Under the health law, Medicare started penalizing hospitals for too many re-admissions. Now mortality rates are up.READ MORE
Hospital systems around the country have started scaling back financial assistance for lower- and middle-income people without health insurance, hoping to push them into signing up for coverage through the new online marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act.READ MORE
Charitable hospitals that treat uninsured Americans will be subjected to new levels of scrutiny of their nonprofit status and could face sizable new fines under Obamacare.READ MORE
As of Monday [10/1;12], Medicare will start fining hospitals that have too many patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge due to complications. The penalties are part of a broader push under President Barack Obama's health care law to improve quality while also trying to save taxpayers money.New Medicare fines for hospital re-admittance
About two-thirds of the hospitals serving Medicare patients, or some 2,200 facilities, will be hit with penalties averaging around $125,000 per facility this coming year, according to government estimates.
Challenging the Death PanelObamacare Is Going Down
Also working its way through the courts is another Obamacare challenge brought by the Goldwater Institute in Arizona that not only challenges the individual mandate, but also challenges the constitutionality of the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) also adopted by Obamacare.
That board will be composed of 15 unelected bureaucrats with the power to cut payments to doctors and hospitals under Medicare to keep the program within specified spending targets. Though its backers deny it, IPAB was designed to be a federal rationing authority analogous to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), which decides who can live or who can die under British socialized medicine. The IPAB merely needs to severely cut, or deny altogether, payments for treatments it decides are not in the public interest, regardless of what you or your doctors think.
That should be unconstitutional on many grounds. But what the Goldwater Institute has focused on is the isolation of the board from democratic, executive or judicial accountability.
The rulings of this board will automatically go into effect unless two-thirds of Congress overrides them with Medicare cuts of its own of equal magnitude. The Obamacare law provides that the decisions of the board cannot be challenged in the courts. And the board is even shielded from executive oversight.
According to the California Hospital Association (CHA), illegal aliens cost hospitals across the state about $1.25 billion a year in unpaid medical care.Read more
The CHA recently stated that $26 million of those costs are absorbed in the eight hospitals in Ventura County alone.
The American Hospital Association (AHA) is asking the Obama administration to compensate hospitals for the care they extend to the millions foreign nationals living in this country illegally.
In June, AHA President Richard Umbdenstock sent a letter to President Obama, reminding him that while federal law requires hospitals to provide emergency care to every patient who walks through the doors, those hospitals are now forced to eat the costs of treating uninsured illegal aliens.
Umbdenstock wrote that the Federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act mandates treatment of the unisured “yet federal support for hospitals providing these services to the undocumented population is virtually nonexistent. Many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services or close beds.”
He continued: “Hospitals should not have to bear the burden.”
...he was merely examined there by a private practitioner, David Sinclair, in the days following his birth, which triggered the validation of an administratively issued “Certificate of Live Birth” registration, not a hospital generated birth certificate representing an actual delivery.OUT OF ORDER: Obama’s Non-sequential Certificate Number Based On Registration Office Location, Not Birth Date
Over the last few months, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has exempted a long list of unions and employers from an Affordable Care Act provision that would have made it too costly for them to continue some of their health care insurance plans. But, in sharp contrast, HHS apparently doesn't intend to do anything at all about a new health reform mandate that could eventually force hundreds of badly needed U.S. hospitals to shut their doors.Obama's health care reform is unhealthy for hospitals
The Republicans who now control the House of Representatives hope to repeal or defund ObamaCare, but the law has already yielded profound, destructive changes that will not be undone by repeal or defunding alone. Active steps and new laws will be needed to repair the damage.ObamaCare Is Already Damaging Health Care
The most significant change is a wave of frantic consolidation in the health industry. Because the law mandates that insurers accept all patients regardless of pre-existing conditions, insurers will not make money with their current premium and provider-payment structures. As a result, they have already started to raise premiums and cut payments to doctors and hospitals. Smaller and weaker insurers are being forced to sell themselves to larger entities.
Doctors and hospitals, meanwhile, have decided that they cannot survive unless they achieve massive size—and fast. Six years ago, doctors owned more than two-thirds of U.S. medical practices, according to the Medical Group Management Association. By next year, nearly two-thirds will be salaried employees of larger institutions.
Consolidation is not necessarily bad, as larger medical practices and hospital systems can create some efficiencies. But in the context of ObamaCare's spiderweb of rules and regulations, consolidation is more akin to collectivization. It means that government bureaucrats will be able to impose controls with much greater ease.
With far fewer and much larger entities to browbeat, all changes in Medicare and Medicaid policies will go through the entire system like a shock wave. There will be far fewer individual insurers, doctors, hospitals, device makers, drug manufacturers, nursing homes and other health-care players to resist.
There is little mystery how the government will exercise its power. Choices will be limited. Pathways to expensive specialist care such as advanced radiology and surgery will decline. Cutting-edge devices and medicines will come into the system much more slowly and be used much less frequently.
This is why simply defunding enforcement of the individual mandate and other upcoming directives will not be enough: Given all this consolidation, limits on treatment choices are already becoming hardwired into the system. Lawmakers must take concrete steps to stop and reverse this. . .
By the way, I am a 15 year veteran of print graphic design and have a Bachelor’s in Fine Art with a Concentration in Graphic Design and graduated magna cum laude and at the top of my class. I have 15 years of professional experience in dealing with print vendors, paper vendors, paper ordering and 15 years pre-press experience–including ordering embossed materials–and I have designed and ordered custom business letterhead too many times to mention. Six of those years I held the title of Creative Director. You can be certain my opinion is a professional opinion. Thank you again.
A chief aim of the new healthcare law was to take the pressure off emergency rooms by mandating that people either have insurance coverage. The idea was that if people have insurance, they will go to a doctor rather than putting off care until they faced an emergency.Read more
People who build hospitals, however, say newly insured people will still go to emergency rooms for primary care because they don’t have a doctor.
“Everybody expected that one of the initial impacts of reform would be less pressure on emergency departments; it’s going to be exactly the opposite over the next four to eight years,” said Rich Dallam, a healthcare partner at the architectural firm NBBJ, which designs healthcare facilities.
“We don’t have the primary care infrastructure in place in America to cover the need. Our clients are looking at and preparing for more emergency department volume, not less,” he said.
Some Democrats agree with this assessment.
A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending -- one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system -- would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.Read more
Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
