Video - The Debate Over How to Pay Medicare Doctors Explained in 75 Seconds

Video - The Debate Over How to Pay Medicare Doctors Explained in 75 Seconds. Read the full story here.

250,000 Virginians Set to Receive Health Insurance Cancellation Notices.

250,000 Virginians Set to Receive Health Insurance Cancellation Notices.(Heritage).

A quarter-million Virginians likely will lose their health insurance plans by the end of the year because their plans to do not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.

That’s in addition to the thousands of Virginians who already had lost their plans over the last year because of non-compliance with the ACA, popularly known as Obamacare.

Those who lose their health care plans can purchase another that complies with the ACA — but they’ll likely pay higher premiums each month.

A Manhattan Institute study found that older men (around age 64) are the only general group benefiting from lower rates than before because of the ACA. Young men (around age 27) are suffering the most from higher premiums as a result of Obamacare — an average 67 percent monthly increase.

The announcement is certainly timely ammunition for Ed Gillespie, the Republican who is running to replace Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and already has been campaigning on Warner’s vote for Obamacare.

The latest Christopher Newport University poll shows Warner with a 22-point lead over Gillespie.
Originally appeared on Watchdog.org.


The post 250,000 Virginians Set to Receive Health Insurance Cancellation Notices appeared first on Daily Signal.

US Hospitals spy on patient purchases to spot bad habits.

Are you using today your Wall Mart card?

US Hospitals spy on patient purchases to spot bad habits. (RT).

According to a Bloomberg News report, hospitals in various states are beginning to use consumer information mined through data brokers in order to fill out more complete profiles of their patients. 

By tabulating these statistics and projecting which individuals are at risk of falling ill the most, medical professionals are hoping to correct potential problems before they get worse.

The process is already underway in at least two major hospital chains, one in Pennsylvania and the other across both North and South Carolina.

At the Carolinas Healthcare System – comprised of more than 900 hospitals, nursing homes, surgical centers, and more – officials are employing information such as where a person shops, the kind of food they buy, and whether or not they smoke to craft profiles for roughly 2 million people.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and its 20-plus facilities, meanwhile, is also using household information to learn more about more than 2 million patients.

“What we are looking to find are people before they end up in trouble,” said Carolinas’ director of research Michael Dulin to Bloomberg. “The idea is to use big data and predictive models to think about population health and drill down to the individual levels to find someone running into trouble that we can reach out to and try to help out.”

Large data brokers like LexisNexis and Acxiom are already known to be collecting numerous pieces of information regarding American customers alongside their spending and lifestyle habits. As RT reported previously, a Senate survey found data brokers are gathering up to 75,000 data points on each individual consumer they track within the United States. 

This information can be simple – like your favorite sports team – but it can also include much more than that, and it can be sold for profit to other companies.

As noted by Bloomberg, the US government is also fining hospitals that readmit too many patients per month and “rewarding hospitals that do well on a benchmark of clinical outcomes and patient surveys.” As a result, it’s more beneficial now than it was before for hospitals to ensure their patients don’t end up in the emergency room.

Although hospitals can reveal an individual’s risk assessment to a doctor, they are not permitted to reveal particular details about it. Still, the fact that these institutions are gathering large amounts of data on individuals has many concerned over their privacy.

“It is one thing to have a number I can call if I have a problem or question, it is another thing to get unsolicited phone calls. I don’t like that,” Jorjanne Murry, a North Carolina resident who has Type 1 diabetes, told Bloomberg. “I think it is intrusive.”

As a safeguard against some of these concerns, Dulin said that at Carolinas Healthcare System, there will be an option for patients to opt-out of the process and ensure their info remains private. He argued that this information is currently being sold to people much less interested in a person’s well being than hospitals, presumably a reference to marketers and other commercial companies,.


“The data is already used to market to people to get them to do things that might not always be in the best interest of the consumer," he said. “We are looking to apply this for something good.”Hmmm....One more reason why i don't use plastic.....that includes loyalty programs :)

Why America compared to others is losing the health race.

Why America compared to others is losing the health race.HT: CROFT.

Via The New Yorker, a must-read: Why America Is Losing the Health Race. Excerpt:

Many Americans are aware that the United States spends much more on health care than any other country in the world. But fewer people know that the health of Americans—by many different measures—is actually worse than the health of citizens in other wealthy countries. 

