The American Medical Association let Congress know on Wednesday that it opposes creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan that is strongly supported by President Obama and many other democrats. The association, which is made up of both doctors and employers, opposes the government-backed plan that would compete with private insurers because a public plan threatens to restrict patient choice” by driving out private insurers, according to the NY Times. Instead, health-care services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently,” the AMA told the NY Times. The Chamber of Commerce (which represents approximately three million businessmen) also opposes the public plan idea, according to the Wall Street Journal. The group told the Journal that it is concerned that forcing employers to help pay for insurance would add more costs to businesses that are already struggling. Later on Wednesday, the AMA issued a statement ststating that it would accept some versions of the public plan. AMA President Nancy H. Nielsen said in a statement: “The AMA opposes any public plan that forces physicians to participate, expands the fiscally-challenged Medicare program or pays Medicare rates, but the AMA is willing to consider other variations of a public plan that are
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According to a study done by the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Plymouth in the U.K., many Medicare beneficiaries find it hard to choose the most cost-effective Medicare Part D plan when there are so many plans to choose from.  Beneficiaries often choose unnecessarily expensive plans and don’t realize that they are overpaying for these plans. The study included more than 200 healthy adults with half over the age of 65 and half under the age of 65. One of the groups had three plans to choose from, another group had 10 plans to choose from, and the third group had 20 plans to choose from. The results obtained from the study showed that the groups that had the choice of many plans had more difficulty choosing one that was cost-effective. The study also noted that older adults are less likely to choose the least-costly plan yet more confident that they had made the right decision than the younger adults. “Many seniors are unaware that they can be saving hundreds of dollars every year by choosing a different drug plan, because there are entirely too many choices for them to navigate,” said Yaniv Hanoch, Ph.D., author
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The Medicare Part D plan is notorious for its so-called doughnut gap. The doughnut gap is the gap in coverage where beneficiaries generally start paying the full cost for their medicines. This happens when total drug expenditures by the beneficiary reach $2,700. This gap in coverage usually occurs during the summer or fall and it forces millions of beneficiaries to pay the full cost of their drugs. Congress is now being called on to eliminate or at least decrease the gap as part of the efforts to reform health care. The main challenge that Congress has in trying to close the gap is where the money will come from. The Congressional Budget Office claims that closing the gap and providing continuous coverage for all beneficiaries would cost $134 billion over 10 years. At a time when the government is already struggling to reduce the federal deficit and Medicare is already estimated to go bankrupt by 2017, the concern over the gap may have to be dismissed and people under Medicare may have to continue spending thousands of dollars a year to fill their prescriptions. This year an estimated 3 million of the 27 million older Americans who receive Medicare drug
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Peter Bach, a pulmonary specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has an interesting solution for some of Medicare’s problems. In an op-ed column in Wednesday’s New York Times, Bach claims that while medical specialists increase in a given area, medicare costs go up but but patient satisfaction, quality of care and convenience remain the same. In other words, in a place like Manhattan where there are double the amount of specialists as there are in Albany, medicare costs per individual are more than double . However, patient satisfaction and treatment are reported to be the same. The simple solution that Bach poses for this issue is that medicare should use a bidding system in which Medicare should start to offer doctors a reimbursement rate lower than the current rate and see how many doctors sign up. Obviously, if enough doctors do sign up, Medicare would save its users and taxpayers much money. Worst case scenario, Bach argues, is that specialists may leave the system and patients may not be able to get their preferred. However, as Bach notes, the loss of specialists should not result in less quality care. Bach’s argument makes sense if it is true their is not
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At a recent meeting Senate sources confirmed that President Obama plans to undertake a major Medicare reform. The White House hopes that a large part of the changes will be centered on MedPAC, the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee. MedPAC is an independent congressional agency formed to help Congress deal with Medicare issues. Every year the agency releases a report to Congress that analyzes the payment policy of Medicare and gives recommendations and every year the report is ignored. There are currently two plans to reform Medicare under consideration that involve MedPAC. Under Jay Rockefeller’s MedPAC Reform Act, MedPAC would move into the executive branch and be given control over things like Medicare payment rates. The other plan consists of taking MedPAC’s yearly recommendations and putting them through a yes-or-no vote in Congress. This plan would call for fast track, episodic reform. However, healthcare reform is a continual process and as such should consist of continual reform. Despite obvious reasons that the second plan would do more harm than good, all the healthcare reforms being discussed by government need a reality check. Before trying to even promote universal healthcare or make more people Medicare-eligible, Obama should eliminate all of the fraud
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US researchers announced Monday that patients with private health insurance lose more weight after having gastric bypass surgery than those covered by Medicare do. The study which surveyed data on 750 gastric bypass patients showed Medicare patients tend to weigh more before the surgery than those one private insurance, and that they are most likely to be depressed, have high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and sleep apnea. Gastric bypass has risen in popularity in the past few years as a treatment option for severe obesity. This type of bariatric surgery works by reconstructing the digestive tract to reduce the amount of food that can be eaten by a patient. It is most frequently used to treat patients whose BMI (body mass index) is over 30. Patients with BMIs of 40 to 49 are considered morbidly obese, while those with a score of 50 or above fall in the category of the super obese. The researchers in this study say that morbid obesity is the leading public health crisis in the US and that bariatric surgery is often the only effective treatment option for these people. Both large private insurers and Medicare (covering 44 million elderly and disabled Americans) cover
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