Today is the 45th anniversary of the Medicare program, and several bloggers take note and even find a new video featuring an American icon. Other commentators review the implementation and design of the high-risk pool program created by the health law.
Don Berwick, the new Medicare and Medicaid administrator, compares the enactment of Medicare with the efforts this year to get a health care overhaul. He writes on healthcare.gov: “Today, CMS is not only celebrating Medicare’s 45th anniversary but also using it as an opportunity to redouble its efforts to educate and inform people with Medicare and their family members about the many changes and improvements to the program’s various options [in the new health law] in advance of Medicare Open Enrollment. We have done mailings for beneficiaries, posted materials on Medicare.gov, and unveiled radio ads educating beneficiaries about where to go to get their questions answered and how to prevent fraud and scams.”
Kate Philips of the New York Times’ Prescriptions blog looks at the new information campaign led by the Department of Health and Human Services and posts a television ad HHS commisioned featuring actor Andy Griffith (below):
Cathy Hope of Georgetown’s Say Ahhh! notes that it’s also Medicaid’s birthday, and says: “I think Medicaid represents an appropriate moral test for our government and the American people as it was created to serve those in the dawn of life, twilight of life and shadows of life. Medicaid is there for families facing poverty, the elderly who cannot afford long-term care, people with disabilities and for children with severe and chronic health conditions.”
Peter H. Stone of the Center for Public Integrity’s Paper Trail reports that a group of health insurers are considering a new lobbying campaign of up to $20 million. “Aetna Inc., Cigna Corp., Humana Inc., United HealthCare Inc. and WellPoint Inc. are weighing the new drive in part to shape the government regulations that will implement this year’s sweeping new health care legislation. Two lobbying sources familiar with talks underway by high-level insurance executives say that a decision to go forward with such an effort is likely to be made by at least four of the insurers—and possibly Cigna – in coming weeks.”
Cato’s Daniel Mitchell posts a graphic that tries to illustrate the organizational and decision-making structure under the new health overhaul law. Mitchell says: “It’s worth noting, by the way, that the system already was a disaster even before Obamacare was enacted. In the health care sector, free markets are only allowed to operate in very rare cases, such as cosmetic surgery, laser eye surgery, and (for better or worse) abortion. The rest of the sector was heavily distorted by government intervention. Obamacare simply makes a bad situation worse.”
On the Health Affairs blog Thomas Miller and James C. Capretta say the structure of a new high-risk insurance program created by the health law is flawed and call for a different definition of “high-risk”: “A better solution would begin with redefining the problem to avoid the temptations of trying to achieve multiple policy objectives with a single tool, which results in mission creep and failure to target scarce resources more effectively and sustainably. True high-risk pools should be limited to covering the most likely, highest-risk individuals, as identified before the fact. They don’t work as well as a mechanism for subsidizing the health care costs of low-income individuals more broadly, or for covering the uninsured in general.”
John Goodman also criticizes the new program but doesn’t necessarily agree with Miller and Capretta. He says that “socializing the costs of patients with expensive conditions … surely invites a mechanism whereby insurers, employers, and individuals would crawl out of the woodwork to lobby continuously and perpetually for more federal money and expanded eligibility for high-risk pools — just as happened to Medicaid over the last four and a half decades. A far simpler and more effective reform would be to eliminate employers’ monopoly control of Americans’ health dollars, so that individuals and families could buy their own health insurance that is portable from job to job and state to state.”
And Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky doesn’t like the fact that the regulations released yesterday bar elective abortion coverage. He writes, “Indeed, rather than developing a compromise that would have either allowed states to decide whether to cover abortions with federal funding or required them to segregate funding and use private or state money to pay for the abortion services, the administration prohibited abortion coverage almost instantly. … it’s hard to understand why the administration felt so compelled to make this decision so quickly and reactively. If it was hoping to score points with conservative pro-life voters, then it overestimated the GOP’s willingness to recognize its concessions and may be surprised when Republicans continue to send fundraising letters about the abortion issue.”