Two major reports, both released last year, provide further elaboration of this apparent paradox. The first, “The State of US Health, 1990-2010,” documented trends in mortality and morbidity across the thirty-four member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.). The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (to which I am a contributing writer), showed that both life expectancy and healthy-life expectancy improved in the United States over two decades. 

But the pace of those improvements was considerably slower in the United States: in 1990, the U.S. ranked twentieth among O.E.C.D. countries for life expectancy, and fourteenth for healthy-life expectancy; by 2010, it had fallen to twenty-seventh and twenty-sixth, respectively. The other charts and tables in the report—about heart, lung, and kidney disease; diabetes; injuries and homicides; depression; and drug abuse—all show Americans suffering poorer health.

The second report, commissioned by the National Institutes of Health, and conducted by the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM), convened a panel of experts to examine health indicators in seventeen high-income countries. It found the United States in a similarly poor position: American men had the lowest life expectancy, and American women the second-lowest. 

In some ways, these reports were not news. As early as the nineteen-seventies, a group of leading health analysts had noted the discrepancy between American health spending and outcomes in a book called “Doing Better and Feeling Worse: Health in the United States.” From this perspective, the U.S. has been doing something wrong for a long time. 

But, as the first of these two reports shows, the gap is widening; despite spending more than any other country, America ranks very poorly in international comparisons of health. The second report may provide an answer—supporting the intuition long held by researchers that social circumstances, especially income, have a significant effect on health outcomes. 

Americans’ health disadvantage actually begins at birth: the U.S. has the highest rates of infant mortality among high-income countries, and ranks poorly on other indicators such as low birth weight. In fact, children born in the United States have a lower chance of surviving to the age of five than children born in any other wealthy nation—a fact that will almost certainly come as a shock to most Americans. 

But what causes such poor health outcomes among American children, and how can those outcomes be improved? Public-health experts focus on the “social determinants of health”—factors that shape people’s health beyond their lifestyle choices and medical treatments. These include education, income, job security, working conditions, early-childhood development, food insecurity, housing, and the social safety net.

Obamacare Menu Mandate Creates Headache For Restaurants & Pizzarias

Obamacare Menu Mandate Creates Headache For Restaurants and Pizzarias. HT: FoxNews.

Tucked deep in the Affordable Care Act is language requiring all restaurants with at least 20 locations to list nutritional information alongside each and every item on their menu.

That edict is now creating headaches for small business owners across the country, particularly pizza chains.

Take Domino’s. There are 34 million different pizza combinations available at the chain, when all crusts and cheeses and toppings are factored in.

Now imagine walking into a Domino’s and navigating a menu board with 34 million different options on it.Executives say figuring out the small print will be a big burden.

“Our company, like many pizza enterprises, is individual small business franchisees, so these are people that own three or four, or one or two Domino’s pizza stores,” said Domino’s spokeswoman Lynn Liddle. “To have to redo the menu boards every time something changes on a calorie count would cost them several thousand dollars.”
Read more at FOX NEWS.

Republicans 'Finally' open investigations into ObamaCare’s disaster sites.

Republicans 'Finally' open investigations into ObamaCare’s disaster sites.HT: TheHill.

Republicans are launching investigations into three state-run ObamaCare exchanges that are failing disastrously.

Lawmakers are setting their sites on exchanges in Oregon, Maryland and Massachusetts where Democratic governors embraced the healthcare law, and are demanding to know why their expensive online portals remain useless more than four months after launch.

On Wednesday, four Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting a review of the $304 million in federal grants that Oregon received to build its broken website. “The catastrophic breakdown of Cover Oregon is unacceptable, and taxpayers deserve accountability,” wrote the group of lawmakers led by Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.).

The scrutiny of the state enrollment portals is a shift from October, when the federal site HealthCare.Gov was out of service but state-run exchanges in California, New York and even red Kentucky appeared to be humming along.

But several states are having major problems with their ObamaCare sites.

In Oregon, not even one person has yet to enroll online, leaving the state completely reliant on paper applications.

The website problems run deeper in Maryland, where state officials have been debating for months whether to abandon its faltering state-run exchange in favor of HealthCare.gov.

And Massachusetts, which was once the model for state-run healthcare exchanges, presently has the worst enrollment percentage in the country, having signed-up only 8,100, or 17 percent, of its expected total for 2014, according to Avalere.

