Insurers Push Plans Limiting Patient Choice of Doctors
THE NEW YORK TIMES: As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country’s biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals.

The plans, being tested in places like San Diego, New York and Chicago, are likely to appeal especially to small businesses that already provide insurance to their employees, but are concerned about the ever-spiraling cost of coverage.

But large employers, as well, are starting to show some interest, and insurers and consultants expect that, over time, businesses of all sizes will gravitate toward these plans in an effort to cut costs.

The tradeoff, they say, is that more Americans will be asked to pay higher prices for the privilege of choosing or keeping their own doctors if they are outside the new networks. That could come as a surprise to many who remember the repeated assurances from President Obama and other officials that consumers would retain a variety of health-care choices. >>> Reed Abelson | Saturday, July 17, 2010

Socialized medicine begins here! Consider this the start of the dismantlement of the old system of medicine provision in the States. By the end, the patient’s opinion will matter far less than the doctor’s. The state will control your healthcare and the management thereof. This is the price Americans will pay for being taken in by a smooth talker! – © Mark

Copying the NHS Is the Last Thing the US Should Do
THE TELEGRAPH: The future health care in both countries must involve a mix of state and private provision, says Janet Daley.

Bad idea: Barack Obama has appointed a man as head of the American public healthcare programmes who professes a passion for some of the most discredited features of our NHS. Photo: The Telegraph
This week, the Coalition will offer an example of how coping with an economic crisis may serve a reforming purpose. Having to cut back the power and the expenditure of the state will provide a rationale for dismantling the monolithic, bureaucratic monster that the NHS has become. In his health White Paper, Andrew Lansley will apparently propose sweeping away the command-and-control structure in which clinical decisions are taken and hospital procedures commissioned by Primary Care Trust administrators, rather than by general practitioners who actually come face-to-face with people in need of medical help.

Fine. But if GPs are to inherit all the authority in this system, then it should be possible for patients to choose – and change – their family doctors easily and without recrimination. For, alas, Mr Lansley has decided to pass on the powers that he is confiscating from the abolished PCT mandarins exclusively to doctors rather than to patients. This is a real missed opportunity, but never mind: he is at least facing the right way, devolving decision-making down to levels where it can be done with more responsiveness and sensitivity to individual needs, rather than with the impersonal, blanket uniformity of a target-driven central authority.

The US government, meanwhile, is galloping doggedly in the opposite direction, bizarrely determined to occupy precisely the ideological ground which Britain is abandoning. Barack Obama has, indeed, appointed a man as head of the American public health care programmes who professes a passion (no other word will do) for some of the most discredited features of our NHS. Dr Donald Berwick is to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which effectively means that he will be in charge of Obamacare – the new universal health care system on which the President has staked his political credibility.

The appointment has created an extraordinary kerfuffle, partly because it was made under highly contentious circumstances – as a “recess” appointment which allowed it to bypass Congressional approval – but primarily on account of Dr Berwick’s widely disseminated statements extolling the virtues of the most disliked aspects of state-funded medical care as we know it.

Dr Berwick professes a love (which he describes in ecstatic terms that will have a tragicomic ring to most British ears) of just those evils of a national health system with which we are exasperated: the calculated rationing of treatment, and the ruthless enforcement of uniform cost limits, which often puts the most advanced medication and procedures out of reach of patients whose lives might have been extended or transformed by them. Dr Berwick thinks that our own dear National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) – which is scarcely ever out of the headlines for denying some poor suffering victim a remedy that is available in other countries – is simply wonderful. Continue reading and comment >>> Janet Daley | Saturday, July 10, 2010

Americans will come to rue the day they ever elected B. Hussein Obama into office. He is nothing other than the iPresident. That ‘i’ stands for the Internet, through which he got elected; but it also stands for incompetence, inexperience, insincerity, incapability, irrationality, immaturity, oh and, of course, Islam! – © Mark

The Uphill Battle for Health-Care

US Health Care: 14 States File Lawsuits Over Barack Obama's Reforms
THE TELEGRAPH: In a sign of political battles to come, 14 US states filed lawsuits on Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of health care reform just moments after President Barack Obama signed it into law.

Other states are expected to join the fight against the far-reaching reforms which could place huge burdens on state budgets. Many are also considering legislation to block a provision which requires most people to buy insurance or pay a fine.

"This lawsuit should put the federal government on notice that Florida will not permit the constitutional rights of our citizens and the sovereignty of our state to be ignored or disregarded," said Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum.

Mr McCollum, a Republican who is running for state governor in the upcoming election, said the federal government had no right to impose a "tax on living" by forcing people to buy insurance.

The historic $940-billion overhaul will extend coverage to some 32 million Americans who are currently uninsured, ensuring 95 per cent of US citizens under age 65 will have health insurance.

The lawsuit filed in a Florida federal court calls the reform bill an "unprecedented encroachment" on state sovereignty by requiring states to spend billions on expanding health care coverage to the poor. >>> | Tuesday, March 23, 2010

In Health Care Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality
THE NEW YORK TIMES: For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan. >>> David Leonhardt | Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Obama Signs Health-Care Reform Bill

A Black Day for the US: America Takes Its First Shaky Steps Towards a Socialist State
If you thought this was merely healthcare reform, think again! President Barack Hussein Obama has just managed to pull off the biggest change in American politics – ever.

