The Obama Administration plans to force active duty service members and veterans off the military’s current health care plan, Tricare, and into ObamaCare’s state-run healthcare exchanges by increasing Tricare premiums between 30 percent to 78 percent the first year and a crushing 94 percent to 345 percent every five years thereafter.

By squeezing service members and veterans out of Tricare and into ObamaCare through significantly higher Tricare premiums, the Obama Administration believes it can pinch $1.8 billion from Tricare in fiscal 2013 and $12.9 billion by 2017.

By comparison, Mr. Obama spent $20.5 billion on his Department of Energy green energy grants and loans program, 80 percent of which went to companies owned or tied to Mr. Obama’s top fundraisers.

According to reports, Arkansas is joining the list of states that have decided against establishing an ObamaCare insurance exchange. Arkanasas' Governor, Mike Beebe, said he would not seek federal funds to establish the exchange without the support of the state legislature - support that clearly does not exist.

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Forbes has a new article detailing how the American Medical Association sold out doctors and patients to preserve its government granted billing code monopoly - a move that will give the AMA continued revenue of $72 million per year. It seems that the AMA betrayed free-market principles in order to maintain a system that violates free-market principles.

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The Atlantic has an interesting article about Netflix and marginal costs. What does that have to do with healthcare? The author buried a little nugget in there that is instructive about why liberals ideas about health care policy will not work in the long run and will jeopardize innovation as well.  She writes:

"You can get a sweet deal if you are the customer who gets marginal cost pricing. Medicare does this--reimburses hospitals at above their marginal cost, but below their average cost, so that private insurers have to pick up most of the hospital overhead. European countries do this with prescription drugs: reimburse above the marginal cost of producing the pills, but below the total cost of developing the pills, so that the US has to pick up most of the tab for drug development. The problem is that as voters and as customers, we often get the notion that this can be extrapolated to everyone. So liberal policy wonks want to save money by putting everyone on Medicare, or some equivalent program that uses the government's monopsony pricing power to get lower prices for everyone.... But everyone cannot be the marginal cost consumer. Someone has to cover things like development costs." 

The bottom line is that ObamaCare tries to lower costs through price controls and by restricting access to care. In the end this will reduce choices, drive doctors from their chosen profession, and retard research and development in the field of health care. The implications for patients will be disastrous.

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According to The Wall Street Journal today, a federal mandated update to medical coding and billing is on the way and will kick in on October 1, 2013. Doctors often rightly complain that the current billing system is needlessly complex, requiring medical offices to employ sometimes two or three people to ensure bills submitted to the government and private insurance companies for reimbursement are accurate.  Well, those doctors ain't seen nothing yet.

The federal update has gone from bad to worse. The new coding system will expand the current 18,000 different codes to a total of 140,000 and takes the current billing code that describes the medical condition of the patient and the treatment offered to include where an injury has occurred (differentiating from the bedroom and the bathroom). 

One can imagine that this will waste a lot of your doctor's time as he will now be required to ask a lot more questions to determine not just what is wrong with you medically but that you dislocated  your toe on a squash court (seriously, the update includes a code for squash court: Y92311).  And your doctor will need to take a lot more notes in your medical records to ensure your insurer knows exactly what happened. But the new coding system goes even further. There are, the WSJ reports, different codes for run-ins with our fine feathered friends. Separate codes, depending on the kind of bird your accident involves, include ducks, macaws, geese, parrots, turkeys and chickens. 

None of these additions are likely to improve the quality of healthcare, but it wlll open the door for government and your insurance company to keep better tabs on you.

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