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Articles by Grace-Marie Turner

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David Hogberg: ObamaCare May Hurt Medicare Advantage Plans For Poor May 15, 2012

Many low-income seniors could lose access to their preferred Medicare Advantage plans due to ObamaCare changes.

A new report released by the conservative American Action Forum on Tuesday argues that changes made to the five-star rating program for MA plans may reduce plan choice and direct Medicare resources away from low-income areas.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services rates MA plans on a system of one to five stars, depending on how the plans satisfy certain criteria.

Under ObamaCare, beginning in 2015 plans that achieve four- and five-star ratings are eligible for bonuses, which can boost an insurer’s bottom line, and rebates that the insurers must use to expand benefits for plan enrollees.

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J.D. Foster: The Good News in the Medicare Trustees Report May 14, 2012

The release of the annual Medicare trustees report in late April, containing as it did a vast array of very bad news, was immediately greeted with valid dire warnings of fiscal disaster.  Little noticed, however, were three important bits of good news: the inevitability of imminent action; a simple key hidden in the report for understanding Medicare’s fiscal problem; and a proven bipartisan solution.

To be sure, the trustees report provided a wealth of bad news about the program’s finances. The key facts:

  • Part A, the Hospital Insurance (HI) program, ran a cash deficit in 2011 of almost $28 billion, and the Medicare Trust Fund is projected to be insolvent in about 12 years.
  • Medicare has an unfunded obligation of $42.7 trillion.

Continue reading at The Heritage Foundation…

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Sally Pipes: Not That the Obama Administration Has Noticed, But Drugs Are Expensive to Develop May 14, 2012

Last week, pharmaceutical company Roche announced that it was scrapping work on a once-promising cholesterol medicine at the recommendation of its independent data and safety monitoring board. Had the drug proven successful, it would have likely delivered sales of a billion dollars a year. Instead, Roche lost millions researching something that will never reach patients.

This episode underscores just how difficult and expensive the innovation process for drug-development is.

Not that anyone in the Obama Administration has noticed. Obamacare will hit pharmaceutical firms with more than $20 billion in new taxes over the next ten years. Some firms may conclude that they can’t shoulder both a hefty tax bill and the risk of a multimillion-dollar research failure.

That would be tragic news not just for patients waiting for cures but for the American economy, which benefits tremendously from the massive sums that pharmaceutical companies sink into research and development.

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Henry Miller: ObamaCare’s Killer Device Tax May 11, 2012

Much of the political conversation in Washington these days concerns innovation, job creation and competitiveness. But talk is cheap, and elected officials must enact policies that enhance economic activity and job creation. The medical device industry is an example of Washington doing exactly the opposite.

Medical device manufacturing is one of the nation’s most dynamic and vibrant industries. The United States is the global leader in medical technology innovation, and it is one of the few major industries with a net trade surplus. This industry is responsible for more than 400,000 American jobs—and is indirectly responsible for almost two million …

Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal…

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Joshua Archambault: Red or Blue Pill for Payment Reform? Both Won’t Work May 10, 2012

Are the House and Senate giving us a false choice for how to control health care costs in Massachusetts? Aren’t there other options?

A few major themes have emerged from the two payment reform proposals and highlight the fact that they fail to align incentives for patients to be more involved in the purchase of their health insurance and their health care.

For example, even with full transparency of cost and quality (which is a huge lift on its own) for many patients, high-cost still correlates with higher quality in medicine. A recent report from Attorney General Coakley proved this theory wrong, but simply providing patients with cost data without placing the right incentives in their health plan to choose the low-cost high-quality provider will result in many selecting the most expensive care. As a result, these proposals will fall short of sustainably bending the cost curve. There is another way for the Commonwealth- patient-centered health plans, see Health Affairs($) for national savings estimates. The impact would be significant in Massachusetts as less than 3% of residents are on a form of these plans, compared to 13% nationally.

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