Health insurance

Health insurance reform proposals, legislation

Tom Tancredo is going to give Obama Democrat John Hickenlooper a strong run and may even beat the Denver mayor on the issues. In Friday’s debate on Channel 12, which can be viewed on Denver’s CBS4, Tancredo attacked Hickenlooper on education, taxes, spending, running a sanctuary city, bilingual ballots, and PERA. Hickenlooper did himself no favors with his endorsements of ObamaCare, printing ballots in Spanish as well as in English and in his denials that he runs a sanctuary city and would make Colorado a sanctuary state. And Hick’s double talk about why he won’t disclose his 20-year-record of giving to ACORN and other hard left groups just won’t wash with Republicans or independents. You can summarize the debate this way:

Conservative gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo said health care exchanges that the state of Colorado is required to create under ObamaCare would create new, dysfunctional bureaucracies that would get in the way of delivering health care.

Republicans are making the classic mistake of promising to repeal ObamaCare when they know that Democrats always will have enough votes in Congress to protect major sections of the bill. What Republicans like Ken Buck, Ryan Frazier, Cory Gardner and Scott Tipton should be doing is telling how they will protect us from ObamaCare. Here’s my first draft of 

Since the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, the editorial pages of the liberal Denver Post have become more centrist and less hard core progressive and liberal. Therefore, 

By 2014, almost all small employers that offer health insurance to their workers will be forced to drop those plans because they don’t meet standards for health insurance set by ObamaCare, according to report released late Friday by the White House. See page 50.

Under three scenarios, 

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 http://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: