Anti-Republican ad: Paul Ryan pushes elderly lady off a cliff.
Doctors answer with their own ad: Obama pushes elderly lady off a cliff.
Study: bigger hospitals drive costs up.
Michelle Obama caught eating a cheeseburger – again. Food police upset.
There are now 300,000 OTC medicines and ingredients available for sale in the US.
It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election.
But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.
The money is to come from funds that Health and Human Services is allowed to use for “demonstration projects.” But to make it legal, HHS has to pretend that it’s doing an “experiment” to study the effect of this money on the insurance market.
That is, to “study” what happens when the government doesn’t change anything but merely continues a program that’s been going on for years.
Obama can temporarily prop up Medicare Advantage long enough to get re-elected by exploiting an obscure bit of federal law. Under a 1967 statute, the HHS secretary can spend money without specific approval by Congress on “experiments” directly aimed at “increasing the efficiency and economy of health services.”
Full editorial by Ben Sasse and Charles Hurt. More from theAssociated Press:
In a rebuke to the Obama administration, government auditors are calling for the cancellation of an $8 billion Medicare program that congressional Republicans have criticized as a political ploy.
Also see Benjamin Domenech’s discussion of the topic.
The International Monetary Fund asks what would happen if life expectancy by 2050 turns out to be three years longer than current projected in government and private retirement plans:
[I]f individuals live three years longer than expected–in line with underestimations in the past–the already large costs of aging could increase by another 50 percent, representing an additional cost of 50 percent of 2010 GDP in advanced economies and 25 percent of 2010 GDP in emerging economies. … [F]or private pension plans in the United States, such an increase in longevity could add 9 percent to their pension liabilities. Because the stock of pension liabilities is large, corporate pension sponsors would need to make many multiples of typical annual pension contributions to match these extra liabilities.
HT: Timothy Taylor in the Conversable Economist blog.
Medicare, in almost every instance, is the primary payer for medical services for people 65 and older and some of the disabled. But in some cases, such as auto accidents, on-the-job injuries or slip-and-fall accidents, Medicare becomes the secondary payer. It may be billed first and pay for the immediate care — but the medical costs are really somebody else’s primary responsibility. So Medicare has the right to recoup them from the responsible party.
For instance, if a senior is injured in a car accident, the hospital bills Medicare. But if there’s a settlement, or if the case goes to court and a person is awarded damages, Medicare has a right to recoup at least some of what it paid. The settlement also must take into account future Medicare costs that could arise from the condition or injury.
And it’s at this point, Farber and others say, that the process breaks down, leaving attorneys, Medicare beneficiaries and businesses in the lurch. Legal settlements stall.
More from Matt Dobias in POLITICO.
Oregon has been in the forefront of trying to make sure a person has as much control over the end of his or her life as possible. The state pioneered a form known as a POLST, for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment, that has been adopted by 14 states and is being considered in 20 more. The form offers many more detailed options than a simple “do not resuscitate” directive.
Now EMTs and doctors can access the state database to see if someone wants to be resuscitated.
“We have really learned that this is not a black and white process,” says [Dr. Susan Tolle of the Oregon Center for Ethics in Health Care]. “Less than 10 percent of people wanted to refuse all treatment. A majority want some things and not other things.”
More from Kristian Foden-Vencil in the Kaiser Health News.
Source: New England Journal of Medicine. HT to Don Taylor, who provides an interesting discussion.
In a review of her previous claims, the Washington Post fact-checker gave presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann, two Pinocchios for the following statement:
“Senior citizens get this more than any other segment of our population, because they know in Obamacare the president of the United States took away $500 billion — a half-trillion dollars — out of Medicare, shifted it to Obamacare to pay for younger people.”
The Post went on to explain why it thought the statement was inaccurate…
The Medicare savings in the health-care law are aimed at providers, not seniors; meanwhile, seniors stand to benefit from aspects of the health-care law that Republicans want to repeal.
The Medicare chief actuary would seem to agree with Bachmann. In his illustrative alternative report, Richard Foster explained that under the impending cuts to the Medicare program, one in seven hospitals that treat Medicare patients would be insolvent; Medicare reimbursements would fall below Medicaid levels, causing seniors to increasingly have difficulty finding providers who will treat them.
Valid data show that surgeries on older patients are successful. A 2003 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology followed 220 patients age 65 and older who underwent heart-valve surgery. The study concluded that “age does not appear to limit the health related quality of life benefits” of surgery. Even patients over 75 had symptom relief and improvements in quality of life “on a par with improvements seen in younger patients.”
The California study, published in February in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found higher death rates from pneumonia, congestive heart failure, stroke, gastrointestinal hemorrhage and hip fractures at low-spending hospitals. The study’s authors calculated that 13,813 California patients treated for these conditions between 2004 and 2008 would have survived had they been treated at higher-spending ones hospitals rather than low-spending ones.
The Pennsylvania study produced similar results, showing higher survival rates at higher-spending hospitals.
See full article on The Wall Street Journal. Full study here.
In a parody playing on the Medicare handbook that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) publishes each year that gives seniors information about changes to the program, U.S. Senators and doctors Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) and John Barrasso, M.D. (R-WY) released their own “Medicare and You 2012” handbook that provides a doctors’ perspective about the real challenges facing the Medicare program under President Obama’s health care law.
[C]hanges included in the so-called “Affordable Care Act” drastically cut payments to Medicare Advantage plans starting in 2013, driving many MA plans out of business, and forcing the surviving plans to slash benefits. According to a recent study I wrote with Michael Ramlet, these cuts will cause the beneficiaries in the average county (MA plans are offered on a county-level basis) to lose two-thirds of their MA plan choices by the time the new payment formula is fully phased in in 2017….
The average beneficiary — considering both those who stay in the stripped-down MA program, and those who transition out of it — will incur an average cut of more than $3,700 in benefits per year by 2017.
The decline in both plan offerings and in enrollment will vary substantially across the country. In Texas, for example, beneficiaries will face an average loss of more than three quarters of plan offerings per county by 2017….
The percentage of beneficiaries pushed out of the program ranges from 38 percent in Montana to a 67 percent in Washington, D.C., and 84 percent in Puerto Rico. Average benefit losses range from a low of $2,780 in Montana to a high of $5,092 in Louisiana.
Full Robert Book post here. See our previous posts here and here.
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