Viewpoints: What The Tax Bill Does To Obamacare, Other Health Policies; Congress Is ‘Rolling The Dice’ On CHIP

The New York Times: How The G.O.P. Tax Bill Will Ruin Obamacare
As part of their giant tax bill, Republicans in Congress are about to eliminate the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. Their objective is not sensible health care reform but rather insensible arithmetic that could satisfy the byzantine rules governing the Senate’s reconciliation process. The purpose of the mandate is to evenly distribute risk among healthy and unhealthy Americans on the individual insurance market so that costs are shared and no one is left out. (J.B. Silvers, 12/4)

Los Angeles Times: The GOP's Big Tax Win Is A Loss For The Rest Of Us
Now that the Senate has joined the House in passing versions of a bill to cut taxes — with the support of virtually all Republicans and no Democrats — there’s little doubt that the GOP majority will work out a measure that Republicans in both chambers can support, and send it to President Trump to be signed into law. But the first big win for Republicans in Washington is a loss for the rest of us. ... The biggest beneficiaries, though, will be businesses with the highest profits and individuals with the highest incomes, and some of the biggest losers could be those who can scarcely afford the higher tab — graduate students, for example. More broadly, the measure will cause either much larger deficits or large cuts to Medicare and other federal programs, quite possibly accompanied by higher interest rates for borrowers. (12/2)

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Tax Proposal Has Unintended Consequences For Nonprofits
“These are my principles," the comedian Groucho Marx once proclaimed. “If you don’t like them, I have others.” The same might be said for lawmakers who’ve built careers out of condemning budget deficits, but who now seem intent on passing a tax bill that, absent cuts to Medicare and Social Security, could add at least $1.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. (Tom Saler, 12/1)

Forbes: Will GOP Cut Social Security And Medicare Before Or After The 2018 Election?
Assuming the Trump Family and Friends Tax Cut approved by the Senate ... is enacted, big cuts to Social Security and Medicare will be the next target for the White House and congressional Republican leadership. The only question is when. My former blogging partner Bruce Bartlett -- who in a previous life was chief economist for Republican economic icons Representatives Jack Kemp (R-NY) and Ron Paul (R-TX) -- for weeks has been shouting from the mountaintop the extreme likelihood of the GOP training its sights on Social Security and Medicare. To paraphrase Bruce's wisdom ... the Republican deficit hawks that have been in the budget version of the witness protection program during the current mega deficit-increasing tax cut debate will reemerge with a vengeance to demand Social Security and Medicare cuts to reduce the deficit they just created. (Stan Collender, 11/3)

RealClear Health: Congress, Repeal The Individual Mandate. It's Only Fair.
Imagine the outcry if Congress compelled all individuals to purchase a new automobile. Moreover, let’s say Congress didn’t just command Americans to buy cars, but in Henry Ford-like fashion told us everybody must buy one of a very small number of identical cars, the features of which would be dictated by the government. What if Congress told us exactly what food, clothing, housing, legal or dental services we were required to procure? That is exactly what Congressional Democrats did for health insurance when they enacted the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its mandate that all individuals purchase one of but a few health plans these legislators deemed permissible. (Roger Klein, 12/4)

Detroit Free Press: Washington's So Dysfunctional It's Rolling The Dice With Children's Health Care
Come January, barring a pre-Christmas miracle in Washington, the State of Michigan will begin notifying parents of the 116,000 child recipients of the federal Children's Health Insurance Program that time is running out. That's how toxic the dysfunction in our nation's capital has become — for the first time since its creation in 1997, the short-term future of a program that provides low-cost health care for low-income kids is in jeopardy. (Nancy Kaffer, 12/3)

Modern Healthcare: Kids Need More Than A Health Insurance Program
The Republican strategy of delaying reauthorization of the Children's Health Insurance Program serves their broader agenda. By forcing advocates to defend kids' human right to see a doctor, they deflect attention from how their tax plan and social service cuts will harm the health of America's young. (Merrill Goozner, 12/2)

The San Jose Mercury News: Congress Abandons Community Health Centers, Hurting Thousands In Bay Area
On Sept. 30, critical funding for federally qualified community health centers expired. This perceived lack of urgency endangers the health of our nation’s most vulnerable. Now, every community health center in California faces drastic cuts in federal funding that will cause many services to be discontinued, patients to be sent to emergency rooms, clinic staff laid off and some health center doors closed permanently. (Rep. Anna Eshoo and Dolores Alvarado, 12/2)

The Washington Post: What The Opioid Epidemic Looks Like On The Screen Of A Brain Scan
I recently received the sad news that a colleague of mine had lost his daughter. Reading the obituary, I found out the cause. It was not shrouded in code, like “died suddenly” or “unexpectedly.” Her parents spelled it right out: She was a victim of her addiction to opioids. Her funeral was jarring, full of young people, friends in their 20s. They were not joking over fond memories or talking about a good long life; they were in shock. At the front of the receiving line, I met her father, my colleague. What could I say? I hugged him. I told him it was brave to put the truth in the newspaper, not to hide it as some shameful fact. And he nodded, his eyes desperate. “I wanted to be honest. Because, you know, we didn’t know how to help her. No one could. We tried everything. Nothing worked.” (Sandra Block, 12/1)

Cleveland Plain Dealer: Federal Nursing Home Regulations Need To Be Tougher, Not Weaker
Ohio faces two incontestable facts when it comes to nursing-home care -- facts that lobbyists for nursing homes (and their Capitol Hill allies) want Congress to ignore. First, two of every five Ohio nursing homes provide care deemed substandard under federal regulations. That's as of 2015, the latest year for which data are available. Second, the graying of Ohio is raising demand for nursing homes at the very time their quality is falling short: About 16 percent of all Ohio residents are age 65 or older now; the proportion was just 14 percent in 2010. (12/3)

RealClear Health: Feds Owe The Public 'Corrective Statements' On Vaping
Major tobacco companies, such as Altria and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, have unveiled primetime television commercials and full-page ads in over 40 newspapers telling Americans something they already know: Smoking kills. ... They are a long-overdue correction by an industry that long tried to suppress the truth about the lethal effects of smoking. Now would be a good time for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Surgeon General – two entities entrusted to give the public credible health information – to make their own corrective statements. Both agencies have committed public health malpractice by trying to scare people who can’t or won’t give up smoking while withholding or distorting data about viable alternatives. (Sally Satel and Guy Bentley, 12/4)