Category Archives: Sen. Amy Klobuchar

What the Trump budget says about the administration’s health priorities; The Dems and Bloomberg and More on the Corona Virus

As Michael Bloomberg continues to attempt to buy the Primaries and the Elections let us look at Trump’s new budget and its effect on health care. University of Pennsylvania Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Simon F. Haeder reported that the Trump administration recently released its budget blueprint for the 2021 fiscal year, the first steps in the complex budgetary process.

The final budget will reflect the input of Congress, including the Democratic House of Representatives, and will look significantly different.

However, budget drafts by presidential administrations are not meaningless pages of paper. They are important policy documents highlighting goals, priorities and visions for the future of the country.

As a health care expert, I find the vision brought forward by the Trump administration deeply concerning. Cuts to virtually all important health-related programs bode ill for nations future. To make things worse, ancillary programs that are crucial for good health are also on the chopping block. To be sure, most of the proposed damage will find it hard to pass muster with Congress. Yet given the nation’s ever-growing debt Congress may soon be amenable to rolling back the nation’s health safety net.

Rolling back the ACA and the safety net

To no one’s surprise, some of the biggest cuts in the proposed budget focus on health care programs. The budget document uses a number of terms to disguise its true intentions. Yet a closer look indicates that terms like “rightsizing government,” “advancing the President’s health reform vision,” “modernizing Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program,” and “reforming welfare programs” all come down to the same end result: cuts to the safety net.

One of the main targets remains the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. In 2017, after several failed attempts to repeal and replace the ACA, the Trump administration has scaled back its open hostility. Instead of asking directly to repeal the ACA, this year’s budget proposal calls for initiatives to “advance the president’s health reform vision,” by cutting more than half a trillion dollars from the budget.

These initiatives come on top of actions the Trump administration has already taken to roll back the Affordable Care Act, including the repeal of the individual mandate penalty, severely limiting outreach and enrollment efforts, and creating a parallel insurance market by expanding the roles of short-term, limited duration and association health plans.

The Trump administration has also targeted Medicaid, the nation’s largest safety net program serving mostly low-income Americans, pregnant women, children, the disabled and those in need of long-term care, as well as its cousin, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Overall “modernization” for these two programs alone would entail cuts of almost US$200 billion.

Medicare, the program serving America’s seniors, technically would not undergo significant restructuring. However, “streamlining” and “eliminating waste” would reduce the program by more than half a trillion dollars or 6%. All put together, cuts to the ACA, Medicaid and Medicare will exceed a trillion dollars over a decade. Coverage losses, mostly affecting lower-income Americans, would range in the millions of dollars.

Health is more than just medical care

In the U.S, we often equate health with access to medical care. However, researchers have long recognized that medical care contributes only about 10% to 20% to the health of individuals.

One crucial component of good health is access to education. However, the Trump budget includes cuts of more than $300 billion across the entire education spectrum from Head Start to grants that support college education. This just doesn’t make any sense!

Access to food and nutrition also plays a major role in maintaining good health. However, two programs providing important food security to millions of Americans would face significant cuts. For one, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which supplements food budgets for 34 million Americans with an annual budget of $58 billion, is slated for $22 billion in cuts over a decade. There are also cuts exceeding $2 billion over a decade to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which reaches more than 6 million Americans with an annual budget of $6.4 billion.

Cuts to nutritional benefits would be further compounded by a 15.2% reduction to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The department provides a range of housing assistance programs to needy individuals. Moreover, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program which provides cash benefits to needy families, faces 10% in cuts. Again, this doesn’t make any sense!

A healthy environment and access to clean air and water unquestionably are crucial to living a healthy life. However, the proposed budget would trim spending on the agency tasked with protecting the nation’s environment, the Environmental Protection Agency, by more than 40%, or $36 billion.

A myriad of public health crises has been slowly but steadily harming communities all across the country. Much of the attention has been garnered by the devastating opioid crisis. More recently, the coronavirus and the seasonal flu epidemic have caught the headlines. Yet, there are countless other epidemics harming communities around the country including syphilis, hepatitis C and gonorrhea. Yet the nation’s major public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control, would see its budget decline by 9%.

The Trump administration is also proposing to significantly reduce funding for health-related research programs. One target is the National Science Foundation, which would see a reduction by 6.5%. Moreover, the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier medical research agency, is set for 7.2% in cuts. Both agencies play crucial roles in positioning the nation to tackle current and future health challenges. Do any of these budget cuts make any sense?

A blueprint for the future?

Since the Kennedy administration, taxes have generally been cut and only rarely increased. Particularly large tax cuts under the George W. Bush administration, without commensurate budget cuts, have created a systemic imbalance in the federal budget. This imbalance was further exacerbated by the recent tax cuts under the Trump administration.

So far, we have been able to stall the eventual reckoning because of strong economic growth and our ability to borrow heavily. Eventually, it seems inevitable that this massive imbalance will catch up with us.

Faced with the choice to either raise taxes or cut programs, Congress may choose the latter. With defense spending largely untouchable, health programs and other social support systems will likely bear the brunt.

Democrats Get Personal on Healthcare

Shannon Firth reported that the Democratic presidential candidates engaged in one of the most brutal and bruising fights to date, attacking each other’s integrity and physical fitness while still reserving time to tear into each other’s healthcare plans.

The debate took place in Las Vegas, with caucuses in Nevada only a few days away, and was broadcast by NBC/MSNBC.

Ahead of the debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, was leading nearly every poll according to RealClearPolitics.

In addition to Sanders, participants included former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

Sanders’ health came under scrutiny in the wake of his October 2019 heart attack and stent placements.

When asked whether he would offer voters “full transparency” around his medical records, he was quick to point out that Bloomberg also has two stents. Sanders then said he had released the “full report” of his heart attack and decades of records from the attending physicians on Capitol Hill. (Last month, though, cardiologist Anthony Pearson, MD, noted that the recent report didn’t include Sanders’ left ventricular ejection fraction, a key indicator of cardiac function.)

In addition, two “leading Vermont cardiologists” had also released reports stating that he is “more than able to deal with the stress and the vigor of being president of the United States,” Sanders said, challenging anyone who doubts his stamina to “follow me around the campaign trail.”

Buttigieg quipped that Sanders was in “fighting shape,” but continued to stress the need for transparency.

When President Obama was in office the standard, he was to release “the read out” after a physical. While President Trump lowered that bar, Buttigieg said it should be raised.

“I am certainly prepared to get a physical, put out the results,” he said, “and I think everybody here should be willing to do the same.”

‘A PowerPoint,’ a ‘Post-It,’ and a ‘Good Start’

When it came to healthcare reform plans, Warren took aim at each of the other candidates.

Buttigieg has a “slogan” dreamed up by consultants, she said. “It’s not a plan, it’s a PowerPoint,” referring to Buttigieg’s “Medicare for All Who Want It.”

Buttigieg’s plan, which includes a public option, would initially preserve the role of private insurers, but later serve as a “glide path to Medicare for All.”

She likened Klobuchar’s plan, which also involves a public option, to a “a Post-It Note, ‘Insert plan here,'” then she took aim at Sanders’ more comprehensive plan. Although she had endorsed it in the first debate, this time she called it merely “a good start” that leaves gaping holes in how it would be implemented.

As candidate’s hands shot, with each rebuke, signaling a request to defend themselves, Warren shared her own vision for healthcare reform.

“[W]e need as much help for as many people as quickly as possible and bring in as many supporters as we can. And if we don’t get it all the first time,” presumably here she’s referring to a complete transition to a single-payer system, “… take the win and come back into the fight and ask for more,” Warren said.

Medicare for All has been a particular point of contention in Nevada, where the powerful Culinary Workers Union has been vocal in opposing any plan that takes away its members’ negotiated healthcare coverage. (The union declined to endorse any candidates in the state’s caucuses.) Asked about it in Wednesday’s debate, Sanders said, “I will never sign a bill that will reduce the healthcare benefits that they have, we will only expand it for them, for every union in America and for the working class of this country.”

