Posts Tagged ‘Reform’

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Obama Accepts $70 Billion Less in Medicare Payment Cuts to Hospitals

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Many hospitals are quite happy with the news that the Obama administration has now agreed to decrease its proposed hospital cuts by about $70 billion. Originally the White house was planning to cut Medicaid and Medicare payments to hospitals around the US by about $224 billion over 10 years to aid healthcare reform. However, they now agreed to the smaller target amount of $155 billion over 10 years.

Unfortunately, this deal may only be good news for hospitals. Since President Obama does not want the healthcare reform to add to the deficit, now the White House has to find other ways to get the money to fund it. The healthcare reform is expected to cost more than $1 trillion. Losing this source of funding for the reform puts our country in another $70 billion of debt if other sources are not found.

Obama and the Senate are still struggling with healthcare reform legislation and trying to work out all of the details. A lot of controversy still remains, although some people are hopeful that a bill will be passed by the end of August.

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Medicare Doughnut Hole Closing

Friday, June 26th, 2009

President Barack Obama announced on Monday that he plans on closing the gap in prescription drug coverage for senior citizens. The way that Medicare works now is that once a senior’s prescription drug costs reach $2,700, Medicare stops paying. Then once costs top $6,100, Medicare starts paying again. “It’s a reform that will make prescription drugs more affordable for millions of seniors … and restore a measure of fairness to Medicare Part D,” Obama said. Under the agreement, prescription drug costs would be cut in half for about 26 million seniors who fall into the so-called Medicare doughnut hole. Some people, however, are not so hopeful for this plan’s outcomes. “It signifies pretty much nothing,” said Michael Cannon, with the Cato Institute. “The pharmaceutical industry isn’t going to give out those discounts just for free. They’re expecting to get more customers. They’re expecting to make more money off this deal not less money,” Whatever the case may be, even if the pharmaceutical industry’s goals may be financial, it does not change the fact that this plan will help millions of seniors throughout the country pay for their prescriptions.  Many seniors sufffer from the inability to pay for prescriptions under the doughnut hole and some are forced to drop their insurance.  Sure, the pharameceutical companies may gain money through all of this, but as long as more seniors are covered with affordable prescription drug coverage, this plan is a success.

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Congress Called On to Fill in the Medicare Doughnut Hole

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

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 benefits will reach the coverage gap and pay the full cost of their prescriptions or risk their health by reducing their medication or stop taking it altogether when their costs reach $2,700. These Americans will be on their own to pay the next $3,454 of prescriptions before they become eligible for Medicare’s catastrophic coverage. With that coverage, beneficiaries are only responsible for only 5% of their bills for the rest of the year.

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A single-payer health care reform can contribute to an economic stimulus

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

According to an article in The Nation, we need the right health care reform for our nation to recover economically so it can prosper. The establishment of a national single-payer style healthcare reform system that expands the existing Medicare system to cover all Americans is said to be the “right reform.” The National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association (NNOC/CNA) released a study last week that shows that if we implement this reform, it would provide a major stimulus to our economy by creating more than 2.6 million jobs and instilling $317 billion in new business and public revenues into our economy. $100 Billion in wages will be added as well to the U.S. economy.

Unemployment hit 7.2% in 2008; a 16 year high and over 2.6 million jobs were lost. The single-payer system will create the jobs we lost last year, approximately 2.6 million.

“Through direct and supplemental expenditures, healthcare is already a uniquely dominant force in the U.S. economy,” said Don DeMoro, lead author of the study and director of the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy, the NNOC/CNA research arm.

“However, so much more is possible. If we were to expand our present Medicare system to cover all Americans, the economic stimulus alone would create an immense engine that would help drive our national economy for decades to come,” DeMoro said.

Healthcare in the U.S. currently accounts for $2.1 trillion in direct expenditures. Total health care spending is nearly $6 trillion. The comprehensive plan includes attributes such as universal eligibility, regardless of age, income, pre-existing conditions, and employment status; a uniform single standard of care for all enrollees which would eliminate the existing disparities in Medicare and Medicaid; and a single payer system for both funding and administration. The entire nation will have access to the same health services, costs, administrative cost burden, and eligibility requirements.

This single payer system can make significant contributions to the access of health care for all residents of the United States as well as a substantial economic stimulus in the form of new jobs and increased wages. The total cost for this system is $63 billion, which ends up being a huge percentage less than the bailouts paid for AIG and CitiGroup.

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