Tarren Bradgon (formerly of the Maine Heritage Policy Center) writes for the Heritage Foundation how the state of Maine is moving towards real market-based reforms to expand coverage and lower costs. Read his commentary: here.
Be sure to follow AHEC on Twitter @TheAHEC and at Facebook.com/TheAHEC.
As America nears the one-year anniversary of ObamaCare becoming law, AHEC has released a new document entitled: "A Policymaker's Primer on ObamaCare: The Myths, the Costs and a Practical Guide to Defunding the Government Takeover of Healthcare in the 112th Congress."On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is commonly referred to as ObamaCare. This law includes a series of provisions that will have a dramatic impact on America’s healthcare system, including: (1) increased taxes and compliance burdens imposed on small businesses; (2) changes to HSAs that make them less useful to individual consumers and increased fines for non-qualified distributions; (3) deep cuts to Medicare Advantage, the free-market portion of Medicare; (4) a significant expansion of Medicaid, which will threaten state budgets; and (5) an unprecedented use of the Constitution’s commerce clause to justify the imposition of an individual mandate requiring individuals to carry health insurance or face serious tax penalties. Supporters of the law have made a series of promises about this law, including that it will reduce costs and expand access to insurance. Opponents of the law, however, note that these promises have proven false, and that the law will actually increase insurance costs, increase federal budget deficits, and damage the U.S. economy. In response to the clearly negative impact the law will have on businesses, individual consumers, and America as a whole, this primer concludes that it is necessary to repeal ObamaCare and recommends a course of action for state and local policymakers to achieve that objective.
The Heritage Foundation has a new analysis that details many of the consequences that will befall consumers as a result of many of the ObamaCare benefit mandates. Mandates are bad, bad stuff.
That analysis can be found here.
Over at National Review Online, Scott W. Atlas makes a really sound argument for eliminating government health insurance altogether:
Constitutional questions aside, a whole host of concerns about specific impacts of the PPACA underlie the opposition to it, including the fact that the law fails to control costs as calculated by the government itself. The major objections to Obamacare rest on four of its fundamental features, all of which represent a marked shift of authority and control of health-care decisions to the government: 1) mandating insurance coverage while eliminating insurance options such as high-deductible plans with health savings accounts (HSAs), which people increasingly prefer; 2) shifting millions more into already unsustainable public health-insurance programs; 3) directly or indirectly limiting access to technology by reducing payments for specialty medical care and limiting patient-driven options on available care; and 4) significantly increasing taxes to pay for the plan. While stopping short of the overt single-payer system openly desired by our president and many Democratic congressional leaders, the PPACA inarguably moves dramatically toward many of those same endpoints.
Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, spoke about his organization's opposition to ObamaCare last Tuesday. In the Politico he is quoted as saying the Chamber strongly advocates for health care reform, but that it's time "to go back to the drawing board" as it relates to the new health care legislation. The debate this week in the House over H.R. 2 he saw as "an opportunity for everyone to take a fresh look at health care reform and to replace unworkable approaches with more efficient and effective measures that will lower costs, expand access and improve quality.
In addition to the litany of regulatory concerns associated with the controversial legislation, the U.S. Chamber is particularly worried by the 200 waivers already granted exempting people from the legislation; the employer mandate; the requirement that insurers spend certain amounts on health care; and changes to health savings accounts and 1099 form filing minimums.
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