Buttigieg, however, suggested that Sanders hadn’t been listening. “This idea that the union members don’t know what’s good for them is the exact kind of condescension and arrogance that makes people skeptical of the policies we’ve been putting forward.”

At another point, Biden took a shot at Bloomberg for having attacked the Affordable Care Act during a 2010 speech.

Bloomberg countered that he was in fact “a fan” of the landmark law. “I was in favor of it, I thought it didn’t… go as far as we should,” he said.

Now, his position is that Obamacare should be preserved and strengthened. “We shouldn’t just walk away and start something that is totally new, untried. People depend on this,” he said. One of his first moves as president would be to “bring back those things” that President Trump eliminated.

Other features of Bloomberg’s plan include a public option, caps on healthcare prices, and elimination of “surprise medical bills.” The overall goal is to achieve universal coverage while preserving private insurance.

Bloomberg To Grieving Family: Elderly Cancer Patients Are Too Expensive

Peter Hasson of the National Interest reported that Billionaire and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg said in a 2011 video that elderly cancer patients should be denied treatment in order to cut health care costs.

“All of these costs keep going up, nobody wants to pay any more money, and at the rate we’re going, health care is going to bankrupt us,” said Bloomberg, who was then New York City’s mayor.

“We’ve got to sit here and say which things we’re going to do, and which things we’re not, nobody wants to do that. Y’know, if you show up with prostate cancer, you’re 95 years old, we should say, ‘Go and enjoy. Have a nice [inaudible]. Live a long life. There’s no cure, and we can’t do anything.’ If you’re a young person, we should do something about it,” Bloomberg said in the video.

“Society’s not ready to do that yet,” he added.

Bloomberg made the comments while visiting a grieving family whose brother had died after reportedly waiting 73 hours in an emergency room.

His presidential campaign didn’t return a request for comment.

The New York billionaire has faced increased scrutiny over past statements as he has continued to rise in Democratic primary polls.

Fake Facts Are Flying About Coronavirus. Now There’s A Plan to Debunk Them

We have been hearing all sorts of information regarding the Corona Virus and I thought that I would share some of the Fake Facts and some of the truths. Malaka Gharib reported that the coronavirus outbreak has sparked what the World Health Organization is calling an “infodemic” — an overwhelming amount of information on social media and websites. Some of it’s accurate. And some is downright untrue.

The false statements range from a conspiracy theory that the virus is a man-made bioweapon to the claim that more than 100,000 have died from the disease (as of this week, the number of reported fatalities is reported at 2,200-plus).

WHO is fighting back? In early January, a few weeks after China reported the first cases, the U.N. agency launched a pilot program to make sure the facts about the newly identified virus are communicated to the public. The project is called EPI-WIN — short for WHO Information Network for Epidemics.

“We need a vaccine against misinformation,” said Dr. Mike Ryan, head of WHO’s health emergencies program, at a WHO briefing on the virus earlier this month.

The Coronavirus Outbreak
What you should know

Where the virus has spread
Coronavirus 101
Coronavirus FAQs

While this is not the first health crisis that has been characterized by online misinformation — it happened with Ebola, for example — researchers are especially concerned because this outbreak is centered in China. The world’s most populous country has the largest market of Internet users globally: 21% of the world’s 3.8 billion Internet users are in China.

And fake news can spread quickly online. A 2018 study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that “false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does.” The reason, say the researchers, may be that the untrue statements inspire strong feelings such as fear, disgust and surprise.

This dynamic could cause fake coronavirus cures and treatments to fan out widely on social media — and as a result, worsen the impact of the outbreak, says Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Over the past decade, he has been tracking the effect of digital technology on issues such as global health and economic development.

The rumors offer remedies that have no basis in science. One untrue statement suggests that rubbing sesame oil on the skin will block the coronavirus.

If segments of the public turn to false treatments rather than follow the advice of trusted sources for avoiding illness (like frequent hand-washing with soap and water), it could cause “the disease to travel further and faster than it ordinarily would have,” says Chakravorti.

There could be a political agenda behind the fake coronavirus news as well. Countries that are antagonistic toward China could try to hijack the conversation in hopes of creating chaos and eroding trust in the authorities, says Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux, research director for Harvard Belfer Center’s Security and Global Health Project.

“Disinformation that specifically targets your health system or your leaders who are trying to manage an emergency is a way of destroying, undermining, disrupting your health system,” she says.

In the instance of vaccines, Russian bots have been identified as fueling skepticism about the effectiveness of vaccination for childhood diseases in the U.S.

The World Health Organization’s EPI-WIN team believes that the countermeasure for misinformation and disinformation is simply to tell the truth.

It works rapidly to debunk unjustified medical claims on social media. In a series of bright blue graphics posted on Instagram, EPI-WIN states categorically that neither sesame oil nor breathing in the smoke of fire or fireworks will kill the new coronavirus.

Part of this truth-telling strategy involves enlisting large-scale employers.

The approach, says Melinda Frost, an officer on the EPI-WIN team, is based on the idea that employers are the most trusted institution in society, a finding reflected in a 2020 study on global trust from the public relations firm Edelman: “People tend to trust their employers more than they trust several other sources of information.”

Over the past few weeks, Frost and her team have been organizing rounds of conference calls with representatives from Fortune 500 companies and other multinational corporations in sectors such as health, travel and tourism, food and agriculture, and business.

The company representatives share questions that their employees might have about the coronavirus outbreak — for example, is it safe to go to conferences? The EPI-WIN team gathers the frequently asked questions, has their experts answer them within a few days, and then sends the responses back to the companies to distribute in internal newsletters and other communication.

Because the information is coming from their employer, says Frost, the hope is that people will be more likely to believe what they hear and pass the information on to their family and community.

Bourdeaux at Harvard calls this approach a “smart move.”

It borrows from “advertising techniques from the 1950s,” she adds. “They’re establishing the narrative before anybody else can. They are going on offense, saying, ‘Here are the facts.’ “

WHO is also collaborating with tech giants like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and TikTok to limit the spread of harmful rumors? It’s pursuing a similar tactic with Chinese digital companies such as Baidu, Tencent and Weibo.

“We are asking them to filter out false information and promote accurate information from credible sources like WHO, CDC [the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and others. And we thank them for their efforts so far,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, in a briefing earlier this month.

Google and Twitter, for example, now actively bump up credible sources such as WHO and the CDC in search results for the term “coronavirus.” And Facebook has deployed fact-checkers to remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories about the outbreak. Kang-Xing Jin, head of health at Facebook, wrote in a statement about one such rumor that it has eliminated from its platform: that drinking bleach cures coronavirus.

Chakravorti applauds WHO’s coordination with the digital companies — but says he’s particularly impressed with Facebook’s efforts. “This is a radical departure from Facebook’s past record, including its controversial insistence on permitting false political ads,” he wrote in an op-ed in Bloomberg News.

[Facebook and Twitter did not respond to requests from NPR for comments. Facebook is one of NPR’s financial sponsors.]

Still, there is no silver bullet to fighting health misinformation. It has become “very, very difficult to fight effectively,” says Chakravorti of Tufts University.

A post making a false claim about coronavirus can just “jump platforms,” he says. “So you might have Facebook taking down a post, but then the post finds its way on Twitter, then it jumps from Twitter to YouTube.”

In addition to efforts by WHO and other organizations, individuals are doing their part.

On Wednesday, The Lancet published a statement from 27 public health scientists addressing rumors that the coronavirus had been engineered in a Wuhan lab: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin …. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”

Dr. Deliang Tang, a molecular epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, says his friends from medical school and his research colleagues in China find it difficult to trust Chinese health authorities, especially after police reprimanded the eight Chinese doctors who warned others about a pneumonialike disease in December.

As a result, Tang’s network in China has been looking to him and others in the scientific community to share information.

Since the outbreak began, Tang says he has been answering “30 to 50 questions a night.” Many want to fact-check rumors or learn about clinical trials for a potential cure.

“My real work starts at 7 p.m.,” he says — morning in China.

And the latest news on the Corona virus: Coronavirus update: 80,238 cases, 2,700 deaths; CDC warns Americans to prepare for disruption

And: Harvard scientist predicts coronavirus will infect up to 70 percent of humanity

Physicians Get Weed Killer; Administrators Get Miracle-Gro And neither is helping, Obamacare Funding Suggestions, Andrew Lang, Year in Review and Google Searches

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Last week Suneel Dhand reported that compared to a couple of years ago, very little has changed in the hospital medical community.

In fact, I’m sure the divergence of the curves has only grown bigger, as more and more administrators are added to the ranks of healthcare. Look at what happened in Chicago where one of the fairly large hospitals fired 15 of their physicians and replaced them with 15 nurse practitioners last year, and in Texas 27 pediatricians at a chain of clinics in the Dallas area lost their jobs and were replaced by nurse practitioners.

Quite often in life, the answers to some of the biggest questions we have, are staring us right in the face and incredibly simple. Healthcare can never be fixed unless we radically simplify everything and strip away the unnecessary complexities in our fragmented system. The divergence of the above lines, however, actually represents so much more than just an obnoxious visual. It actually symbolizes what happens when any organization, system, or even country, becomes top-heavy and loses sight of what is happening at the front lines. And in the end, it eventually collapses under its own weight.

When this happens in America, we cannot predict, but consider this: The amount we spend on healthcare would be the 4th largest economy in the world if it stood alone (at $3.5 trillion, only China and Japan have a higher total GDP). With an aging population, increasing chronic comorbidities, and expensive new treatments, if costs are not reined in, healthcare expenditure could account for a third of the entire GDP in about 25 years. A figure that will quite simply destroy the American economy.

It would be one thing if all the administration and bureaucracy was actually resulting in an improved and more efficient healthcare system. But look around you folks. Acute physician shortages now plague every state. Millions of people find it impossible to find a primary care doctor. Certain specialties are now booking out appointments months in advance. ERs and hospitals are overflowing. And in the end, patients are still facing soaring out of pocket expenses.

The last 20 years have witnessed the consolidation and corporatization of the entire U.S. healthcare system. Sold initially as a way to reign in costs, I am yet to see any evidence that it’s done anything other than dramatically increase costs (please feel free to forward me any financial analysis if I’m wrong). And why should that be a surprise to anyone?

I’ll leave you to stare once again at the above graph for a minute or two, and take in a comment that a distinguished physician colleague of mine recently made: “It’s like the physicians have been given weed killer and the administrators have been given Miracle-Gro.”

Affordable Care Act funding in question after health insurance taxes repealed

The Cadillac Tax, Health Insurance Tax and Medical Device Tax were recently repealed, raising questions over how the Affordable Care Act will be funded in the future. Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani joins Adam Shapiro, Julie Hyman and Dan Howley during On the Move to break it all down.

Andrew Yang Has The Most Conservative Health Care Plan In The Democratic Primary

Daniel Marans of the Huff Post pointed out that Entrepreneur Andrew Yang has had unexpected staying power in the Democratic presidential primary thanks in part to the enthusiasm for his plan to provide every American with a basic income of $1,000 a month.

But the boldness of his signature idea only serves to underscore the unambitiousness of the health care plan he released earlier this month.

In fact, Yang’s health plan, which he bills as an iteration of the left’s preferred “Medicare for All” policy, is more conservative than proposals introduced by the candidates typically identified as moderate.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota all at least call for the creation of a public health insurance option that would be available to every American. (Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts favor Medicare for All, which would move all Americans on to one government-run insurance plan ― though the two senators disagree on the timeline for implementing the idea.)

In terms of expanding health insurance coverage, Yang says on his website merely that he would “explore” allowing the employees of companies that already provide health insurance the chance to buy into Medicare.

“We need to give more choice to employers and employees in a way that removes barriers for businesses to grow,” Yang writes.

Under Yang’s plan, people employed by businesses that do not provide insurance, or who are self-employed, would continue to purchase coverage on the exchanges created by former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

The decision not to focus on expanding coverage distinguishes Yang dramatically from his competitors. And in the foreword to his plan, he explains that that is a deliberate choice, since enacting single-payer health care is “not a realistic strategy.”

“We are spending too much time fighting over the differences between Medicare for All, ‘Medicare for All Who Want It,’ and ACA expansion when we should be focusing on the biggest problems that are driving up costs and taking lives,” he writes. “We need to be laser focused on how to bring the costs of coverage down by solving the root problems plaguing the American healthcare system.”

When asked about how Yang plans to expand health insurance coverage ― 27 million Americans remain entirely uninsured and millions more have insurance that is so threadbare they do not use it ― Yang’s campaign referred HuffPost to his website.

Yang would increase health care access through reforms designed to reduce the health care system’s underlying costs, according to his campaign. On his website, he divides those reforms into six categories: bringing down the cost of prescription drugs through bulk negotiation; investing in waste-saving health care technologies; realigning medical providers’ “incentives” away from waste and abuse; increasing investment in preventive and end-of-life health care; making the provision of health care more “comprehensive”; and reducing the influence of lobbyists on the political system.

Yang implies that his rivals have sacrificed cost control in the name of expanding coverage. But when it comes to the specifics, Yang’s competitors have already gotten behind many of the ideas he is proposing ― and sometimes take them a step further.

For example, Buttigieg has a provision in his health care plan that would prohibit “surprise billing” ― the practice of providing unwitting patients with a large bill after a medical procedure when a doctor who performed it is not in the hospital’s insurance network. Yang does not mention the practice in his health care plan.

One provision of Yang’s plan that genuinely sets him apart is his plan to encourage the replacement of the fee-for-service billing model for doctors with salaries. The latter model is supposed to cut back on duplicative practices and foster more holistic care. Other elements of his plan, such as “incentivizing” gym memberships, healthy eating and bike commuting as a form of preventive health care, have drawn eye rolls from leftists who regard the ideas as paternalistic.

First and foremost, though, many progressives are likely to find fault with Yang’s plan, because they consider his use of the term “Medicare for All” misleading.

For months on the campaign trail, Yang claimed that he supported Medicare for All, though not the provision of Sanders’ bill ― and its companion in the House ― requiring people with private insurance to enroll in an expanded Medicare program.

He even aired a television ad casting his commitment to the policy as a reflection of his experience as the father of a special needs child.

Yang says on his campaign website that he is still firmly committed to the “spirit” of Medicare for All. But now that he has introduced a plan of his own, that claim is harder to defend.

Yet the Yang campaign is plowing full-steam ahead with its appropriation of the term in a new 30-second ad, “Caring.”

“If my husband, Andrew Yang, is president, he’ll fight for Medicare for All with mental health coverage,” Yang’s wife, Evelyn, says in the ad.

Fate of Obamacare uncertain amid tax repeals, lawsuits and Medicare-for-all push consider that Democrats seize on anti-Obamacare ruling to steamroll GOP in 2020

Alice Miranda Ollstein and James Arkin reported that a court ruling last week putting the Affordable Care Act further in jeopardy may provide the opening Democrats have been waiting for to regain the upper hand on health care against Republicans in 2020.

At the most recent Democratic presidential debate, candidates largely avoided discussing the lawsuit or Republicans’ years-long efforts to dismantle Obamacare, and instead continued their intra-party battle over Medicare for All.

But Senate Democrats, Democratic candidates and outside groups backing them immediately jumped on the news of the federal appeals court ruling — blasting out ads and statements reminding voters of Republicans’ votes to repeal the 2010 health care law, support the lawsuit and confirm the judges who may bring about Obamacare’s demise.

“I think it’s an opportunity to reset with the New Year to remind people that there’s a very real threat to tens of millions of Americans,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview. “We Democrats are always striving to improve the system, but, at a minimum, the American people expect us to protect what they already have.”

In 2018, Democrats won the House majority and several governorships largely on a message of protecting Obamacare and its popular protections for preexisting conditions. This year continued the trend, with Kentucky’s staunchly anti-Obamacare governor, Matt Bevin, losing to Democratic now-Gov. Andy Beshear.

The landscape in 2020 may be more challenging for Democrats than it was in 2018, when Republicans had more recently voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Republicans also say they now have more ammunition to push back on Democrats’ arguments with the party’s divisions over single-payer health care, which would replace Obamacare, shaping the presidential race.

Moreover, the appeals court’s ruling — which in all likelihood punted any final disposition on the case until after the 2020 elections — eliminates what some Republicans saw as a nightmare scenario: If the court had embraced a lower court ruling striking down the law in its entirety, it would have put the issue before the Supreme Court during the heat of the election, putting tens of millions of Americans’ health insurance at risk.

Still, Democrats believe they can win the political battle over health care, especially in Senate races. At least a half-dozen GOP senators are up for reelection, and Democrats need to net three seats to win back control of the chamber if they also win back the presidency. Democratic strategists and candidates are eager to run a health care playbook that mirrors that of the party’s House takeover in 2018, and say Republicans are uniquely vulnerable after admitting this year that they have no real plan for dealing with the potential fallout of courts striking down Obamacare.

Within a day of the ruling, the pro-Obamacare advocacy group Protect Our Care cut a national TV and digital ad featuring images of Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), warning that if the lawsuit succeeds, “135 million Americans with preexisting conditions will be stripped of protections, 20 million Americans will lose coverage and costs will go up for millions more.”

Other state-based progressive groups told POLITICO they’re readying their own ads going after individual Senate Republicans over the 5th Circuit’s ruling.

Protect Our Care director Brad Woodhouse predicts that it’s just a preview of the wave of attention the issue will get in the months ahead, as Democratic candidates and outside groups alike hammer the GOP on the threat their lawsuit poses to Obamacare.

“If there is one issue in American politics that is going to flip the Senate from Republican to Democratic in 2020, it’s this issue,” he said. “Our message is simple: President [Donald] Trump and Republicans are in court right now, suing to take away the ACA, take away your health care. And if Cory Gardner or Thom Tillis or any of them don’t think that’s an indefensible position, they should ask the 40-plus House Republicans who lost their seats in 2018.”

More than a dozen Republican state attorneys general, backed by the Trump administration, have been arguing in federal court for more than a year that Congress rendered the entire Affordable Care Act untenable when they voted as part of the 2017 tax bill to drop the penalty for not buying insurance down to zero. A district judge in Texas sided with them last year in a sweeping ruling declaring all of Obamacare unconstitutional.

Last week, an appeals court agreed that the elimination of the penalty made the individual mandate unconstitutional, but sent the case back down to the district court to decide whether any of the law could be separated out and preserved. The move all but guarantees the case won’t reach the Supreme Court until after the election, but it maintains the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the health law that experts say drives up the cost of insurance.

Though no one is in danger of losing their health coverage imminently, Democratic challengers in nearly every Senate battleground race, including Arizona, North Carolina, Maine and Iowa, jumped on the court ruling as an opportunity to attack Republicans on health care.

“Democrats have been in the fight to ensure that people across this country have access to affordable health care,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, the chair of the DSCC. “This opinion does not help the Republicans.”

Sara Gideon, Democrats’ preferred candidate in Maine to take on Collins, called the lawsuit a “direct threat to the protections countless Mainers and Americans depend on. She has been reminding voters that Collins’ vote on the 2017 tax reform law triggered the ACA lawsuit in the first place, and she voted to confirm one of the 5th Circuit judges that recently sided with the Trump administration’s arguments against the law.

Unlike the vast majority of her GOP colleagues in the upper chamber, Collins has spoken up against the lawsuit. She has written multiple times to Attorney General Bill Bar, urging him to defend the ACA in court. Collins told POLITICO the day after the ruling that it was “significant” that the 5th Circuit judges were clearly “very uneasy with the thought of striking down the entire law” and instead sent the case back down to the lower court for reconsideration. Collins’ campaign spokesman both emphasized that she believes the government should defend the law and criticized Democrats for defending the unpopular individual mandate.

Tillis, the vulnerable North Carolina senator, said the lawsuit gave Republicans “breathing room” to find a viable replacement for Obamacare and attempted to flip the attack on Democrats by tying them to their presidential contenders.

“I think the fact that they all raised their hands and said we need Medicare for All is also raising their hands and saying the Affordable Care Act has failed,” Tillis said.

Though most of the 2020 presidential candidates have come out against Medicare for All, and more Democratic voters favor a choice between private insurance and a public option, the single-payer debate has given Republicans a potent line of attack that they’re turning to more than ever in the wake of the court’s ruling.

“Obamacare failed to lower health care costs for millions of Americans, and now Democrats want a complete government takeover of our health care system,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “They spent all of 2019 defending their socialist plan to eliminate employer-based health care coverage, and those problems will not subside anytime soon.”

The effectiveness of the GOP attacks will depend largely on the Democratic nominee for president — if it is someone who backs Medicare for All, it will be much more difficult for Senate candidates who don’t support the policy to separate themselves from it. But Democratic activists say they’re confident the GOP’s actions in court will sway voters more than their claims about Medicare for All.

“We can prepare for and counter those attacks by reminding voters that [Republicans are] fighting actively to take health care away,” said Kelly Dietrich, the founder and CEO of the National Democratic Training Committee, which coached more than 17,000 candidates for federal and state office in 2019. “Republicans’ ability to use fear as a tool to win elections should never be underestimated. But the antidote is to fight back just as hard.”

Year in Review: Lots of talk, not a lot of action in healthcare politics

Rachel Cohrs noted that lawmakers and regulators talked big on tackling high drug prices and surprise medical bills in 2019, but agreement on the bipartisan policies remained elusive. Some healthcare policy could be attached to a potential budget deal in December, but it is still unclear whether lawmakers will resolve funding disputes by the end of the year.

Despite major bipartisan legislative packages spearheaded by senior Senate Republican leaders, disputes over details and intense lobbying efforts have so far stalled progress in Congress. Drug makers are fighting a provision in the Senate Finance Committee’s drug pricing bill that would require them to pay back Medicare for drug price hikes faster than inflation, and providers and insurers are warring over how out-of-network medical bills should be handled.

Competing approaches to address surprise medical billing came to a head in December when a bipartisan, bicameral compromise proposal on addressing surprise medical bills emerged, but a key Senate Democrat involved in the negotiations had not signed on as of press time. Despite provider-friendly tweaks, providers still oppose the legislation and it is unclear whether House and Senate leadership have an appetite to include it in must-pass legislation.

Health reform 3.0: Early in the year, Senate health committee Chair Lamar Alexander and ranking Democrat Patty Murray released a wide-ranging plan to lower costs that addresses surprise medical bills; contract reform provisions; cost transparency; and boosting generic competition for Rx drugs. The year ended with a bipartisan, bicameral bill emerging, but at deadline it lacked Murray’s endorsement.

Reducing drug prices: Addressing drug prices was the other issue that dominated the policy landscape. Competing plans emerged, and the House passed a bill in mid-December on a party-line vote.

Grinding to a halt: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, which soured the prospects of a grand bargain between Trump and Pelosi on drug pricing and complicated the timeline for passing major healthcare policy.

Drug pricing was also a top priority for the Trump administration, but several marquee policy ideas have been stopped by the courts, abandoned, or are forthcoming. The White House decided to retract a prominent initiative that would have required insurers to pass manufacturer rebates directly to patients at the pharmacy counter, and a rule that would have compelled drug makers to include list prices in television advertisements is tied up in court. House Democrats passed a partisan government drug price negotiation bill, but it almost certainly will not become law.

The administration could at any time release a regulation outlining a process to allow states to import prescription drugs from Canada or move forward with a demonstration that would tie payments for physician-administered drugs in Medicare to international drug prices, but it has not yet acted on either proposal.

The 10 most-searched questions on health Reported by Sandee LaMotte of CNN

There were more questions that had people Googling in 2019.

The full list of the most-searched health questions in the United States this year also included questions about the flu, kidney stones and human papillomavirus or HPV:

How to lower blood pressure
What is keto?
How to get rid of hiccups
How long does the flu last?
What causes hiccups?
What causes kidney stones?
What is HPV?
How to lower cholesterol
How many calories should I eat a day?
How long does alcohol stay in your system?

NYU started to answer one of the big questions in the design of a fair healthcare system when they decided to declare their medical school tuition free. If all medical schools were tuition free the graduating doctors wouldn’t have the huge debt and they could have the opportunities to chose primary care and provide care to underserved rural and poorer communities.

One step at a time and maybe next year Congress can really improve the health care system of our U.S.A.

And to all you interested readers out there Happy New Year! Maybe those in control will start the process of improving the delivery of affordable health care to all and not worry about their future political aspirations. What a change that would be!

Again, Democrats Spar at Debate Over Health Care, How to Beat Trump and Could Medicare for All Really Go Horribly Wrong?

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deal549[5953] Was there anything different about last week’s Democratic debate? Bill Barrow, Will Weissert and Jill Colvin reported that the Democratic presidential candidates clashed in a debate over the future of health care in America, racial inequality and their ability to build a winning coalition to take on President Donald Trump next year.
The Wednesday night faceoff came after hours of testimony in the impeachment inquiry of Trump and at a critical juncture in the Democratic race to run against him in 2020. With less than three months before the first voting contests, big questions hang over the front-runners, time is running out for lower tier candidates to make their move and new Democrats are launching improbable last-minute bids for the nomination.
But amid the turbulence, the White House hopefuls often found themselves fighting on well-trodden terrain, particularly over whether the party should embrace a sweeping “Medicare for All” program or make more modest changes to the current health care system.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the field’s most progressive voices, staunchly defended Medicare for All, which would eliminate private insurance coverage in favor of a government-run system.
“The American people understand that the current health care system is not only cruel — it is dysfunctional,” Sanders said.
Former Vice President Joe Biden countered that many people are happy with private insurance through their jobs, while Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, complained about other candidates seeking to take “the divisive step” of ordering people onto universal health care, “whether they like it or not.”
Democrats successfully campaigned on health care last year, winning control of the House on a message that Republicans were slashing existing benefits. But moderates worry that Medicare for All is more complicated and may not pay the same political dividend. That’s especially true after Democrats won elections earlier this month in Kentucky and Virginia without embracing the program.
“We must get our fired-up Democratic base with us,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. “But let’s also get those independents and moderate Republicans who cannot stomach (Trump) anymore.”
The fifth Democratic debate unfolded in Atlanta, a city that played a central role in the civil rights movement, and the party’s diversity, including two African American candidates, was on display. But there was disagreement on how best to appeal to minority voters, who are vital to winning the Democratic nomination and will be crucial in the general election.
Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey said the party has sometimes come up short in its outreach to black Americans.
“For too long, I think, candidates have taken for granted constituencies that have been a backbone of the Democratic Party,” Harris said. “You show up in a black church and want to get the vote but just haven’t been there before.”
Booker declared, “Black voters are pissed off, and they’re worried.”
In the moderators’ chairs were four women, including Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s liberal darling, and Ashley Parker, a White House reporter for The Washington Post. It was only the third time a primary debate has been hosted by an all-female panel.
Buttigieg — who was a natural target given his recent rise in the polls to join Biden, Warren and Sanders among the crowded field’s front-runners — was asked early about how being mayor of a city of 100,000 residents qualified him for the White House.
“I know that from the perspective of Washington, what goes on in my city might look small,” Buttigieg said. “But frankly, where we live, the infighting on Capitol Hill is what looks small.”
Klobuchar argued that she has more experience enacting legislation and suggested that women in politics are held to a higher standard.
“Otherwise we could play a game called ‘Name your favorite woman president,’ which we can’t do because it has all been men,” she said.
Another memorable exchange occurred when Biden — who didn’t face any real attacks from his rivals — was asked about curbing violence against women and responded awkwardly.
“We have to just change the culture,” he said. “And keep punching at it. And punching at it. And punching at it.”
Harris scrapped with another low polling candidate: Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who has criticized prominent Democrats, including 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton.
“I think that it’s unfortunate that we have someone on the stage who is attempting to be the Democratic nominee for the president of the United States who during the Obama administration spent four years full time on Fox News criticizing President Obama,” Harris said.
“I’m not going to put party interests first,” Gabbard responded.
But the discussion kept finding its way back to Medicare for All, which has dominated the primary — especially for Warren. She released plans to raise $20-plus trillion in new government revenue for universal health care. But she also said implementation of the program may take three years — drawing criticism both from moderates like Biden and Buttigieg, who think she’s trying to distance herself from an unpopular idea, and Sanders supporters, who see the Massachusetts senator’s commitment to Medicare for All wavering.
Sanders made a point of saying Wednesday that he’d send Medicare for All legislation to Congress during the first week of his administration.
Booker faced especially intense pressure Wednesday since he’s yet to meet the Democratic National Committee’s polling requirements for the December debate in California. He spent several minutes arguing with Warren about the need to more appropriately tax the wealthy, but also called for “building wealth” among people of color and other marginalized communities.
“We’ve got to start empowering people,” Booker said.
Businessman Andrew Yang was asked what he would say to Russian President Vladimir Putin if he got the chance — and joked about that leader’s cordial relationship with Trump.
“First of all, I’d say I’m sorry I beat your guy,” Yang said with a grin, drawing howls of laughter from the audience.
Is Warren retreating on Medicare-for-all?
Almost one week before the fifth Democratic presidential debate, Elizabeth Warren released the latest plan in her slew of policy proposals: An outline detailing how, if elected, she would gradually shift the U.S. toward a single-payer health care system.
“I have put out a plan to fully finance Medicare for All when it’s up and running without raising taxes on the middle class by one penny,” the Massachusetts senator wrote in a post introducing the plan. “But how do we get there? Every serious proposal for Medicare for All contemplates a significant transition period.”
It was a marked shift from her previous calls to quickly bring the country toward Medicare-for-all and, notably, included similar tenets laid out in the health care proposals of more moderate candidates, like former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
In the transition plan, Warren said she would take several steps in her first 100 days in office to expand insurance coverage, like pushing to pass a bill that would allow all Americans to either buy into a government-run program if they wanted, or keep their private insurance. It would extend free coverage to about half of the country, including children and poor families. She would also lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 50 and let young people buy into a “true Medicare-for-all” option.
“Combining the parts into a whole reveals a bit of a mess,” wrote David Dayen of The American Prospect, a progressive magazine. “After putting forward a comprehensive cost control and financing bill, Warren split that apart and asked people to accept two bruising fights to get to her purported end goal. It’s reasonable for people to see that as a bait and switch.”
Rivals portrayed the move as a retreat from one of her most high-profile positions on an issue that voters repeatedly rank as one of the most important. A campaign spokesperson for Biden called the senator’s health stance “problematic,” while Buttigieg’s spokeswoman Lis Smith criticized the latest measure as a “transparently political attempt to paper over a very serious policy problem.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has wholeheartedly pledged to fight for a single-payer health system, took a swipe at Warren when accepting an endorsement on Friday from the largest nurses’ union in the country.
“Some people say we should delay that fight for a few more years — I don’t think so,” he said, according to The Washington Post. “We are ready to take them on right now, and we’re going to take them on Day One.”
The similarities come as Warren, who experienced a somewhat momentous surge in the polls, has begun to falter. In early October, her national polling climbed to 28 percent, according to a Fox News poll, but since then, her numbers have steadily declined. In the latest Iowa poll, Buttigieg pulled ahead of Warren by a staggering nine percentage points, indicating the 37-year-old could be a serious contender.
The timing of the seeming loss of campaign momentum appears to be tied to the release of her sweeping Medicare-for-all proposal at the beginning of November. Warren said it could be paid for with a series of taxes, largely via new levies on Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy (and, she’s repeatedly stressed, none on the middle class).
According to a recent poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Cook Political Report, while universal coverage is popular with a majority of Democratic voters, almost two-thirds of voters in key swing states said a national health plan in which all Americans receive their health coverage through a single-payer system was not a good idea.
It also precludes the start of the next debate in Georgia, during which Warren will very likely face fierce criticism and scrutiny over her $20 trillion Medicare-for-all plan and remember the cost is really closer to$52-$72 trillion>
Still, Warren told reporters over the weekend that “my commitment to Medicare for All is all the way,” according to The Associated Press.
And Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Washington Democrat who introduced the House version of the Medicare-for-all bill, called the plan a “smart approach to take on Big Pharma & private-for-profit insurance companies.”
Medicare for All’s thorniest issue is how much to pay doctors and hospitals. Any new system could become a convoluted mess if it goes wrong.
Earlier this month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren unveiled her $20.5 trillion package to finance Medicare for All, a system that would provide comprehensive health insurance to every American and virtually erase private insurance.
If its details are made reality, it would be nothing short of a sweeping transformation of the way Americans receive and pay for their medical care.
The proposal attempts to address one of the thorniest problems that any candidate pushing for a single-payer system in the US faces: how much to pay doctors and hospitals.
Dismantling the current payment structure and replacing it with another would likely require some tough trade-offs, experts say, creating winners and losers when the dust settles.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently unveiled details of her Medicare for All health plan, a system that would provide comprehensive health coverage to every American and virtually erase private insurance.
If its details are made reality, it would be a sweeping transformation in the way Americans get and pay for their medical care. Its the only financing model for universal coverage that a Democratic presidential candidate has rolled out in the primary so far.
It attempts to address one of the thorniest problems any candidate pushing for a single-payer system in the US faces: how much to pay the country’s doctors and hospitals. Pay them too little, and you risk wreaking havoc on their bottom line — and possibly forcing a wave of hospital closures as some critics have warned. Pay them too much, and it becomes much more expensive to finance care for everybody.
“The challenge is that when you expand Medicare to new populations, they’re going to use more healthcare,” Katherine Baicker, a health policy expert who serves as the dean of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, told Business Insider. “But that means there is going to be a substantial increase in demand for healthcare at the same time that you’re potentially cutting payments to providers.”
Warren has proposed big cuts in payments to many hospitals and doctors in her $20.5 trillion package to bring universal healthcare to the United States. Single-payer advocates argue that eliminating private insurance would lower administrative burdens on doctors and hospitals, freeing them up to treat more insured patients.
Several outside analyses of Medicare for All proposals suggest it can lead to considerable savings through negotiation of lower prices and reduced administrative spending.
The cuts in Warren’s plan are steep, because private insurers currently pay around twice as much as Medicare does for hospital care, according to research from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Warren’s reform blueprint sets them in line with the Medicare program. Doctors would be paid at the Medicare level while hospitals would be reimbursed at 110% of Medicare’s rate.
‘A recipe for shortages’
As a result, those rates would lower doctor pay by around 6.5%, according to an estimate from economists who analyzed the Warren plan. For hospitals, who are used to bigger payments from private insurers, the payments under Warren’s plan would be roughly enough to cover the cost of care, the economists said.
Baicker says the healthcare system may not be prepared to meet the rapid rise in demand, especially if payments fall at the same time.
“You’re going to see people wanting more services at the same time you pay providers less, and that’s a recipe for shortages unless something else changes,” she said.
That echoes a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released in May. It found that setting payments in line with Medicare would “substantially” lower the average amount of money providers currently receive. “Such a reduction in provider payment rates would probably reduce the amount of care supplied and could also reduce the quality of care,” the CBO report said.
Business Insider reached out to the five largest hospital systems to ask the possible effects of lowering payment rates to Medicare levels and whether they would be prepared to weather the transition.
Only one responded: the 92-hospital Trinity Health System based in Michigan.
“Trinity Health supports policies that advance access to affordable health care coverage for all, payment models that improve health outcomes and accelerate transformation, and initiatives that enhance community health and well-being,” spokeswoman Eve Pidgeon told Business Insider.
Pidgeon said that Trinity Health welcomes the dialogue around “critical questions” of financing and access to coverage, and would “analyze Medicare for All proposals as more details emerge.”
The healthcare industry generally opposes Medicare for All
“Trinity Health has a rich tradition of honoring the voices of the communities we serve, and we will continue to dialogue around policy proposals designed to improve affordability, quality and access for all,” Pidgeon said.
The healthcare industry generally opposes Medicare for All, arguing that it would lead to hospital closures and hurt the overall quality of care for Americans.
The American Hospital Association is staunchly against it. In a statement to Business Insider, executive vice president Tom Nickels called it “a one-size -fits-all approach” that “could disrupt coverage for more than 180 million Americans who are already covered through employer plans.”
“The AHA believes there is a better alternative to help all Americans access health coverage – one built on improving our existing system rather than ripping it apart and starting from scratch,” Nickels said.
Meanwhile, the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest physician organization, came out against the single-payer system, though its membership nearly voted to overturn its opposition in June, Vox reported. The group since pulled out of an industry coalition fighting the proposal.
While many big hospitals could face payment cuts, others could benefit, particularly those that mainly serve people with low incomes or who don’t have insurance.
“If you’re a facility serving a lot of Medicaid and uninsured patients today, you might come out ahead here,” Matthew Fiedler, a health policy expert at the Brookings Institution, told Politico. “But the dominant hospitals in a lot of markets that are able to command extremely high private rates today will take a big hit. I don’t think we’d see hospitals closing, but the question is: What would they do to bring down spending?”
Chris Pope, a healthcare payment expert and senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, said fewer dollars would ultimately mean a cutback in services hospitals would be able to offer. “The less you pay, the less you’re going to get in return.”
“What would likely happen is if you give a fixed lump sum of money, they would start dialing back on access to care,” Pope told Business Insider. “You’re just not going to be able to have a scan done when you need one done.”
The impact on hospitals and doctors
I have pointed these next few points before but thought that it would be worth mentioning again. The surging cost of hospital bills has fanned consumer outrage in recent years as people struggle to afford needed care and helped elevate support for some type of government insurance plan, whether its the more incremental route allowing people to simply buy into a public insurance option or Medicare for All.
In a preview of battles to come, Congress has struggled to pass legislation addressing exorbitant and confusing hospital bills, an issue with widespread public support and bipartisan interest that the White House backed as well, the Washington Post reported in September. Its movement grinded to a halt amid an onslaught of outside spending from doctor and insurer groups.
Dr. Stephen Klasko, chief executive of the Jefferson Health hospital system in Pennsylvania, said the political debate has oversimplified the difficult decisions that would need to be taken in moving to Medicare for All.
“They haven’t been willing to talk about what you would really have to do to bring a dollar and a quarter down to a dollar,” Klasko said, referring to candidates like Warren and Sanders who back universal health coverage.
The hospital executive said that while the nation’s healthcare system is “inefficient” and “fragmented,” slashing overhead wouldn’t necessarily improve the quality of care.
“This myth that there’s these trillions of dollars of administrative costs that are out there in the ether, that’s not true. Every dollar you take away is somebody’s dollar,” Klasko said.
He added that pricing reform on the scale that Warren proposes “is doable,” though there’s likely a caveat.
“It will change how consumers interact with the healthcare system and they won’t get everything they want,” he said.
I’m not sure that Medicare for All will be the Democratic party’s continual push as the debates continue and they realize that moderation to develop a health care system will be the only way to challenge a run against President Trump. I wonder when the rest of the Democratic potential candidates realize that besides the gaffs that former Vice President Biden makes, that improving the Affordable Care Act is the only strategy that may work.
Now I want to wish all a Happy Thanksgiving and hope that we all will appreciate all that we all have and as Mister Rogers said we all need to be Kind, and be Kind and also be Kind. Enjoy you Turkey Day!

Whistleblower Alleges Fraud At A Large Medicare Advantage Plan In Seattle and on and on about the last Democrat Debate and more on Medicare for All

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72488737_2301802426616070_6529440653267435520_n What a unique world we live in. Bernie Sanders, a man running for the position of President, ignores his symptoms of heart disease, has a heart attack, needs stents for his coronary arteries which are obstructed and a few weeks later is back on the difficult road to running for President. What a jerk who I am sure is ignoring his doctor’s advice, who I’m sure has discussed his post-procedure heart disease restrictions including taking stress, etc. easy for at least 6 weeks, or that what is what I would tell my patient. And this is the man who is telling us all how we should all be deciding our health care system. Unbelievable!! Now, with all the whistleblowers coming out of the woodworks, Fred Schulte points out another whistleblower. Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, one of the United States’ oldest and most respected nonprofit health insurance plans, is accused of bilking Medicare out of millions of dollars in a federal whistleblower case.

Teresa Ross, a former medical billing manager at the insurer, alleges that it sought to reverse financial losses in 2010 by claiming that some patients were sicker than they were or by billing for medical conditions that patients didn’t actually have. As a result, the insurer retroactively collected an estimated $8 million from Medicare for 2010 services, according to the suit.

Ross filed suit in federal court in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2012, but the suit remained under a court seal until July and is in its initial stages. The suit also names as defendants two medical coding consultants — consulting firm DxID of East Rochester, N.Y., and Independent Health Association, an affiliated health plan in Buffalo, N.Y. All denied wrongdoing in separate court motions filed late Wednesday to dismiss the suit.

The Justice Department has thus far declined to take over the case but said in a June 21 court filing that “an active investigation is ongoing.”

The whistleblower suit is one of at least 18 such cases documented by Kaiser Health News that accuses Medicare Advantage managed care plans of ripping off the government by exaggerating how sick their patients were. The whistleblower cases have emerged as a primary tool for clawing back overpayments. While many of the cases are pending in courts, five have recovered a total of nearly $360 million.

“The fraudulent practices described in this complaint are a product of the belief, common among [Medicare Advantage] organizations, that the law can be violated without meaningful consequence,” Ross alleges.

Medicare Advantage plans are a privately run alternative to traditional Medicare that often offers extra benefits such as dental and vision coverage but limits the choice of medical providers. They have exploded in popularity in recent years, enrolling more than 22 million people, just over 1 in 3 of those eligible for Medicare.

Word of another whistleblower alleging Medicare Advantage billing fraud comes as the White House is pushing to expand enrollment in the plans. On Oct. 3, President Trump issued an executive order that permits the plans to offer a range of new benefits to attract patients. One, for instance, is partly covering the cost of Apple watches as an inducement.

Group Health opened for business more than seven decades ago and was among the first managed care plans to contract with Medicare. Formed by a coalition of unions, farmers and local activists, the HMO grew from just a few hundred families to more than 600,000 patients before its members agreed to join California-based Kaiser Permanente. That happened in early 2017, and the plan is now called the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Washington. (Kaiser Health News is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

In an emailed statement, a Kaiser Permanente spokesperson said: “We believe that Group Health complied with the law by submitting its data in good faith, relying on the recommendations of the vendor as well as communications with the federal government, which has not intervened in the case at this time.” Ross nods to the plan’s history, saying it has “traditionally catered to the public interest, often highlighting its efforts to support low-income patients and provide affordable, quality care.”

The insurer’s Medicare Advantage plans “have also traditionally been well regarded, receiving accolades from industry groups and Medicare itself,” according to the suit.

But Ross, who worked at Group Health for more than 14 years in jobs involving billing and coding, says that from 2008 through 2010, the company “went from an operating income of almost $57 million to an operating loss of $60 million.” Ross says the losses were “due largely to poor business decisions by company management.”

The lawsuit alleges that the insurer manipulated a Medicare billing formula known as a risk score. The formula is supposed to pay health plans higher rates for sicker patients, but Medicare estimates that overpayments triggered by inflated risk scores have cost taxpayers $30 billion over the past three years alone.

According to Ross, a Group Health executive in 2011 attended a meeting of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, where he heard from a colleague at Independent Health about an “exciting opportunity” to increase risk scores and revenue. The colleague said Independent Health “had made a lot of money” using its consulting company, which specializes in combing patient charts to find overlooked diseases that health plans can bill for retroactively.

In November 2011, Group Health hired the firm DxID to review medical charts for 2010. The review resulted in $12 million in new claims, according to the suit. Under the deal, DxID took a percentage of the claims revenue it generated, which came to about $1.5 million that year, the suit says.

Ross says she and a doctor who later reviewed the charts found “systematic” problems with the firm’s coding practices. In one case, the plan billed for “major depression” in a patient described by his doctor as having an “amazingly sunny disposition.” Overall, about three-quarters of its claims for higher charges in 2010 were not justified, according to the suit. Ross estimated that the consultants submitted some $35 million in new claims to Medicare on behalf of Group Health for 2010 and 2011.

In its motion to dismiss Ross’ case, Group Health called the matter a “difference of opinion between her allegedly ‘conservative’ method for evaluating the underlying documentation for certain medical conditions and her perception of an ‘aggressive’ approach taken by Defendants.”

Independent Health and the DxID consultants took a similar position in their court motion, arguing that Ross “seeks to manufacture a fraud case out of an honest disagreement about the meaning and applicability of unclear, complex, and often conflicting industry-wide coding criteria.”

In a statement, Independent Health spokesman Frank Sava added: “We believe the coding policies being challenged here were lawful and proper and all parties were paid appropriately.”

Whistleblowers sue on behalf of the federal government and can share in any money recovered. Typically, the cases remain under a court seal for years while the Justice Department investigates.

How would Warren pay for ‘Medicare for All’? Enough evasion, it’s past time for answers.

Chris Truax points out that the last 2 months al anyone who watches the politicians suggesting that Medicare for all is the solution to the healthcare crisis has bombarded the news. Medicare for All will create winners and losers. It’s all very well to say you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs unless you’re the egg.

When it comes to doing things, Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything — and she’s happy to tell you all about it. But when it comes to paying for things, I’m sorry to say, the Massachusetts senator dodges and deflects like a Donald Trump defender.

It’s estimated that “Medicare for All” will cost the federal government an extra $3 trillion a year. That’s more than $9,000 annually from every man, woman, and child in America. Despite being asked, again and again, Warren refuses to acknowledge that paying for this is going to require an across-the-board tax increase — and a pretty massive one, at that. Instead, she keeps talking about how “costs” will go down before she changes the subject to how stressful it is to have your insurance canceled when you get sick or when you have to cope with your mom having diabetes. That’s very true, I’m sure. But we’re talking fiscal policy here.

Warren To Release Plan To Pay For ‘Medicare For All’

Yuval Rosenberg of The Fiscal Times noted that now, just last week Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Sunday she will roll out a plan to pay for an expansive single-payer health care system in the coming weeks, promising the plan would decrease overall costs for the middle class.

“I plan over the next few weeks to put out a plan that talks, specifically, about the cost of ‘Medicare for All’ and how we pay for it,” Warren said at the end of a town hall here at Simpson College. “I will not sign a bill into law that does not reduce the cost of health care for middle-class families.”

Warren’s aides have long suggested she was studying ways to pay for the health care plan originally backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of her leading rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In recent days, Warren has faced criticism from lower-profile candidates in the race — especially South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar — for her failure to explain how she would pay for the ambitious plan, which would replace private health insurance with generous, universal coverage paid for by the federal government.

“Everybody who is running for president right now knows that families are getting crushed by the high cost of health care,” Warren told the crowd of nearly 500 people. “They also know that the cheapest possible way to make sure that everyone gets the health care that they need is Medicare for All.”

Warren’s statement came after her standard 40-minute stump speech and three questions from attendees, none of whom asked about Medicare for All. The addition appeared to be an attempt to short-circuit recent criticisms of her health care plan.

Warren has previously promised, most recently at the Oct. 15 debate, that no middle-class family would see an increase in overall health care costs. And her aides have said since at least September that she was evaluating ways to pay for Medicare for All. She does not plan to significantly alter the details of the legislation she’s co-sponsored with Sanders in the way Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) did with her own health care proposal over the summer. Warren said she had been working on the problem of how to pay for the legislation for “months and months.”

