A Star Ledger headline reads: “ObamaCare fuels applicant boom for NJ Medicaid—Advocate hails 35% increase in October.” Almost 22,000 new applications were filed in October, up from 16,000 in September. Is this a triumph? Was a 990-page law needed to accomplish this? The taxpayers will have to fork over $5,000 per applicant to a Medicaid HMO—that’s $110 million—and what will the patients get?
I am a physician who volunteers at the Zarephath Health Center, a non-government charity clinic in central NJ, where volunteers care for the poor and uninsured. We see Medicaid patients who cannot find a Medicaid doctor. The other day I saw a 35-year-old mother with severe asthma. She is on Medicaid and had gone to the emergency room a few days earlier. She was instructed to find a physician for follow-up treatment. Unable to find a doctor who takes Medicaid, she was welcomed at our clinic. I saw her, spent time hearing her story, and was happy to give her prescriptions to keep her asthma in check.
The next day she returned with the odd complaint that no pharmacy would fill her prescriptions. Since I had not enrolled as a “non-billing Medicaid provider,” the pharmacies were told they would not be paid if they filled my prescriptions. I have a license, am board certified in internal medicine, and pay each year to keep my controlled-substances licenses updated, so why would they not honor my prescriptions?
When the patient called the Medicaid office, they instructed her to go back to the emergency room to get her prescriptions rewritten there—presumably copied by a physician enrolled in the program. Why would the Medicaid program deny her the medicines she needed? One would think they would appreciate the fact that a doctor was willing to see and care for her without costing the system anything. But apparently this is not how a bloated bureaucracy works.
Gov. Chris Christie will allow insurance companies in New Jersey to decide whether to reinstate the insurance policies of 800,000 people who received recent letters saying they would be canceled because they did not meet the standards of the Affordable…
Posted: November 26th, 2013 | Author:admin | Filed under:News, NJNewsCommons, ObamaCare | Tags:Chris Christie, ObamaCare | Comments Off on Chris Christie will let insurance companies decide whether to extend 800,000 policies
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.
Now that we’ve all had the joy of seeing everyone rush to sign up for Obamacare, while having major reductions in the costs of their policies and experiencing everyone in this nation being fully insured (that was the promise, wasn’t it?), let’s not lose track of how we got here. When history writes about this fiasco, it will not focus on the abysmal failure that this very poorly written monstrosity turned out to be. It will not focus on the political bickering or the fact that it was passed solely with Democratic votes while every Republican proposal to amend, modify or correct it was ignored by Harry Reid and the Senate — modifications that may actually have enabled it to survive. No, history will focus, eventually, on the real horror of this bill, the gross violation of law and our Constitution that enabled it to stain our national landscape. Make no mistake. Historians will understand that the means “justified” by the ends in one instance may, in the future, justify some act that will be far less piquant than universal health care.
“IT’S NOT TRUE,” Congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ, Monmouth and Middlesex) shouted at Fox News’s Megyn Kelly last night while arguing that President Obama has kept his promise, “If you like your healthcare, you can keep it, period, I guarantee it.”
The bobble-heading Pallone apparently was unaware that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius had testified before a House hearing he was present for, that ObamaCare requires that any insurance policy premium that goes up by $5 or more, is ineligible to be “grandfathered.” Pallone changed his demeanor, but stuck to his talking points and kept bobble-heading, after a clearly exasperated Kelly confronted Pallone with a video clip of Sibelius’s testimony.
Pallone insisted that insurance companies were canceling “lousy” policies because no one would buy them. “But 15 million people did buy them,” Kelly retorted as Pallone bobbled.
This was the second time in a week that Pallone lost his composure and motor functions publicly. On October 24 Pallone bobbled and shouted “I will not yield to this monkey court or whatever this thing is, DO WHAT YOU WANT,” during a House ObamaCare hearing.
You probably saw the video of Congressman Frank Pallone ranting and raving like a lunatic at a House hearing this morning regarding the Affordable Care Act (a bill that he was the mastermind of) and the security of the private information of those enrolling.
I believe the whole incident was staged and this is why. Pallone recently had a failed bid for the Democratic primary regarding the open U.S. Senate seat here in New Jersey. For years Pallone has planned and dreamed of becoming a United States Senator During that time he built up a substantial warchest of about $4 million. When he announced his bid for United States Senate he transferred the majority of that money into his senatorial account.
Unfortunately for Pallone the battle was much more intense then he thought. After receiving a devastating blow from now US Sen. Cory Booker, Congressman Frank Pallone only has one fourth of his once mighty warchest left. Compared to his other challenger Congressman Rush Holt who walked away with a net gain.
An angry and animated Congressman Frank Pallone slammed his Republican colleagues on the House Energy and Commerce Committee this morning for holding a “Monkey Court” designed to discourage enrollment in ObamaCare.
Pallone, after a bobble head soliloquy, angrily refused to yield to “this Monkey Court.” “Do what ever you want”, Pallone shouted, “I’M NOT YIEDLING!”
For a better quality video of Pallone’s outburst, click here.
U. S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid anointed Newark Mayor Cory Booker as New Jersey’s next Senator in a PBS interview last July. That was before the Special Senate Primary Booker was engaged in with Congressmen Frank Pallone, Rush Holt and Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver.
Asked by interviewer Judy Woodruff about the absence of a black Democratic member of the Senate, Reid responded, “”Well, just hold your breath, Cory Booker’s on his way from New Jersey. That’ll happen in October.”
View the video at the 12:06 mark.
This afternoon a CNN reporter asked Reid, “If you could help one child with cancer, why wouldn’t you do it?” as a follow up to her question about why Reid isn’t letting the Senate vote on the House’s bill to fund the National Institute of Health during the government shutdown.
Reid responded, “Why would we want to do that?” and went on the insult the reporter’s intelligence.
