Viewpoints: Enrollment Extension; Health Law By The Numbers; Hospital Safety
A selection of opinions on health care from around the country.
The Wall Street Journal:
Scenes From ObamaCare Tax Season
We keep reading that ObamaCare is working beautifully—a liberal reverie interrupted only by those moments when the law is not. The latest arrived Friday, featuring another political exemption from the individual mandate. This tax-filing season is exposing Americans for the first time to the ObamaCare command to buy health coverage or else pay a penalty—or pay maybe, kind of, to some extent. The White House carved out vast exceptions to the mandate last year to assuage its unpopularity, but a few saps are still discovering they must pay 1% of their gross income or $95, whichever is higher, for going uninsured. This remains unpopular, and thus we get calls for more regulatory improvisation. (2/20)
The Washington Post:
An Obamacare Fix
This is the first tax season in which people are being hit with Affordable Care Act penalties. Unsurprisingly, opinion polls show that many uninsured don’t yet understand the health-care law’s deadlines, subsidies and fines. To many, the penalties will come as a very unwelcome surprise. Obama administration planning threatened to make this entirely predictable situation worse. But, as of Friday, the Health and Human Services Department is in the process of ameliorating the sting that some uninsured will soon face. That’s good, but may not go far enough. (2/21)
The New York Times:
For Tens of Millions, Obamacare Is Working
Ever since President Obama unveiled his health care plan in 2009, critics have questioned its lofty promise to bring affordable health insurance to millions of Americans. Now statistics for the second year are largely in hand and the verdict is indisputable: Its disastrous 2013 rollout notwithstanding, the Affordable Care Act has achieved nearly all of its ambitious goals. Most important, just three key provisions — creation of exchanges with subsidies for those who qualify, expansion of Medicaid and minimum standards for insurance plans — have benefited at least 31 million Americans. (Steven Rattner, 2/21)
The Washington Post:
Taking Obamacare For Granted
Will it take the repeal of the Affordable Care Act or its evisceration by the Supreme Court for us to appreciate what it’s done? ... Because of the law, at least 10 million fewer Americans are uninsured — and that’s a conservative number. The drop in the nation’s uninsured rate is the largest since the early 1970s, when Medicaid was still taking hold and both Medicare and Medicaid were expanded to cover people with disabilities. ... Some more numbers: 87 percent of the people who signed up on the exchanges qualified for subsidies, and the average assistance to each was $268 per month. Perhaps some out there would rather not have government help people buy health insurance, but this seems to me a good and decent use of our tax money. (E.J. Dionne Jr., 2/22)
The New York Times:
The G.O.P. Policy Test
On health care, the G.O.P. has profited from the unpopularity of Obamacare, but we are now at Year 6 and counting without anything more than the pretense of a conservative alternative. These failures have not been for want of policy options; they’ve been for want of ingenuity and will. The list of plausible conservative health care alternatives now literally fills a book — “Overcoming Obamacare,” from The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein, which any G.O.P. presidential contender would do well to at least pretend to have read. The best of these alternatives would allow a Republican candidate to promise, as Romney did not, to mostly maintain Obama’s coverage expansion (albeit with less comprehensive coverage) while lowering health insurance premiums for most Americans. (Ross Douthat, 2/21)
The Wall Street Journal:
States Strike A Blow For Freedom In The ObamaCare Age
One of ObamaCare’s many unfortunate effects is its centralization of the nation’s health-care debate. Even Republicans now assume only Washington can fix America’s broken health-care system—look at the various federal-centric ObamaCare replacement plans that have been released in recent months. But state lawmakers can play an important role in improving health outcomes, lowering costs and increasing choices for patients. Fortunately, elected officials in some states are showing promise in this regard. For example, legislators in South Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire and Washington have recently introduced bills to weaken or repeal their states’ “certificate of need” laws, which increase health-care costs and empower bureaucrats and lobbyists rather than patients. (Nancy Pfotenhauer and Nathan Nascimento, 2/20)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
If Facts Mattered, Medicaid Expansion In Missouri Would Be Slam Dunk
When it comes to Medicaid expansion, it’s time for the Missouri Republicans who control the Legislature to play a high-stakes game of truth or dare. If legislative leaders like Speaker of the House John Diehl, R-Town and Country, and Senate President Pro Tem Tom Dempsey, R-St. Charles, really don’t believe that Medicaid expansion would be good for both the Missouri economy and the general revenue budget, then they should hold a hearing and prove Medicaid expansion advocates wrong. One real hearing. One wide-open debate. One moment where the truth matters. You would think that a party that is so convinced that Obamacare is the job-killing scourge of a nation that it must be stopped at all costs wouldn’t be afraid to make its case, right? You would be wrong. (2/22)
The New York Times:
When Medical Devices Spread Superbugs
Germs that are resistant to antibiotics are cropping up with alarming frequency at American hospitals. A lethal “superbug” known as CRE infected seven patients at the Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center and killed two of them. The germs were apparently transmitted on inadequately sterilized medical scopes. The episode brought an immediate reminder and warning from the Food and Drug Administration that the complex design of the instruments, known as duodenoscopes, makes them hard to clean after they are used. It is imperative that government agencies, medical institutions and the manufacturer take more aggressive steps to ensure sterilization and protect patients. (2/23)
The New York Times:
The Government’s Bad Diet Advice
For two generations, Americans ate fewer eggs and other animal products because policy makers told them that fat and cholesterol were bad for their health. Now both dogmas have been debunked in quick succession. ... How did experts get it so wrong? Certainly, the food industry has muddied the waters through its lobbying. But the primary problem is that nutrition policy has long relied on a very weak kind of science: epidemiological, or “observational,” studies in which researchers follow large groups of people over many years. But even the most rigorous epidemiological studies suffer from a fundamental limitation. At best they can show only association, not causation. Epidemiological data can be used to suggest hypotheses but not to prove them. (Nina Teicholz, 2/20)
The Washington Post:
Protecting Virginians
Virginia’s General Assembly is poised to act on legislation to protect against meningococcal meningitis, a particularly deadly and almost always destructive set of infections. The proposed law would require vaccination against this disease for entry into middle school and a booster in high school. Despite significant strides in promoting vaccination and a mandate at the collegiate level in Virginia, meningococcal meningitis, which describes different strains of bacterial meningitis, is still very much a threat. (Harvey Hodges, 2/20)
USA Today:
Kamala Harris' Conditional Love For Prime Healthcare Services
In approving the sale of six cash-straped Daughters of Charity hospitals to Prime Healthcare Services of Ontario, California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris took pains to guard against Prime reducing the types of care available or shifting the focus away from the low-income and elderly patients that make up the bulk of their current patients. These steps included unprecedented requirements to keep most of the hospitals open with their major services intact for at least 10 years, twice as long as Prime had pledged. The question now for Prime is whether it can do those things without winding up in the same financial mess that forced the Daughters to look for a buyer. (Jon Healey, 2/21)