“It’s just a little more work until it’s finished,” she said.

For a campaign that has long prided itself on detailed policy proposals, releasing a plan to pay for Medicare for All — which is sure to generate intense scrutiny from the media and her rivals for the nomination — is a high-risk but likely necessary move. Whether or not a plan for Medicare for All would lower costs for the middle class would rely heavily on complicated details, including how progressive the tax system supporting the plan is and how aggressively the government is able to control the cost of health care.

Estimates of how much the plan would cost vary wildly, as do estimates of how much switching to a single-payer system would increase or decrease overall health care costs.

Buttigieg, in particular, has aggressively questioned how Warren would pay for the plan, and said she is being dishonest by not saying whether or not taxes would go up for middle-class families. Sanders has said taxes would likely go up, while overall costs would drop. But Warren has resisted the question, arguing that admitting taxes would rise is equal to accepting a dishonest Republican framing of the issue. Warren has also attacked Buttigieg’s plan for failing to cover every American, dubbing it “Medicare for all who can afford it.”

“Your signature, Senator, is to have a plan for everything. Except this,” Buttigieg said at the debate. “No plan has been laid out to explain how a multi-trillion-dollar hole in this Medicare for All plan that Senator Warren is putting forward.”

Soon, Buttigieg will get his answer.

She ended your last weekend rally asking the “people” to give her a little more time and she will announce how she proposes to pay for it. More important, is her plan, probably an increase of taxes for all, including Middle Americans, to pay for it…. realistic???? Remember, nothing in any of the political “experts” proposals are ever free. Someone, you and I, have to pay for it in some way or another!!

Winners and losers in Medicare for All

There’s a very unpleasant collectivist feel to this. It’s all very well to say you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs … unless you’re the egg. About 56% of Americans — more than 180 million — have private health insurance through an employer. Medicare for All would sweep that all away, whether the people who have that insurance like it or not, in the name of the common good. Perhaps worse, as Warren knows perfectly well but steadfastly refuses to admit, there are going to be winners and losers. Costs might go down in the aggregate, but individuals and families aren’t aggregates.

Elizabeth Warren’s choice: ‘Medicare for All’ purity or a path to beating Trump?

For example, Warren keeps saying that the total you pay for health care would end up being less under Medicare for All because it will eliminate out-of-pocket costs like premiums and copays. That’s an oversimplification at best, especially since she hasn’t said how she would finance this enormously expensive project.

But it is a given that everyone will pay higher taxes, and it’s older people who spend more on premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs — a lot more. Consequently, older people will be far more likely to see these higher taxes offset by a decrease in the cost of their health care. By contrast, younger people and families at healthier stages of their lives would still be paying new taxes but will see fewer benefits.

Your Two-Minute Summary of Tuesday’s Democratic Medicare-for-All Debate

Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate once again highlighted the candidate’s deep divides over Medicare for All. After opening questions related to the House impeachment inquiry into President Trump, the debate quickly turned to the health care reform plan backed by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Warren again tried to reframe the question of whether she would raise middle-class taxes to pay for the plan. “Costs will go up for the wealthy. They will go up for big corporations. And for middle-class families, they will go down,” she said. “I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families.”

Pete Buttigieg, who last month called Warren “extremely evasive” on the tax question, pounced. “No plan has been laid out to explain how a multi-trillion-dollar hole in this Medicare for all plan that Senator Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in,” he said, touting his “Medicare for All Who Want It” proposal as a better alternative. “I don’t understand why you believe the only way to deliver affordable coverage to everybody is to obliterate private plans, kicking 150 million Americans off of their insurance in four short years,” he said to Warren. “Why unnecessarily divide this country over health care when there’s a better way to deliver coverage for all?”

Warren jabbed back at Buttigieg, saying his “Medicare for All Who Want It” plan is really “Medicare for All Who Can Afford It.”

Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar, both of whom support building on the Affordable Care Act with a public option, also attacked Medicare for All as expensive and impractical. “The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done,” Klobuchar said. “And we can get this public option done.”

Sanders defended his plan — and opened the door for further attacks on Warren. “At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of people will save money on their health care bills,” Sanders said. “But I do think it is appropriate to acknowledge that taxes will go up. They’re going to go up significantly for the wealthy. And for virtually everybody, the tax increase they pay will be substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.”

Klobuchar took the opportunity to criticize Warren again. “At least Bernie is being honest here, and saying how he’s going to pay for this and that taxes are going to go up,” she said. “And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that, and I think we owe the American people to tell them where we will send the invoice.”

A political strategy: The attacks on Warren are widely seen as a sign that she’s now the Democratic frontrunner — and they’re likely a sign that, as tiresome as the repeated tax question might get, Warren is going to keep getting asked it by the media, Democratic rivals, and Republicans. She’s pointedly not willing to answer directly (or take the bait) and say that she will raise taxes, even as she continues to argue that overall costs under Medicare for All will go down for the middle class. Her caginess on the question suggests she thinks that higher taxes on the middle class, or the very word “taxes,” might be toxic in an election campaign against Trump. But her dodging hasn’t hurt her so far.

What the polls say: The latest Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll found that 51% of those surveyed favor Medicare for All, while 47% oppose it. A majority of Democrats and about half of independents support a national Medicare-for-all plan, while more than 70% of Republicans oppose the idea. Support for a public option is higher, at 73%. A CBS News poll released Tuesday found that 59% of voters believe that a government-run plan should “compete with private insurance” as under a public option, while 32% said they would want it to replace private insurance. But polls have also found that support for Medicare for All or other health plans can shift significantly depending on the arguments presented.

The bottom line: Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation reminds us that there is no simple answer to the question of ultimate costs, and that a wide variety of outcomes are possible depending on how Medicare for All is implemented. “A Medicare for all plan could be designed so that many people, including those who are middle class, pay less in taxes than they are paying now in premiums, deductibles, and copays,” Levitt tweeted Tuesday. “It depends entirely on the details.”

J&J Pulls Baby Powder From Market

FDA testing reveals chrysotile fibers in one lot of embattled product of the J&J babypowder, which the courts are suggested cause ovarian cancer.

John Gever the managing editor of the MedPage reported that Johnson & Johnson is recalling one lot of its famous baby powder because of possible asbestos contamination, the FDA announced Friday.

“FDA testing has found that a sample from one lot of the product contains chrysotile fibers, a type of asbestos,” the agency said in a press release. “Consumers who have Johnson’s Baby Powder lot #22318RB should stop using it immediately and contact Johnson & Johnson for a refund.”

Although Johnson & Johnson agreed to initiate the recall, it stopped short of admitting that the product really was contaminated. It questioned “the integrity of the tested sample and the validity of the test results,” suggesting that it might not even be a genuine Johnson & Johnson product.

The company has consistently denied that its baby powder — on the market for more than a century — has ever been contaminated with asbestos, but the company has faced numerous lawsuits from consumers alleging that they or loved ones developed cancer because of asbestos in talc components. The baby powder is popular not only for use on babies; many women have used it to reduce “feminine odors” as well.

The FDA said it has tested some 50 cosmetic products since 2018 for asbestos contamination, including two lots of Johnson’s Baby Powder. One was negative and the other was positive. This lot of baby powder is not the first to test positive and the FDA has previously issued alerts on others.

“The FDA expects to issue the full results from this survey, including all tested products having both positive and negative results, by the end of the year,” the agency said.

Musings of a Doc with an MBA

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Category Archives: Sen. Amy Klobuchar

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Whistleblower Alleges Fraud At A Large Medicare Advantage Plan In Seattle and on and on about the last Democrat Debate and more on Medicare for All

Warren To Release Plan To Pay For ‘Medicare For All’

J&J Pulls Baby Powder From Market

FDA testing reveals chrysotile fibers in one lot of embattled product of the J&J babypowder, which the courts are suggested cause ovarian cancer.