e-News 10/28/16

• New Evidence: ObamaCare is not Sustainable
• Medical Doctors/Congressmen on Obamacare, Health System Reform
• Congress will “fix” National Guard Bonus Scandal
• Respected “Defense Board: White House Blocked Navy From S. China Sea Warship Passages”
•  “How Putin played our ‘flexible’ president”
• Picatinny Collaborates With Private Industry to Enhance National Security
• Salute: Local Firefighters earn St. Barnabas Burn Center “Valor Awards”
• Salute: Passaic County Community College’s Wanaque Academic Center

 

New Evidence: ObamaCare is not Sustainable

Last week, this eNews focused on the damaging effect Obamacare is having on economic growth and job creation – key priorities for New Jersey.

Now, just days before Obamacare open enrollment begins, the Obama Administration announced that benchmark health insurance premiums on healthcare.gov will rise by an average of 25 percent in 2017, while the number of insurance plans offered on the exchanges will decrease by an average 36 percent.

If this data isn’t proof that Obamacare is failing Americans across the country, I don’t know what is.

• Premiums are climbing to unprecedented highs.
• Insurers are fleeing the exchanges in droves.
• More and more middle class families and taxpayers are forced to foot the bill as the overall cost of health care spikes.

What's becoming even clearer is this law is not sustainable. Obamacare’s failures have led to more money coming out of the pockets of hard-working Americans. This is troubling for those struggling to pay their health care bills who have seen another one of the law's promises broken. We need bipartisan, solutions-oriented health care reform that focuses on access, cost, quality, and choice.

In a nation of 323 million people, it makes no sense for one federal bureaucracy to dictate Americans' health insurance plans. But that’s exactly what Obamacare does, and it is not working.

There is a Better Way

The House leadership plan would give families more control to choose the coverage that best meets their needs—not Washington’s mandates:

• Make it easier to take insurance from job to job. 
• Expand health saving accounts. 
• Give small businesses more leverage to negotiate better rates, and
• Allow health insurance to be sold across state lines. 

All of this will help lower premiums. And instead of Washington at the center of your health care, it will be you and your doctor.

The fact of the matter is, we need to have a real conversation about the future of health care in this country, and people need to start acknowledging that the Affordable Care Act is anything but affordable.

The number of doctors and clinicians in Congress these days must be near a record high.  Three of them, Dr. Phil Roe of Tennessee, Dr. Tom Price of Georgia and Dr. John Fleming from Louisiana recently wrote a column on health system reform in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Forum.  You can access it here.

Or read the article below:

Medical Doctors/Congressmen on Obamacare, Health System Reform

October 13, 2016

By Rep Phil Roe, MD; Rep Tom Price, MD; and Rep John Fleming, MD

We represent the House GOP Doctors Caucus, a group of 18 clinicians in Congress who use our medical expertise to shape health care policy. As clinicians and legislators, we believe we have a unique perspective to bring to the health care debate.

We agree that the US health care system needed reform before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted. Before the ACA, health care cost too much, care was difficult to access for too many people, and quality care was not always incentivized.

But we strongly believe the ACA was not the best way to reform health care delivery in this country. While the administration claims that the ACA has helped tens of millions of Americans gain coverage, simply adding millions more into a Medicaid system that is woefully inadequate at providing actual access to quality care is not health care reform. We believe the federal government has no right to force Americans to purchase anything, and the ACA even goes a step further to also dictate what kind of health coverage patients must purchase. The administration also fails to mention that there are roughly 5 million Americans who had coverage that was deemed inadequate through the ACA and were forced into a government-approved plan. Unfortunately, it’s clear to us that this law has made health care more complicated for physicians and patients alike and exacerbated a cost crisis in health care for millions of Americans.

Ostensibly, the ACA’s primary intent was to expand access to underserved populations, but simply having an insurance card does not ensure that a patient has access to quality, affordable health care. Unfortunately, the all-out push to ensure access to health insurance is having 2 serious adverse effects: it’s making premiums unaffordable for middle-class individuals who are ineligible for subsidies and it’s increasing out-of-pocket costs, deductibles, and co-payments. This is partially why more and more providers and hospital systems are amassing the majority of their uncollectible debt from people with insurance.

Our fellow physicians are making great efforts to navigate a set of constantly shifting metrics—some of which are directly attributable to the ACA. It’s frustrating to hear from so many of our physician colleagues about how much more difficult it is to practice medicine and the troubles they have navigating the changing health care landscape. These are troubles we predicted when Democrats cut Republicans out of the legislative process during the health care debate. As physicians, we believe it’s important to explore the ACA’s implementation not as Republicans or Democrats, but as physicians whose main concern is caring for patients.

Increased Costs

The ACA’s mandatory coverage requirements use a one-size-fits-all approach, and that’s one of the reasons costs continue to rise. To make insurance more affordable, we need to reduce the number of required essential health benefits and let patients decide what coverage they need and can afford. Furthermore, because the ACA reduced the ratios, or “bands,” by which age-based rates for adults can differ, to 3:1 (so the cost of a premium for an adult aged 64 years is no more than 3 times the cost of the same policy for a 21-year-old), the ACA is making health insurance cost-prohibitive for many young adults who are being forced to subsidize older, sicker patients.

Additionally, under the ACA, many preventive services are required to be covered for free, but if a more serious health issue is discovered, many patients now must pay for follow-up tests out of pocket instead of only having to pay a co-payment, as was the case in many plans before ACA.

Finally, while many of the plans on the exchange started with unrealistically low premiums, premiums have now skyrocketed, with some policy holders facing 20% hikes. Further, most of the lower-premium plans have high deductibles, making it difficult for middle-class patients to seek care. Because of how much uncollectible debt is now coming from people who have insurance, many providers are being forced to request payment up front because they simply can’t afford to provide the care and not be reimbursed for their services.

Rewriting a Failing Law Through Rule Making

There are other areas of the law that are almost certainly assured to wreak havoc on the employer-sponsored health insurance system, which covers nearly 150 million Americans. Rather than work with Congress to address those areas of bipartisan concern, such as the employer mandate, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and the individual mandate, the Obama Administration has instead used questionable rule-making authority to rewrite major provisions within the ACA. For instance, the administration delayed the employer mandate multiple times, extended the enrollment deadlines, and unilaterally reduced out-of-pocket caps—just to name a few changes made to the law without Congressional approval.

We believe the statute is clear on what the law requires the administration to do. There’s no clause in the Constitution about changing laws you championed just because they aren’t working.

Moving Forward

We are invested in what the next era of health care should look like, and we believe it should be patient centered with a focus on innovation and research. We believe we can and should repeal the ACA and replace it with commonsense, patient-centered reforms, which is why several of our members have written comprehensive proposals to do just that. Simply put, we believe the reforms we are advancing would make it so every American would have the financial wherewithal and incentive to purchase the coverage that they want for themselves, not the high-cost coverage mandated by the ACA that patients have been forced to purchase under threat of a tax penalty.

Additionally, we support reforms like the ones recommended in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Better Way agenda, such as expanding health savings accounts, providing portable financial assistance for health insurance, and making it easier for individuals and small businesses to pool together to purchase health insurance. We believe in providing preexisting condition protections and bringing fairness to insurance premiums by addressing the cost drivers in health care, including medical malpractice improvements to address the practice of defensive medicine and changing the age-rating ratio. As we mentioned above, the ACA-mandated age-based ratio of 3:1 leaves younger, healthier individuals paying more for their care. These are just a few of the things we can do to expand coverage and lower costs.

Let us be clear: no one is talking about returning to the pre-ACA status quo, but there is a better way to achieve health system reform in this country.

Congress will “fix” National Guard Bonus Scandal

The headlines earlier this week were filled with charges that the National Guard was working to take back enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses improperly given to California Guard members at the height of the Iraq war. 

Under pressure from Congress, veterans groups and the public, the Defense Department did the right thing by halting debt collections from our men and women in uniform. This is an important first step, but the servicemembers and families who received bonuses in good faith deserve to know they will be made whole, that the problem will be solved, and that those responsible will held accountable.

But Congress will step in and “fix” this specific problem in the National Defense Authorization bill expected to pass the House later this year. It’s becoming more clear that Congress must act to give these warriors the peace of mind they have earned. 

See Defense Secretary Carter’s statement here.

America: “Leading from Behind”

More examples came to light this week relating to the Obama Administration’s reluctance to maintain U.S. leadership across the globe.

There’s the story that the White House for years prevented the U.S. Navy from challenging China’s island-building in the South China Sea.   Bill Gertz reports in the Washington Free Beacon, that the respected Defense Policy Board concluded: “White House Blocked Navy From S. China Sea Warship Passages.”

Todd Wood’s analysis piece in the Washington Times, “How Putin played our ‘flexible’ president” is also worth a read.  Find it here.

Picatinny Collaborates With Industry to Enhance US National Security

I was honored to be asked to address members of our military industrial base at this week’s Armaments Industry Day at Picatinny Arsenal.  The theme of the two-day conference, sponsored by the National Armaments Consortium (NAC) and Picatinny’s Armament Research Engineering Development Center (ARDEC) and attended by nearly 300 military and industry representatives, was innovation to ensure that our forces achieve and maintain “overmatch” over our adversaries on the battlefield. 

We rely on innovation to maintain our nation’s ability to deter, and if need be, prevail in conflict.  And if we are to keep ahead of our competitors and, unfortunately, some incredibly smart terror organizations, we must engage the talent of both private industry and government. 

That’s why events like this industry day are so important.  While Picatinny employs the “best and the brightest” scientists, engineers and technicians in the armaments world, private sector companies operating at the cutting edge of technology can also make major contributions to addressing some of the toughest and most important security challenges we face across the globe today.

It is important that they come together on a regular basis and I commend ARDEC and NAC for their efforts!

To learn more about Picatinny Arsenal, visit:

http://www.pica.army.mil/Picatinny/

To learn more about ARDEC, visit:

http://www.ardec.army.mil/

Salute: Thank you to the local firefighters who received this year’s Valor Awards from the St. Barnabas Burn Center. 

Salute: Congratulations to the Passaic County Community Collegeas it officially opens its new and improved Wanaque Academic Center on Union Avenue.  This enhanced facility will make a great college even greater!