GOP Returns To ‘Death Panels’ Narrative In Desperate Effort To Change The Medicare Story
Republican Member of Congress, Phil Gingrey (GA), has decided that the moment has arrived to get back on offense in the debate for the future of Medicare.
At a press conference earlier this week, Gingrey returned to one of the GOP’s favorite ‘boogeymen’ in an effort to make us forget just how much we hate the Republican approach to reforming Medicare. He went after the fifteen-member panel of medical experts established by the Affordable Care Act who go by the name the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).
According to Gingrey-
“Democrats like to picture us as pushing grandmother over the cliff or throwing someone under the bus. In either one of those scenarios, at least the senior has a chance to survive.
But under this IPAB we described that the Democrats put in Obamacare, where a bunch of bureaucrats decide whether you get care, such as continuing on dialysis or cancer chemotherapy, I guarantee you when you withdraw that the patient is going to die. It’s rationing.” (Via Politico)
Wow…that does sound scary! In fact, it sounds an awful lot like a …..Death Panel.
Thank goodness that absolutely nothing Gingrey said at his press conference beyond “My name is Phil Gingrey” has even the slightest connection to the truth.
Like it or not, here are the facts –
In order to keep Medicare spending under control, the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare”, established specific target growth rates for the government program that cares for our seniors.
To ensure that these targets are met, the reform law created the IPAB for the purpose of monitoring the growth of Medicare spending and to make recommendations to cut the same in those years where it looks like we are going to blow past the targets – and only in those years.
So, if the growth in Medicare costs is staying within the boundaries set by law, the IPAB has no authority to propose any changes whatsoever.
Why was it necessary to create this panel of experts?
Prior to creation of the IPAB, it was left to Congress to make decisions about who and what should be covered by Medicare.
While Congress has long had their own board of experts to rely on (“Medipac”), the profound influence of special interests combined with a general lack of understanding of the world of medicine – and the economics that rule that world – made it fairly obvious that Congress was not the best place to get the job done.
If you doubt this, simply look at how poorly Congress has managed the growth in Medicare costs to date. And before you blame this on whichever president you would like to put in the crosshairs, you should be very clear that it is, indeed, the job of Congress to make these decisions and manage this policy.
The IPAB was created to solve this problem.
As noted earlier, the board has no statutory impact whatsoever on Medicare payment rates and policy during the years when the spending targets are being met. Their powers only come into play in those years where Medicare actuarial reports suggest we are spending too much money per the restrictions established by Obamacare.
During those years when the board is required to come up with proposals to get spending under control, they will provide these proposals to the DHHS who must then implement them – unless Congress takes it upon itself to come up with their own proposals and pass them into law.
Thus, Congress retains the absolute ability and opportunity to effectuate its own program to bring Medicare costs back in line with the targets any time they wish. Maybe it was me, but I don’t recall Gingrey pointing out this little detail. And there is something else that Representative Gingrey forgot to mention during his tirade. There is an entire list of policy items contained in the ACA that are specifically prohibited to the IPAB.
And what would you imagine is at the top of that list?
The Board is legally barred from proposing anything that will ration health care, restrict benefits or modify the eligibility criteria for beneficiaries.
What’s more, until 2020, the IPAB may not come up with proposals that place the rates being charged by primary hospitals and hospice programs in their sights. This prohibition was the result of the ACA already putting the moves on these organizations when it comes to what the government pays them. Thus, it seemed fair to give them some breathing room for the next eight years or so.
As a result of these inconvenient truths, it is rather difficult to concoct the scenario where Gingrey and friends see this insidious opportunity for the board to ration our health care.
The only argument I can imagine is to suggest that the board could recommend reducing the sums paid to physicians who provide Medicare services to patients. Were this to occur, more physicians might decide to drop out of Medicare, creating a longer waiting period for patients needing to see a doctor.
Of course, even this is not rationing.
Further, the SGR issue is about to become a thing of the past as Congress moves toward reaching a permanent solution to the problem created by an outdated formula that puts physicians in a position of taking major pay cuts from Medicare each year.
Once the physician payment issue is resolved, it becomes hard to see where the IPAB is going to exercise this health rationing Gingrey so fervently fears.
What should disturb each and every American is not only that Gingrey is willing to flat out lie in order to feather his political nest, he is using that lie to pull our attention away from the true health care rationers in our system – the private insurance companies.
Think this is a liberal red herring designed to distract you from the evil government plan to kill grandma?
Ask your physician about the hoops he or she must jump through to gain insurance company approval to do the job you hire them to do. Ask them how much of their time and money is wasted arguing with health insurance company representatives whose sole job is to turn down a requested procedure so that they will not have to pay for the same. Take a look at some of your statements from your insurer and see where they’ve denied payment on any number of technicalities resulting from a contract you signed that you could not possibly understand.
This is the true rationing problem in the United States today.
Still, polls continue to show that many Americans are deeply displeased with Obamacare.
I continue to believe that this is the direct result of so many of us not understanding what the legislation does – and does not – do.
But there is one thing we should all be able to understand.
If the opponents of health care reform and the current approach to Medicare are continuously left to base their arguments solely on lies, should it not occur to us all that maybe the law is better than what we’ve been led believe?
