- What the left and right are coming to agree on: Obamacare is encouraging consolidation and that is bad for patients.
- New study: If you count all welfare spending as income in kind to poor families, the real poverty rate is only 1.6%.
- FDA: A treatment for cancer may cause cancer.
- Avalere study: For patients in traditional Medicare use of skilled nursing homes was 12% higher and hospital inpatient care was 37% higher than for Medicare Advantage patients.
If all Medicare beneficiaries were in Medicare Advantage, the hospital trust fund would remain solvent until 2048.
At IntegraNet Health, we have found similar results year after year in our diverse Medicare populations.
Thanks for the Chris Jacobs article, he is a good writer.
But once again, his blaming of ‘Obamacare’ seems to fail the classic test of “causation versus correlation.”
Let me be more specific.
The consolidation of hospitals and medical practices is raising prices for all patients, regardless of how they are insured. I can see no proof that this trend would be any different if Obamacare had never been passed.
Obamacare covers about 20 million Americans (leaving aside Medicaid). The trends that Jacobs deplores go a lot wider than that.