So now we know for sure what we had suspected all along. Now we know what he was talking about when he spoke about “change we can believe in”. For with this bill, Obama has managed to turn America away from raw capitalism. From now on, America will be working ever so assiduously towards Obama’s dream of a socialist state. Capitalism has seen the failure of the banking sector; and government intervened. We now see government intervening in the health of the nation. This is Obama’s coup de grâce. He has dealt capitalism as we have known it in America its death blow. America will never be the same again.

If you think this healthcare reform will end with this bill, think again. It will not. This health bill will usher in a multitude of changes down the road. All sorts of side industries will spring up in the new nanny state. Health and social workers, for a start, will be legion in years to come. They will interfere in many aspects of a person’s life. Personal responsibility has been dealt a nasty blow with this bill; and Obama knows it.

Furthermore, it will be very difficult to turn back from here, because these will become entitlements. Entitlements, once granted in a democracy are very difficult to take away from the electorate. Politicians depend on the voters to be re-elected, remember?

The cost of this healthcare bill is already astronomical. If you think it will end with this tab, think again. The costs of universal healthcare just increase and increase – always! The government can never find enough money to satisfy the needs of the healthcare system. There will be nurses and supervisors and managers and managers’ managers, and social workers and para-medics, to say nothing of equipment which is becoming evermore sophisticated and evermore expensive. Then there'll be all the free-loaders who will fly to America from abroad to take advantage of the first-rate healthcare that will be available to them – for free! To provide all these resources the healthcare system will need revenue; so, in years to come, taxes will have to increase and increase – steadily.

America has just taken a giant step into the unknown! Now Americans know exactly what change they can believe in. And these seismic changes really do usher in a black day for America. My commiserations. – © Mark Alexander

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PM Report: Obama Tries to Close Health Deal

White House Pushes for Passing of Health Bill

Obama Addresses Health-Care Reform

White House Backs Off Public Healthcare Option
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Obama and officials say it is not 'essential' to the overhaul. Insurance exchanges or cooperatives would be likely to replace it.

Reporting from Washington - The Obama administration signaled Sunday that it was on the verge of abandoning a government-run insurance option in its healthcare overhaul -- a bow to political reality and a big win for insurers.

But some experts said that may not completely relieve pressure on insurers to deliver cost savings.

Both Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on Sunday talk shows that a government insurance option was not essential -- one day after President Obama himself said as much.

Private-sector options, such as insurance exchanges or cooperatives, would be likely to replace it. Obama already has proposed forming exchanges -- virtual marketplaces where private insurers would compete for consumers' business. And co-ops would allow consumers to band together to negotiate coverage.

Sebelius told CNN's "State of the Union" that a public option is "not the essential element" of healthcare overhaul, but that lowering insurance costs and preventing insurers from dumping customers for preexisting conditions or for exceeding coverage caps are must-haves.

"I think there will be a competitor to private insurers," she said. "That's really the essential part, is you don't turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing."

Gibbs agreed, describing the "bottom line" for the president: "What we have to have is choice and competition in the insurance market."

Obama continues to believe that "the option of a government plan is the best way to provide choice and competition," Gibbs said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

But if there are other means to achieve that, Gibbs said, "the president will be satisfied." >>> Andrew Zajac | Monday, August 17, 2009

Americans Are Better Off Without an NHS
THE TELEGRAPH: A propaganda war is masking the real problems over health care reform, says Toby Harnden.

If Stephen Hawking had been treated in Britain, he would not have survived to be awarded his Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama yesterday, because the NHS "would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless". That was the thundering verdict of the Investor's Business Daily on our National Health Service and Mr Obama's plans to introduce what Republicans term "socialised medicine".

It was, as scientists sometimes say, a beautiful hypothesis destroyed by a single ugly fact. Professor Hawking, who is completely paralysed by motor neurone disease, has been treated by the NHS throughout his 67 years, and points out indignantly that he would not have lived without its care.

Much of the conservative contribution to the health care debate raging in the United States, which is dominating a long, hot summer, has been as misguided as that newspaper editorial. With the battle lines drawn, and President Obama staking his credibility on achieving a comprehensive reform that delivers health insurance to the tens of millions without it, Democratic members of Congress are facing the wrath and anxiety of their constituents – who are being urged on by opponents of reform.

Sarah Palin, who recently resigned as Alaska's governor but remains the darling of rural conservatives, invoked the spectre of a "death panel" pronouncing on whether her baby Trig, who has Down's syndrome, should be allowed to live.

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa suggested that this was what happened in Britain. "I've heard several senators say that Ted Kennedy with a brain tumour, being 77 years old … if he were in England, would not be treated… when you get to be 77, your life is considered less valuable under those systems," he said.

In a television ad from the Club for Growth pressure group, a narrator intones portentously as images of Big Ben and the Union flag appear on the screen: "$22,750. In England, government health officials decided that's how much six months of life is worth. Under their socialised system, if a medical treatment costs more, you're out of luck. That's wrong for America." Cue the Statue of Liberty and the Stars and Stripes.

The figure comes from Britain's National Institute for Clinical Evidence, which evaluates treatments in terms of the average increase in life expectancy. If the cost of prolonging someone's life for a year exceeds more than £30,000, then the NHS will not pay for that treatment. In other words, although there are no "death panels", the fundamental point is correct. The NHS does decide that some treatments are too expensive. And if that means you die? Our condolences, says the Government. >>> Toby Harnden | sday, August 12, 2009

Betsy McCaughey Exposes Obama Healthcare Lies

Obama on Single Payer Health Insurance