The February 3rd Los Angeles Times has an article by Noam Levey on Obama Administration attempts to help states cut their Medicaid spending. Levey reports:

The Obama administration is particularly concerned with maintaining state Medicaid programs because under the new healthcare law, these government insurance plans are expected to provide a foundation for guaranteeing coverage to all Americans beginning in 2014.

First of all, Obamacare does not gurantee coverage to all Americans. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 18 million Americans will pay $33 billion in penalties for failing to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate and yet … Continue Reading

Reporting on the budget crisis Medicaid is causing for states across the country, McClatchy’s Marilyn Werber Serafini and Julie Appleby wrote on January, 31st:

Under [Obamacare], Medicaid will expand sharply in 2014, when 16 million more people are expected to become eligible for the program. The federal government will pick up the full tab for the newcomers for the first three years, then the federal share tapers down to 90 percent by 2020.

This is all true, but Serafini and Appleby forgot to report on the additional administrative burdens that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion inflicts on states. In order to get scored … Continue Reading

Covering the House of Representatives vote to repeal Obamacare, The Los Angeles Times‘ Noam Levey penned a “Healthcare Q&A” on January 18th, that acknowledges that Obamacare’s employer mandate “would create a quirky incentive not to hire.” But then Levey goes on to write:

But several studies — including one by the respected Lewin Group — suggest any job loss would be minimal and would be at least partially offset by new jobs created as the healthcare system expands to care for tens of millions of Americans expected to gain coverage.

That Lewin study is not the only study on the economic … Continue Reading

Reporting on the January 5th release of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services report on national health spending, The Washington Post’s Amy Goldstein leads with:

The nation’s expenditures on health care in 2009 grew by 4 percent, the smallest increase in at least a half-century…

Which is true, but hides the explosion of federal spending that the report documents. Goldstein does mention that, “On the other hand, spending on Medicaid soared - by 9 percent, compared with less than 5 percent in 2008.” But that number lumps state spending on Medicaid in with federal spending on Medicaid and federal Medicaid … Continue Reading

Sarah Kliff penned a piece for Politico published January 3rd titled, 6 States to Watch on Health Reform, stating that while “health reform repeal efforts will generate a lot of noise in the opening weeks of the 112th Congress … the real action on health reform is going to ramp up outside the Beltway in state capitals.”

This is true. But then the rest of her three page piece only mentions Medicaid once, and then only in passing. This is a huge omission. Of the 34 million Americans who gain health insurance through Obamacare, over half (18 million) … Continue Reading

On Decemeber 17th, The New York Times Brian Stelter reported on a study conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org purporting to show that Fox News Channel was a major purveyor of “misinformation” communicated to the electorate. Stelter typed:

According to the study, which can be reviewed online, in most cases, the more a person watched and read the news, the less likely they were to have been misled about the facts. But “there were however a number of cases where greater exposure to a news source increased misinformation on a specific issue,” the study’s authors wrote. In particular, they found that regular viewers

… Continue Reading

In an otherwise great piece titled Medicaid Pushes U.S. States Off ‘Cliff’ as Governors Seek Cuts, Bloomberg’s Christopher Palmeri and Pat Wechsler report:

States face the prospect of enrolling 16 million more people in Medicaid beginning in 2014 under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health-care law Obama signed in March. It expands coverage to include certain childless adults under 65, according to Foley & Lardner LLP, a law firm in Milwaukee. The federal government will pay 100 percent of the increased expense for the first three years.

This is almost true, but not quite. Obamacare does mandate Medicaid … Continue Reading

Margaret Talev and Michael Doyle filed a December 13th report for McClatchy on Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s partial victory against Obamacare’s individual mandate writing:

Some 20-odd cases have been filed overall challenging the law.

White House officials and advocates of the law emphasized that Hudson’s ruling is no more important than two recent rulings by federal judges that upheld the mandate. In October, U.S. District Judge George Steeh in Michigan ruled the insurance mandate fit within congressional power under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. On Nov. 30, U.S. District Judge Norman Moon in Lynchburg, Va. ruled the same.

But not all cases … Continue Reading

Looking forward to the future of health care policy, The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein wrote on November 23rd:

These days, most health reformers can agree about two things.

They believe, based on pretty good evidence, that growing concentration among insurers, hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers and drug companies helps explain why health-care costs are rising faster than the cost of everything else.

Insurance companies merge to gain greater clout in negotiating with hospitals and other providers, then the providers merge to gain leverage over the insurers. At any one time, in any one market, one side or the other might have the

… Continue Reading

“Some States Weigh Unthinkable Option: Ending Medicaid” reported Janet Adamy and Neil King for the November 22nd Wall Street Journal. And they do mention that “Medicaid has become one of the biggest items on state budgets,” but Adamy and King fail to mention just how much bigger a hole Medicaid is going to put in state budgets once the Obamacare mandates begin.

Starting in 2014 states must expand Medicaid to all non-elderly individuals with family incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level. At first, Obamacare picks up the first three years of benefit costs for … Continue Reading

NPR’s Julie Rovner found two Republicans who caution House Republicans that their efforts to investigate Obamacare could “backfire.” Rovner reported on November 4th:

But all those hearings could also have the opposite effect — giving the administration a chance to make its case in favor of the law, a case that often got drowned out during the election campaign.