An official at the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services told The Hill on Friday that the agency has extended a three-month waiver forMassachusetts that would allow it to continue enrolling those that had coverage from the previous exchange and are transferring to a new Connector plan.

Following the example of Democratic lawmakers in Washington, state officials in Oregon, Maryland and Massachusetts are standing behind the healthcare law in concept, but are lashing out about the rollout.

“No one is angrier than I am about the issues with CoverOregon,” Kitzhaber said. “No one wants to get to the bottom of this more than I do. We do already have new CoverOregon leadership in place. And I won't hesitate to take further action to make this right. That's why I called in First Data to do an independent review of what went wrong and how.”Read the full story here.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa Suggests Sebelius May Have Committed Perjury.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa Suggests Sebelius May Have Committed Perjury.HT: WhiteHouseDossier.

In a sharply worded letter sent today to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) suggested Sebelius may have perjured herself before Congress, accusing her of providing “false and misleading” testimony before various congressional panels about Healtcare.gov.

Issa, who said testimony and documents obtained by the committee contradicted several Sebelius statements, pressed for revisions and explanations of her testimony and demanded documents and communications made as part of the preparation for her appearances.

Moreover, Issa accused Sebelius of misleading Congress about the health of the website.

He reminded her that giving false testimony to Congress is a crime:
“Witnesses who purposely give false or misleading testimony during a congressional hearing may be subject to criminal liability,” he wrote.

The letter cites four examples of allegedly false statements:

• That MITRE Corp., a contractor hired by HHS, was conducting ongoing security testing;
• That MITRE’s preliminary report “did not raise flags about going ahead;”
• That “no one… suggested that the risks outweighed the importance of moving forward;”
• That MITRE made recommendations to CMS about moving forward.

And Issa wrote:

Your failure during numerous Congressional hearings to explicitly mention the serious problems with security testing in the month prior to launch creates the appearance that you carefully chose language that would mislead Members of Congress and the American public.

HHS indicated it would respond to the letter, but so far does not appear to have publicly addressed the charges directly.

New Study Demolishes Almost Every Gun Control Myth.

New Study Demolishes Almost Every Gun Control Myth.(Mediate).

A study published in the latest issue of the academic journal Applied Economics Letterstook on many of the claims made regularly by advocates of stricter gun laws. The study determined that nearly every claim made in support of stronger restrictions on gun ownership is not supported by an exhaustive analysis of crime statistics.

The study, “An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates,” conducted by Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius, examined nearly 30 years of statistics and concluded that stricter gun laws do not result in a reduction in gun violence. In fact, Gius found the opposite – that a proliferation of concealed carry permits can actually reduce incidents of gun crime.

“Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states,” the study’s abstract reads. “It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level.”Read the full story Here.

Video: A Day In the Life (under ObamaCare).

Video - Policy For You (Depeche Mode's Policy of Truth parody)

HT: WhiteHouseDossier.

"You ain't seen nothing yet!" - The Coming Obamacare debacle.

"You ain't seen nothing yet!" - The Coming Obamacare debacle.HT: WhiteHouseDossier.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former George H.W. Bush Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Michael Boskin outlines in stunning detail the horror set to unfold as Obamacare really starts to kick in next year.

Hide the children. Here are the gory details.
Didn’t read the fine print on you insurance? Took the “do nothing and automatically re-enroll” option and renewed your plan without looking at next year’s rates?

Well, get set to find out about those higher deductibles as you stand at the doctor’s office reception desk. And then learn of your new deductible when you get the Explanation of Benefits and a bill – yes, a BILL – for the full amount of your procedure.

Meanwhile, the shock of losing your doctor goes from the realm of theory to the harsh cold world of reality as insurers try to limit their losses from the older, less-well patients likely to over-enlist in Obamacare. Networks will become more restrictive as insurers jettison the best doctors and hospitals, reducing the quality of your health care.

That’s business. Which of course is a concept ignored by Obamacare, which assumes people will offer the same services for a lower price.

There will be suffering – physical suffering – among those who currently have insurance, implies Boskin:

Next year, millions must choose among unfamiliar physicians and hospitals, or paying more for preferred providers who are not part of their insurance network. Some health outcomes will deteriorate from a less familiar doctor-patient relationship.

Just try calling for an appointment in January, and you’ll get that sound over the phone we all love . . . “His first available is in June.”

