the pharmas unprofitable.

Democrats who lose their seats in November will become rich lobbyists until Republicans take power and put them out of business.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis says in a press release today that the enactment of ObamaCare would impose budget-killing unfunded mandates on the state of Colorado. Yesterday, his opponent, Democrat Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, told business leaders at the South Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce that he would have preferred a 20- to 50-page bill, but he didn’t say he opposed it. He also said he wouldn’t raise taxes in a recession. ObamaCare imposes huge tax increases that would seriously depress the economy and kill jobs. In his press release, McInnis said:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is betting against heavy odds that she can get House Democrats to commit political suicide and pass the Senate’s version of Obamacare. Mike Barone and others are predicting she won’t have the votes. That means only one thing. She wants to get Obamacare off her plate one way or another. It’s just too big of a political liability to carry into November.  

Coloradans don’t like Obamacare, and appointed Democrat Senator Michael Bennet is paying the price in the latest Rasmussen Reports polls, which show him trailing Jane Norton, Ken Buck and Tom Wiens.

Andrew Romanoff, who is challenging Bennet for the Democrats’ nomination for the senate race, looks better against the Republicans than Bennet does. Bennet has been making headlines as a strong supporter of Obamacare. Rasmussen found that 43% of Coloradans favor Obamacare and 56% oppose it. More important, only 21% strongly favor Obamacare while 49% strongly oppose it.

While Romanoff is even a stronger backer of Obamacare than Bennet, the senator is better known and his support for the bill is costing him in the polls. Read the whole report here.

Why are Colorado Republican candidates for governor and Congress being so quiet about President Obama’s dishonest efforts to shove ObamaCare down the throats of Americans?

Why aren’t Jane Norton, Ken Buck, Tom Wiens, Scott McInnis, Dan Maes, Ryan Frazier, Cory Gardner and other Republican candidates putting pressure on Senators Michael Bennet and Mark Udall and other Colorado Congressional Democrats to vote against ObamaCare?

If Republicans don’t step up and help fight the Democrats over ObamaCare, why should Colorado voters think they will be real conservatives if they are elected?

Colorado’s GOP candidates should dedicate the next two weeks to pressuring Bennet (admittedly a lost cause), Markey (a vulnerable Democrat in conservative CD-4) and Ed Perlmutter (also a lost cause) to vote against ObamaCare 2. 

We’re looking for some political courage, and we’ll be watching to see who knows how to fight for Colorado.

UPDATE: The McInnis campaign notes that he spoke out against ObamaCare early in his campaign and continues to. A You Tube video is here.

Diana DeGette and pro-choice Democrats in the U.S. House are crying that the health deform bill being pushed by President Obama will restrict abortions, but the bill clearly would require the federal government to vastly expand its funding of abortion clinics and services.

This is a smoke and mirrors game by DeGette. She is pretending that that the Senate bill is too restrictive for pro-choice House Democrats so that the anti-abortion Democrats who are threatening to kill the bill will decide that the bill is anti-abortion and vote for it. That the Senate bill would expand government funding of abortion clinics and related services is very clear.

Why are Michael Bennet, Ed Perlmutter, Betsy Markey and Colorado’s other Congressional Democrats saying nothing while President Barack Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid repeatedly lie about ObamaCare? Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) spelled out the Democrats’ game playing at last week’s health talkathon. Bennet, Perlmutter, Markey, John Salazar and Obama didn’t listen, but America did.

Don’t Colorado’s Democrats know that by helping sell Obama’s deceptions and accounting gimmicks they are complicit? They, too, must be called scandalously brazen liars. Americans are tired of the lies that politicians tell. At the moment, they see that the Democrats are lying more desperately than the Republicans, which is why the GOP appears to be riding a huge anti-Obama Democrat wave toward November’s elections.

After the last