More Re-education

The National Council on Aging got a lot of media attention this week for a survey that was astonishing in its misrepresentation of the facts. The NCOA asked 636 seniors true or false questions about "the top twelve facts" they should know about ObamaCare. Only 17% knew the "right" answers to half of the questions and not a single person got a perfect score. The news release read: "Most Seniors Misinformed, Unaware of Key Provisions of the Affordable Care Act." The infuriating thing is that the pollsters and the NCOA got the answers wrong, and seniors were right! With a lawyerly parsing of words, the questions were designed to obscure and even deceive.

Massachusetts Warning Signs

We continue to study Massachusetts' health overhaul experiment as a harbinger of ObamaCare. And we continue to see serious problems ahead. President Obama told MSNBC's Chuck Todd in an interview last week that his new health reform law "not only makes sure everybody has access to coverage but is reducing costs." The quote was evocative of then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's promise in 2006 that, "Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced." Washington's reform effort doesn't even pretend to achieve universal coverage, and Massachusetts' experience shows the near impossibility of containing costs in a system where incentives go in exactly the opposite direction.

This Will Not Stand

A key reason that many conservative Democrats were convinced to vote for the health overhaul legislation in March was because the president and other leaders said it would reduce the deficit and put us on a path to long-term entitlement reform. But any number of independent studies have proven that promise to be false, and nowhere is the case made more forcefully and accurately than in a new paper written for the Galen Institute by budget expert Jim Capretta.

Realities of Risk and Debt

ObamaCare's Catch 22

The Commonwealth Fund is at it again with another headline-grabbing survey, putting the U.S. dead last in its ranking of seven countries' health systems. Commonwealth's bottom line: Only Canada has lower quality health care than we do. The U.S. is the most unsafe, the least efficient, the least equitable, and the worst in keeping people alive and healthy. Oh, and we spend way too much. And, of course, Commonwealth reminds us that the U.S. placed 37th in a discredited, 10-year-old survey by the World Health Organization ranking health care systems.

Bureaucratic Nightmare

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels talked about the impact of ObamaCare on his state before a standing-room-only conference at AEI on Tuesday, and the outlook is not good. He described "what this cannon looks like from the receiving end" and said his state is reeling from the expected costs -- as much as $3.6 billion in additional costs to comply with ObamaCare's mandates. "This is not a blessing or a boon to the states but a huge mandated tax at the state level," the governor said.

Re-education Camp

What a bizarre week it has been, with oil still gushing into the Gulf, growing global political and economic instability, and virtually no private-sector jobs being created in our still-struggling economy. And the president spends yet another week talking about health reform?! Clearly, he knows this massively unpopular law is causing political trouble for Democrats or he wouldn't be trying so hard to re-educate the American people about what's in it. But the sugar-coated message about the early benefits just isn't selling.

Consumerism in Europe

How extraordinary it was in London and Paris last week to hear broad agreement about the value of consumer choice, competition, portability, and the essential role that private providers play in health care in Europe.

The world has turned upside down.

I was in Paris to speak at the first pan-European conference focusing on the issue of private hospitals, organized by the European Union of Private Hospitals and its president, Dr. Max Ponseille and vice-president, Alberta Sciachi. More than 400 people attended, including members of the EU parliament, former health ministers, and many corporate CEOs. CONTINUE READING >>