There will be longer waits for hospital visits, doctors’ appointments and specialist treatment, as more people crowd fewer providers.

But you’ll have more time to call around, since you might be working part time  - or not at all – as your company attempts to pare its workforce to escape Obamacare mandates.

And watch for that exciting, little known new feature of Obamacare that we’ll all soon behold, The Insurance Company Bailouts! Step right this way!

That’s right. If insurers’ costs are too high because they’re taking care of all those new patients in poor health, you, taxpayer, must foot the bill.

If, as many predict, too few healthy young people sign up for insurance that is overpriced in order to subsidize older, sicker people, the insurance market will unravel in a “death spiral” of ever-higher premiums and fewer signups. The government, through taxpayer-funded “risk corridors,” is on the hook for billions of dollars of potential insurance-company losses. This will be about as politically popular as bank bailouts.

Further malaise in coming after 2014.

Your local services will go down – less for education and transportation – and taxes will go up as states struggle in a few years to pay for Obamacare’s vast Medicaid expansion.
The medical profession will become a wasteland.

On the supply side, medicine will become a far less attractive career for talented young people. More doctors will restrict practice or retire early rather than accept lower incomes and work conditions they did not anticipate. Already, many practices are closed to Medicaid recipients, some also to Medicare. The pace of innovation in drugs, medical devices and delivery is expected to slow significantly, as higher taxes and even rationing set in.

There is, of course, a silver lining. The failed Obamacare website is actually an emblem of the atrocious thinking that has gone into our new health care system. It is government planning gone too far and finally revealed for what it is.

This is all going to get so bad, so fast, that repeal will become a very real and popular option. But not before 2017, when Obama is gone, and the misery has already piled up far too high.

Video - Obama care - Drop it like it's hot.

HT: GretaWire.

Video - Greta Van Susteren Discusses Sen. Cruz's Report on the Lawless Implementation of Obamacare.

Video - Greta Van Susteren Discusses Sen. Cruz's Report on the Lawless Implementation of Obamacare.

Video - Larry the Cable Guy’s on Obamacare

Larry the Cable Guy was on with Sean Hannity tonight. He had Sean in stitches when he described the Obamacare plans:

“It’s a disaster. But I have figured a lot of it out. I figured out the Bronze plan. The Bronze plan is the color your finger’s going to look like after you give yourself a prostrate exam. The gold plan is when you start to miss your wedding ring after you had to pay for the deductible. The silver plan is what color your hair is going to be after you sign up for it.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney: “It was a lie. It was deliberate. They knew if they told the truth, the bill would’ve never passed,”

Cheney knew.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney: “It was a lie. It was deliberate. They knew if they told the truth, the bill would’ve never passed,” HT: Politico.

On Fox and Friends, former Vice President Dick Cheney attacked President Obama and his team for their promise that people could keep their plan under Obamacare if they liked it.

“It was a lie. It was deliberate. They knew if they told the truth, the bill would’ve never passed,” said Cheney.

He made a personal argument against the president, citing his well-documented heart troubles which he said required having access to the same doctors over the years.

“One of the most important decisions I made was I had exactly two doctors who covered me over that 35-year period of time and that was crucial in terms of my care,” explained Cheney.Read the full story here.

Senator Reid’s Special Obamacare Staff Exemption

Senator Reid’s Special Obamacare Staff Exemption.HT: Heritage.

In case you didn’t think it could get any worse, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) is apparently exempting his congressional leadership and committee staff from Obamacare, which specifically provides that “notwithstanding any other provision of law, all Members of Congress and congressional staff shall enroll in a Federal health insurance program” created under Obamacare.

This was supposed to mean that Congress would have to finance its health care on the Obamacare exchanges in the same way as average Americans.

But earlier this summer, President Obama pushed to allow Members of Congress and their staff to continue to receive Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) premium support for their plans on the Obamacare exchanges. This fix, issued by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), is flatly illegal.

Now, however, Senator Reid has brought the issue once again into sharp relief. OPM will not only issue illegal subsidies to Members of Congress and their personal staff; it will also continue to administer FEHBP plans for some congressional staff that were expressly denied to them under Obamacare.