If not, why the lies instead of criticism based on the truth?
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, June 24, 2011
Drug Marketing and Free Speech: U. S. Supreme Court Says Data Mining Trumps Your Medical Privacy
Pharmaceutical companies, which spend billions of dollars a year promoting their products to doctors, have found that it is very useful to know what drugs a doctor has prescribed in the past. Many use data collected from prescriptionsprocessed by pharmacies — a doctor’s name, the drugs and the dosage — to refine their marketing practices and increase sales.
The Supreme Court on Thursday made it harder for states to protect medical privacy with laws that regulate such practices. In 2007, Vermont passed a law that forbade the sale of such records by pharmacies and their use for marketing purposes. The ruling upheld a lower court decision that struck down the law as unconstitutional.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the 6-to-3 majority, said the law violates First Amendment rights by imposing a “burden on protected expression” on specific speakers (drug marketers) and specific speech (information about the doctors and what they prescribed). It is unconstitutional because it restricts the transfer of that information and what the marketers have to say.
In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer explains that the law’s only restriction is on access to data “that could help pharmaceutical companies create better sales messages.” He notes that any speech-related effects are “indirect, incidental, and entirely commercial.” By applying strict First Amendment scrutiny to this ordinary economic regulation, he warns, the court threatens to substitute “judicial for democratic decision-making.”
The law would have been upheld, Justice Breyer says, if the court had treated it as a restriction on commercial speech, which is less robustly protected than political speech. The court’s majority unwisely narrows the gap between commercial and political speech, and makes it harder to protect consumers.
By: Editorial, The New York Times, June 23, 2011
Corporate Tax Cuts Don’t Stimulate Job Growth
Prevailing conservative wisdom dictates that businesses need tax cuts—and investors need capital gains tax cuts—to get the economy moving. But two very well-executed articles on wages and taxes published recently suggest that targeting tax cuts at business executives may do little to improve the dismal unemployment picture.
The Washington Post offers a startling analysis of income disparity, noting that the gap between the very rich and the rest of us has grown dramatically in the past few decades, reaching current levels that have not been seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the Post reports, the top one-tenth of one percent of earners took in more than a tenth of the personal income in the United States. But the moneyed class is not dominated by professional athletes or big-name artistic performers or even hedge fund managers, the Post found. Instead, it is due to a big increase in executive compensation, even as real wages for some of their workers have dropped:
The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms. An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories.
The New York Times has a fascinating story that serves as an unwitting companion piece to the Post story. Corporate executives, the paper reports, are clamoring for a tax holiday to encourage them to bring their offshore profits back to the United States. And the money in question is big, the Times notes: Apple has $12 billion in offshore cash, while Google has $17 billion, and Microsoft, $29 billion. The companies with money sitting offshore argue that if the federal government were to offer them a huge tax break—say, a one-year drop from 35 percent to 5.25 percent—the businesses would bring the money home and operate as a private-sector economic stimulus.
However, the Times notes:
(T)hat’s not how it worked last time. Congress and the Bush administration offered companies a similar tax incentive, in 2005, in hopes of spurring domestic hiring and investment, and 800 took advantage. Though the tax break lured them into bringing $312 billion back to the United States, 92 percent of that money was returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, according to a study by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research.
Who needs a tax cut, then? The U.S. economy is very much consumer-driven; companies aren’t hiring, many business owners say, because people aren’t buying. The past behavior of corporations that have received huge tax cuts has not necessarily been to use the money to hire more people; the Bush-era tax cuts have been in place for a decade, and the unemployment rate is still 9.1 percent. And executive compensation has grown. Executives may feel entitled to earn more and more if their companies are doing well and expanding. But without customers, those companies will go bust.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, JUne 20, 2011
Mitt Romney Is Unemployed: Freeloading Former Government Employee Seeks Handout
Mitt Romney is just like you: He doesn’t have a job. And that’s hilarious!
Mitt Romney sat at the head of the table at a coffee shop here on Thursday, listening to a group of unemployed Floridians explain the challenges of looking for work. When they finished, he weighed in with a predicament of his own.
“I should tell my story,” Mr. Romney said. “I’m also unemployed.”
According to Jeff Zeleny, the room full of unemployed people laughed at this, which would make it the first recorded instance of someone laughing at something Mitt Romney intended to be funny.
But should they have laughed at poor Mitt Romney? Like so many Americans, the longer Mitt Romney has gone without a job, the worse his chances of finding new employment have become. There are not very many openings in his chosen field, and he has no other marketable skills. Poor Mitt Romney is in many respects a modern-day “forgotten man.”
Should Mitt Romney just rest on his laurels, waiting for some government handout? No! In fact, his insistence on getting another job in government is exactly what is preventing him from swallowing his pride and taking any work that is available. He’s too good to work at Walmart now? He should stop looking to Washington for a solution to his problem, get some part-time minimum wage work, and consider going back to school. There are many fine for-profit institutions that offer night courses for adults just like him.
Mitt Romney needs to pick himself up by his bootstraps and quit complaining.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon War Room, June 16, 2011
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