DJP Update 10-17-2011 “Return Control to the Patient” editorial in The Tampa Tribune: repeal IPAB
DJP comment: One example of engaging in visits to editorial boards, doing radio and TV interviews, and talking to senior groups is the editorial below in The Tampa Tribune. Good exchange of ideas and sometimes you will see editorials that result from the discussion.
This activity is something all of us can do. It may be that a 10 minute radio interview is the only time you can spare but physicians need to engage more. I had a wonderful time visiting and talking with the seniors at various senior centers in Florida. Lots of wisdom and long experience in the minds of seniors. At one site, several of the seniors spent their career as EMTs and had more wisdom than bureaucrats who design laws without ever treating or helping a patient.
America may have serious economic problems but we have had problems before and America always rises to the occasion. Let’s untie the hands of doctors and patients and allow innovation, creativity, and compassion to trump choking regulations, coercion, and an out-of-control medical liability system. Time to engage in the debate and honor those who died fighting for our liberty. Let us not give up and meekly go into the bureaucratic nightmare that is doomed to failure. And when those with titles say, “you don’t understand…trust us…”, remind them that trust is built on transparency, consistency to principles, and courage; not back room deals.
Imagine if the Federal Government said that all computers in the 1980s would have to use a certain operating system, have specific RAM and Hard Drive space, etc. The result: no Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, Apple Nano, etc. True competition works!
P.S. CLASS portion of PPACA is now stopped by HHS. Math didn’t work just as non-partisan government actuaries said before passage. Yet it was passed and thus funny math kept the projected cost of PPACA under a trillion dollars. And yes, the 30% SGR price-fixing cut of payment of doctors was calculated in the savings as happening January 1, 2012 when the whole world knew that would never happen unless the planners wanted Medicare to collapse. Funny math!
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DJPNEWS Donald Palmisano
Spread the word. Editorial 10-15-2011 The Tampa Tribune: Return Control to the Patient — http://tinyurl.com/3gqc8vf #IPAB #PPACA #hcr
20 hours ago
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Link to Editorial in The Tampa Tribune:
http://www2.tbo.com/news/opinion/2011/oct/15/meopino1-return-control-to-the-patient-ar-272052/
or
http://tinyurl.com/3gqc8vf
Editorial
The Tampa Tribune
Published: October 15, 2011
» 3 Comments | Post a Comment
RETURN CONTROL TO THE PATIENT
“Who is in charge: the government or the patient?” U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan asked during a memorable speech about health care last month at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
For most of us, the answer is clear. The patient, in consultation with his or her doctor, should be in charge. But the new health care law’s attempt to contain out-of-control costs would give the government that role.
The law creates a 15-member board — the Independent Payment Advisory Board — charged with reducing Medicare payments in years in which spending exceeds targeted growth rates. The IPAB would, as National Review suggested, “make Medicare worse for seniors while leaving in place all the program’s perverse incentives, which distort the rest of the health-care market.”
In short, Medicare patients would lose access to medical care when Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals are cut and physicians then refuse to take new patients.
“A (Medicare) card doesn’t help if doctors won’t take it,” Dr. Donald Palmisano, former president of the American Medical Association and a spokesman for The Coalition to Protect Patients’ Rights, a nonpartisan advocacy group, told us during a visit this week. “IPAB will just delay the inevitable. More doctors will go into concierge practices.”
Congress need not wait for the Supreme Court to determine the constitutionality of the overall health care law to get rid of IPAB.
There is bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that IPAB is a mistake. Physicians groups don’t like it, hospital lobbies don’t like it, and even the American Medical Association, whose support helped pass Obamacare into law, has called for its repeal. Some Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor of Tampa, have signed on to Tennessee Republican U.S. Rep. Phil Roe’s repeal bill.
IPAB’s proponents, including President Obama, insist this is no rationing board and point to the section of the law that says there can be no rationing. But it is what it is. The health care law may not ration Medicare directly, but it gives the board the authority to ration Medicare in the future. If Medicare costs rise too rapidly, the board has the power to make “recommendations” to contain those costs, and Congress must go along unless it has a different plan to make the cuts or a supermajority overrides the recommendations.
In effect, the panel has the power to do what Congress has been unwilling to do: make painful cuts to Medicare.
Everyone can agree that Medicare costs must be contained and that the payment system doesn’t work. But the threat of reduced payments to providers will result in rationed care, no matter how you look at it.
Amazingly, President Obama thinks IPAB should have even more power.
According to Ryan: “The president’s latest proposal simply called for letting IPAB cut deeper. This board of bureaucrats will now be tasked with holding Medicare’s growth rate to GDP plus half a percent. To put that in context, Medicare is currently growing at 6.3 percent per year.
“Medicare’s non-partisan chief actuary, Richard Foster, has been clear on this point: Going from 6 percent growth down to the president’s targets, using only the blunt tools that his law gives to IPAB, would simply drive Medicare providers out of business, resulting in harsh disruptions and denied care for seniors.”
And, he aptly noted: “You cannot control costs by using price controls, which impose painful cuts within a fundamentally broken framework.”
The board won’t have control over individual patients, as presidential candidate Michele Bachmann suggested in debate this week. But its “top-down price controls” will drive physicians away and make it harder for seniors to find care. It should be repealed.
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Stay well.
Donald
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