Senator Reid’s fix for his staff apparently rests on his belief that the phrase “congressional staff” in section 1312(d)(3)(D) of the law means congressional staff in a personal office and does not include congressional leadership or congressional committee staff. From the language of the statutory text, this distinction is not clear, as the Congressional Research Service has indicated and independent analysts have also noted. Under the statutory language, the phrase “congressional staff” means “all full-time and part-time employees employed by the official office of a Member of Congress, whether in Washington, D.C., or outside of Washington, D.C.”

When Obamacare was passed, Members of Congress had intentionally repealed the old FEHBP as applied to Members of Congress and their congressional staff (unless of course, they didn’t read the bill). The only legal plans for these persons—and all of these persons—are those created under Obamacare. If Members of Congress are having buyer’s remorse, the appropriate remedy is to change the law—in broad daylight, with an up or down vote—not to ask OPM to create something out of nothing or shovel the American taxpayers’ money into their pockets without statutory authorization.

How can this illegal scheme be stopped? Back when President Obama granted the special subsidies to Members of Congress, the phones of Senators and Representatives rang off the hooks. Senator Reid’s recent decision will surely shine another bright light on this ugly business, and popular outrage may yet exact a price on the White House and its congressional allies for this self-serving scheme.

However, there might also be a few new legal hooks to challenge this abuse. In particular, congressional staff who are not allowed to illegally remain on the FEHBP might sue to get put back on it. This entire process is arbitrary. After all, if “congressional staff” excludes Senator Reid’s congressional leadership and committee staff, why doesn’t it exclude all other House and Senate staff in a similar situation?
Whether this dispute will make it into the courts, one thing is clear: Duly enacted statutes should not be overridden by executive fiat simply for political expediency. That would truly make ours a nation ruled by men, not laws.


The post Senator Reid’s Special Obamacare Staff Exemption appeared first on The Foundry: Conservative Policy News Blog from The Heritage Foundation.

Video - Hitler Finds Out He Can’t Keep His Doctor Under Obamacare.

Video - Hitler Finds Out He Can’t Keep His Doctor Under Obamacare.HT: Scaramouchee.

Obama administration delays small business exchange again; won’t be ready until late 2014.

Obama administration delays small business exchange again; won’t be ready until late 2014.HT:  Washington Post

The Obama administration is once again delaying the launch of an online small-business health care exchange, pushing the deadline back a full year to November 2014, according to an internal memo obtained by On Small Business.

Consequently, instead of enrolling online through Healthcare.gov, small employers will have to apply through an agent, broker or directly through an insurer to enroll in plans through the new federal marketplace, for at least the next year. Department of Health and Human Services officials say the changes are meant to allow business owners to apply for coverage offline while the agency continues to make improvements to the Web site.
...
“We’ve concluded that we can best serve small employers by continuing this offline process while we concentrate on both creating a smoothly functioning online experience in the SHOP Marketplace,” the agency’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services wrote in the memo distributed to health law stakeholders.Read the full story Here.

Related: 

Second wave of 50 million to 100 million insurance policy cancellations next fall -- right before the mid-term elections. 

Second wave of 50 million to 100 million insurance policy cancellations next fall -- right before the mid-term elections.

Second wave of 50 million to 100 million insurance policy cancellations next fall -- right before the mid-term elections. (Fox News).

A new and independent analysis of ObamaCare warns of a ticking time bomb, predicting a second wave of 50 million to 100 million insurance policy cancellations next fall -- right before the mid-term elections.

The next round of cancellations and premium hikes is expected to hit employees, particularly of small businesses. While the administration has tried to downplay the cancellation notices hitting policyholders on the individual market by noting they represent a relatively small fraction of the population, the swath of people who will be affected by the shake-up in employer-sponsored coverage will be much broader.

An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, shows the administration anticipates half to two-thirds of small businesses would have policies canceled or be compelled to send workers onto the ObamaCare exchanges. They predict up to 100 million small and large business policies could be cancelled next year.

"The impact I'm mostly worried about is on small young, entrepreneurial firms that will suddenly face much higher health insurance premiums if they want to offer health insurance to their employees," said AEI resident scholar Stan Veuger. "I think for a lot of other businesses ... they can just send their employees to the exchanges or offer them a fixed subsidy every month to buy health insurance themselves."

Under the health care law, businesses with fewer than 50 workers do not have to provide health coverage. But if they do, the policies will still have to meet the benefit standards set by ObamaCare. Read the full story here.

Video - Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood Perform 'Obamacare by Morning'.