“The next round of this, while there will continue to be the broad sloganeering on both sides, will presumably get a little bit more into the detail,” says Martin Corry, a health care lobbyist and former official at the

… Continue Reading

The October 28th NPR story by Julie Rovner, “Health Law Hardly At Fault For Rising Premiums,” was much fairer than its headline (and the sub-heads, if that’s what we call them). Obamacare is “hardly at fault for rising premiums?” Really? The story quotes an insurance-industry flack who well establishes what the Obama administration’s own regulations confirm: Obamacare will be a major driver of premium increases for some health plans.

A sub-head calls such claims “misinformation.” Really? The article does more to bolster … Continue Reading

N.C. Aizenman covered Judge Roger Vinson’s rejection of the Obama administration’s motion to dismiss the 20 state legal challenge to Obamacare’s individual mandate for the October 15th Washington Post. Providing some background in the decision, Aizenman writes:

Last week, in a suit brought by private parties, a federal judge in Michigan unequivocally upheld Congress’s authority on that point. However, Vinson described the question as far from settled, because the relevant clauses of the Constitution “have never been applied in such a manner before.”

But the Michigan judges’s decision was not as unequivocally different from Judge Vinson’s opinion as Aizenman lets on, … Continue Reading

Celebrating the six-month anniversary of President Barack Obama’s health care law, The New York Times Kevin Sack writes:

Starting now, insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of pre-existing health conditions, which the White House said could enable 72,000 uninsured to gain coverage. Insurers also will be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on benefits.

The law will now forbid insurers to drop sick and costly customers after discovering technical mistakes on applications. It requires that they offer coverage to children under 26 on their parents’ policies.

It establishes a menu of preventive procedures, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations,

… Continue Reading

A September 14th Washington Post article by N.C. Aizenman covering the oral arguments in the states suit against Obamacare, reports that “the public remains profoundly ambivalent about the president’s signature legislative achievement.” But is the American public really “ambivalent” about Obamacare? According to Merriam-Webster, ambivalence means holding “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings,” “continual fluctuation,” or “uncertainty as to which approach to follow.”

Now compare that definition with the Pollster.com aggregated data on Obamacare’s poll numbers. It reveals that a plurality or majority of the public has consistently opposed the law since before the angry town-hall meetings of … Continue Reading

Covering the similarities between Obamacare and Romneycare The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote on July 26th:

[E]ven a cursory read of the evidence would show that whatever the drawbacks of central planning, it covers people at an extremely low cost. Romney Care’s cost problem is a result of pasting a coverage-oriented quick fix atop our insane health-care system. Compare its costs to the British system, the French system, the German system, or any other system, and whatever your conclusions, you won’t walk away unimpressed by the ability of cen

First, this reasoning violates Cannon’s First Rule of Economic Literacy: when … Continue Reading

In the course of a July 13th Washington Post column attacking Republicans, Katrina vanden Heuvel writes that “Missouri’s Roy Blunt, among others, stood with the insurance and drug companies against health-care reform.” Come again? The pharmaceutical industry favored the Democrats’ health-care legislation, and is even now coming to the aid of Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) to thank him for his role in passing it. The insurers spent more than a year urging passage of an individual mandate coupled with insurance regulations. That wasn’t the Republican position in the debate.

So … Continue Reading

David Hilzenrath and N.C. Aizenman reported in the June 15th Washington Post:

If you like your health plan, you can keep it. That’s what President Obama promised during the long months of debate over health-care reform.
…
On Monday, the administration issued new rules to fulfill that promise. But your plan might not be quite the same — it could offer more benefits, and it could cost more.

Or if you have a health savings account or flexible savings account then you can’t keep your current health plan at all. The Heritage Foundation’s Kathryn Nix explains:

Obamacare law limits these consumer-controlled accounts in

… Continue Reading

Politico’s Jennifer Haberkorn’s May 26th article, Dems support Medicare brochure, article leaves out some key details about the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) produced four-page brochure. For starters she leaves out the fact that taxpayers are fooring the $18 million bill for producing and mailing the propaganda.

But more importantly she does not even try to identify or fact check any of the claims in the brochure. For example, the White House directed brochure says Obamacare will “provide you and your family greater savings and increased quality health care.” But the CMS’s own report on Obamacare … Continue Reading

On December 29th, Mary Carmichael reported for News week on What Health-Care Reform Will Mean for You. She writes:

Two changes will affect people with current private insurance in 2010. One is that they won’t have to worry about maxing out their lifetime medical benefits, because as of six months after enactment, insurance companies won’t be allowed to impose those maximums on anyone. … A second is that people who are frustrated with their plans will have someone to gripe to other than their congressmen: the Senate bill calls for the immediate creation of new state offices that will handle

… Continue Reading

USA Today’s Richard Wolf has a very fair and educational piece in October 19ths USA Today on how Medicaid, S-CHIP expansion plan could hurt states’ budgets. Wolf does an admirable job not only detailing how White House sponsored health reform would bankrupt states, but he also reports on how patients in the Medicaid program still find it hard to access health care. Wolf reports:

Many parts of the country already face an acute shortage of general practitioners, 35% of whom did not accept new Medicaid patients last year, according to the Center for Studying Health System Change. House legislation would

… Continue Reading

The August 12th New York Time includes an anonymous “Frequently Asked Questions” item on health care which claims:

Abortion opponents say the legislation would use taxes to subsidize insurance that could cover the procedure. Under the House bill, health plans could choose to cover abortion, but they generally could not use federal money to pay for the procedure and instead would have to use money from the premiums paid by beneficiaries. Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, said the bill would keep current restrictions on the use of federal money for abortion.

Well if Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, says … Continue Reading