ObamaCare Update

680,000 New Jersey residents will be losing their health care coverage  in the coming weeks, as Horizon Blue Cross and AmeriHealth cancel policies that are not compliant with ObamaCare.

But all is not lost!  HealthCare.gov doesn’t work, so one of the firms contracted by the federal government to help with the enrollment process has opened centers in Edison and Wayne that are open seven days per week where trained navigators will be on hand to help the uninsured and soon to be uninsured enroll.

The deadline to enroll in ObamaCare, if you want coverage by January 1, is December 23.  Get your elf off the shelf and hustle off to Edison or Wayne.  There are malls nearby.

President Obama is leaving Friday for a $4 million vacation in Hawaii.

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IT’S AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN BURY IN 2000 PAGES

By Stuart J. Moskovitz

Once again, there are rumblings of “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act. This happens when a bill is passed as massive as this one that not a single member of Congress read prior to approving it. We are slowly learning of the myriad of difficulties buried in this bill simply because it was jammed down our throats with the goal of not airing it carefully beforehand. But the death panels do not exist.

There are two provisions to which Sarah Palin, Mark Halperin and even Howard Dean have referred as “death panels.” The first, Section 1233, involves counselling (voluntary, not mandatory) of “end of life” provisions. These include Living Wills, Health Advisory Statements, etc., all of which are standard documents every trust and estates attorney prepares for his/her client. There is nothing sinister about these. The second provision involves the Independent Payment Advisory Board whose sole function is to make recommendations regarding ways of cutting Medicare costs in the future. Those recommendations are not self-implementing. They must be submitted to Congress and approved by the President. This means first, there is no review of any individual case. Second, whatever recommendations are made need to be passed as if they were a new law. Oddly, there are so many serious harmful provisions of this Act, it is curious that everyone is fixated on two provisions that are relatively benign.

There are provisions that are not benign that are harmful to this nation and not just to its health care. What is amazing is that while everyone is obsessed with something that is not in the Act, they are totally ignoring a provision of the Act that is as unconstitutional and unAmerican as any provision of any Act in our lifetime. The Act provides in section 3007 for a “value based payment modifier.” This means health professionals get reviewed by the Administration and a calculation is made measuring the average cost for treating a patient for the physician or “group” of doctors versus the “success” of the treatment. It would be difficult to dream of a more subjective measurement so subject to abuse. I stand awestruck by the teachers who support the ACA (having not read it, of course) while screaming that it is not fair to “measure” their performance by the success of their students. This calculation leads to a “mathematical” payment modifier that reduces the payments given by Medicare to each group of health practitioners. But that’s not the bad part.

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