Also present “Top 10 Reasons” why health care law should be replaced
WASHINGTON, DC – The Ripon Society hosted a health care policy forum yesterday morning with three doctors currently serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, who not only dissected the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was signed into law last year, but presented what they see as the “Top 10 Reasons” why the law needs to be replaced.
The doctors taking part in the event included Congressman Michael C. Burgess (TX-26), Congressman Dan Benishek (MI-1), and Congresswoman Nan Hayworth (NY-19). Burgess, who also serves as Vice Chairman of the Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health, opened the forum by pointing to one of the unintended consequences of the 2010 legislation – namely, that it makes innovation and new product development even more difficult than it already is.
“There is not a week that goes by that I don’t hear from someone who’s had or has a great idea for a new product, drug or device who’s spent a career trying to get it through the byzantine tunnels at the FDA,” stated Dr. Burgess. “From my brief period of observation over the last eight years, it appears to be getting worse rather than better. One of the things that happened with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a new tax has been placed on medical devices. When you talk to the people who are in that business, their research and development budget is pretty close to the margin. Adding this tax essentially obliterates this budget, and is one more push for those companies and innovators to go offshore and seek friendlier climes in other countries.”
Burgess, who practiced medicine for nearly three decades prior to his election in 2002, also discussed the fact that, up until the beginning of this year, there had been very little oversight into how the law was taking effect. “We didn’t have one hearing on how this thing was being implemented,” he stated, referring to the period following enactment of the measure in March of 2010. “There are multiples instances written into the law – almost 2,000 times – where it says, ‘the Secretary shall.’ Each one of these leads to an episode of rulemaking, and if we wait for the rules to come down, then it just becomes more difficult to effect any change.”
“There was a small, new federal agency that was created by the Secretary of Health and Human Services,” he continued, citing one example. “It wasn’t authorized in the bill – and I know that because I asked the Director to come talk to me in my office last year, and he finally did after the election when he saw that the winds were changing. And I asked him: ‘Where in the world in this bill were you authorized?’ And he said: ‘We weren’t. The Secretary thought she needed us.’ This was the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. They had set up an office from June to November, they had hired some 200 people, rented space in Bethesda, and were just going great guns. This was the group that started to provide the waivers in October. This was the group that was going to be in charge of setting up exchanges. This was the group that was dealing with the medical-loss ratio. It had an enormous amount of power, and yet it did not have one single line of authorization in a 2,700 page bill.
“They pulled that agency back down the day Speaker Boehner was sworn in and brought it back into the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Now it’s called the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. They continue to do all of the things that they were doing before. We’ve had two oversight hearings with them in committee now. But again, a lot of this stuff is water under the bridge. The waivers have already established Administration policy, and there are a lot of question marks. Who gets waivers? Who doesn’t? If you’re denied, how do you apply again? This has been an enormous problem. The lack of attention during the final nine months after the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unfortunately has set the stage for what are going to be a lot more confounding and confusing problems going forward.”
In his remarks, Dr. Benishek – who has served as a general surgeon in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in a private practice since 1983 – not only echoed Burgess’s sense of frustration, but was equally blunt in his assessment of the long-term implications of the bill.
“To me, it’s a disaster that’s going to destroy medicine in this country,” he stated. “It’s nothing less than that. It’s going to limit our access to care. It’s going to limit our access to specialists. It’s going to limit our access to hospitals.” He also pointed to the establishment of the Independent Payment Advisory Board as one of the 10 reasons the law needs to be repealed. “Physicians are incensed about this, and patients should be incensed about this,” he stated, adding that the Board will in effect result in “bureaucrats” in Washington deciding what kind of care doctors around the country are providing to their patients.
Referring to President Obama’s promise that Americans will be able to keep their current insurance coverage if they like it, Benishek scoffed: “We’ve already seen that’s not the case. A lot of bigger companies have figured out that it’s going to be cheaper for them to just simply pay a penalty than put people into the exchanges. That doesn’t make much sense. There are a lot of people who are going to lose their coverage for this reason. So you’re not going to be able to keep your coverage as he promised.”
In her remarks to The Ripon Society health care policy forum, Dr. Hayworth — an ophthalmologist who started her own solo practice in 1989 and also served as an instructor and assistant clinical professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York – said she always made it a point to temper her criticism of the health care act with an acknowledgement of what the measure was trying to accomplish. “I never referred to the law as Obamacare because I didn’t want to cut off the discussion,” she stated. “So I always referred to it as the Affordable Care Act and said, ‘We honor the goals.’ And we do. Who doesn’t want to see every American have good and affordable health care? The problem with the Affordable Care Act is it takes power away from us – the citizens.”
Instead of a top-down system that centralizes health care decision-making and authority, Hayworth said a better approach would be to adopt a model similar to what has been put in place in the Hoosier State. Called Healthy Indiana, Hayworth noted that the plan – which was passed in 2007 by a Democratic Legislature and signed into law by Republican Governor Mitch Daniels – would, among other things, provide Health Savings Accounts to Medicaid recipients as a way of helping them meet their health care needs. Hayworth also noted that Governor Daniels has indicated that the Hoosier State might not be able to afford the Healthy Indiana plan over the long term under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
A list of Drs. Burgess’s, Benishek’s, and Hayworth’s Top 10 Reasons to replace the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act as well as a video recording of their remarks can be found below:
The Top 10 Reasons to Replace
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
1. Not Paid For
2. Independent Payment Advisory Board
3. If You Like What You Have You Can Keep It
4. Impact on Business
5. Limits Choice to Expand Broken Program, No Incentive and the Impact on States (Medicaid)
6. Endless Regulations and the Expanded Power of the Federal Government
7. Stifles Innovation
8. Doesn’t Address Medicare
9. No Liability Reform
10. Lack of Oversight
The Ripon Society is a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 – Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.