Yes we can.

Contrary to President Obama, turning back doesn’t mean denying people with cancer or Alzheimer’s or eating disorders access to reasonably affordable coverage or allowing children who graduate college to stay on their parents health plan until they find a job. And it doesn’t mean prohibiting people from choosing to purchase insurance without lifetime limits.

It does mean putting a stop to the cuts to hospice that are already taking place in Medicare. It means stopping Medicare from issuing guidelines that deny cancer patients radiation therapy because – and this captures the spirit of Obamacare – since advances in detection and staging prostate cancer permit individualized treatment, Medicare claims there is not enough evidence to know if radiation benefits the average Medicare patient. Got it? This is an example of what President Obama was referring to when he talked about eliminating waste and unnecessary treatments from Medicare.

It means putting a stop to the government forcing 120 million people out of the healthcare plans they have and doctors they use if premiums go up to add benefits or alternately an employer uses HSAs (which requires higher deductibles and co-payments) to lower premiums. The President said: “When I say if you have your plan and you like it, or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don’t have to change plans, what I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform. It means putting a stop to forcing companies to choose between increasing coverage and cutting jobs since providing limited insurance benefits for employees will be prohibited.

And it means putting a stop to not only to the biggest tax increase in history (which doesn’t include the higher premiums and out of pocket costs that 93 million Americas will be required to pay under Obamacare) but because we are still on the hook for $59 billion in additional state Medicaid spending, the $250 billion Medicare physician pay increases. $115 billion in operating expenses for Obamacare – 15 percent of total spending! – and a $50 billion shortfall in the temporary program for high-risk insurance policies is paid – the $118 billion in “savings” turns into $303 billion deficit. If we are lucky. That’s assuming the long term care fund doesn’t go bankrupt as the Medicare actuary is predicting.

We must stop where we are. The president says with a straight face that only government can impose the fiscal discipline required to reign in health care spending. This past week in chewing out insurance companies he seemed to imply that premium increases – and by extension health care costs — were tied to profits. Yet other health systems are seeing costs go up faster than we are and are going broke to boot. Britain’s National Health Service, Germany’s system of subsidized insurance plans, and the French health system have seen deficits double in less then two years. The same goes for Japan and Canada where cuts in healthcare spending have already taken place. And despite this government run spending spree, the international outcomes in treating heart failure, diabetes, mental illness, Alzheimer’s and cancer are nowhere close to ours. The British government is proposing cutting the NHS budget by 20 percent. Do we need to increase government spending in order to cut it? This appears to be the path the President is taking.

The President insults millions of decent and caring Americans by suggesting those who don’t agree with him we are abandoning the sick and something less than moral. There is in fact, a better way. We can preserve hospice care and cancer treatment for seniors, allow millions to keep the coverage they have, cut taxes and make coverage affordable for millions more, without saddling America with even more debt and deficit spending.

This is not about turning back. This is about taking stock and moving forward. In politics as in medicine, there is nothing wrong with a second opinion.

“Your guaranteed Medicare benefits that you’ve earned will not change, regardless of whether you receive them through Medicare or Medicare Advantage.
Medicare will continue to cover your costs the way it always has.
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. ‘

Here are the facts behind the salesmanship…

1. Temporary high risk insurance pools.

Obamacare provides $5 billion over five years to subsidize insurance for 4 million people priced out of the traditional insurance market because of chronic illness or other serious medical conditions.

There is only enough money to cover 200,000 for 3.5 years.

2. The CLASS Act

The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act — would be funded by premiums. It is supposed to start collecting premiums in 2011 and beginning in 2013, would pay enrollees $50 or more per day if they became too disabled to perform normal daily activities like eating and bathing.

The start date has been pushed back. Premiums and benefits have not yet been established. Meanwhile, the CMS actuary has predicted would need to start at about $123 per month, are not indexed to inflation do not reward people for staying healthy are likely to rise.

3. $250 Rebate Checks for Seniors Enrolled In The Medicare Drug Plan

A rebate bait and switch. Checks being mailed out Thursday. It is one time payment limited to those who are paying for Medicare drugs out of pocket during the coverage gap. Starting in 2011, companies must start paying 50 percent of the price of it’s drugs. Previously, Medicare would pay half the price of a drug without a rebate plan in place. Now, in a change designed to save money by restricting access, Medicare will not cover any drugs without agreements, even if they are essential to the health of beneficiaries for 2011.

4. Choice of health plans

As many as 1 million people will lose their coverage under Obamacare.
Under the provision, insurance companies will no longer be able to apply broad annual caps on the amount of money they pay out on health policies. Employer groups say the ban could essentially wipe out a niche insurance market that many part-time workers and retail and restaurant employees have come to rely on.

The ban on annual caps are already causing many plans that offer high-deductible plans with health savings accounts to fold.

5. Choice of Doctors and Hospitals

“Two years after a survey found nearly half of Texas doctors weren’t taking some new Medicare patients, new data shows 100 to 200 a year are now ending all involvement with the program. Before 2007, the number of doctors opting out averaged less than a handful a year.” Meanwhile, Massachusetts health insurers say they want to freeze or slash payments to some hospitals and large physician groups this year…this even as a 2008 survey of Bay State docs showed that slightly more than half of medical residents are leaving Massachusetts to continue their careers. Also, recruitment time to fill open jobs is lengthening.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is leading this effort. The Cabinet officer most responsible for implementing reform, has said she expects the process to involve “hand-to-hand combat” in the roll-out of reform.

That translates into a campaign strategy of politicizing the role of HHS as the granter and enforcer of health care to demonstrate short term success in time for the election. In doing so, the Obama administration is pursuing a strategy that also solidifies its support with one of the Democrat party’s principal sources of campaign contributions: trial lawyers. Final health care reform failed to include any mention of malpractice reform and is seen by many as a potential giveaway to the personal injury bar.

Sebelius herself, a former executive director and chief lobbyist for the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association (now Kansas Association for Justice) from 1977-1986, is assembling a crack team at HHS that is stacked with personal injury lawyers and supporters. That group is led Jay Angoff.

Angoff was picked by Sebelius to head the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at HHS which will become one of the most powerful division within the Department and, for that matter, the entire federal government. The Office will control the development and enforcement of new health care regulations and manage the new state exchanges, just to name a few powers of this super-bureaucracy.

And, what makes Angoff so qualified to exercise these vast new powers? He was a state insurance commission and, yes you guessed it, a high-profile personal injury lawyer who specialized in filing massive class action lawsuits – making himself millions while the individuals he sought to protect collected pennies on the dollar. Additionally, Angoff authored a so-called “landmark” 2005 study funded by the trial attorney trade group, the Center for Justice and Democracy, which claimed doctors were being artificially overcharged for malpractice insurance. This study was eventually discredited as being thoroughly inaccurate. However, not before enriching and elevating the profile of this now super-bureaucrat.

So, as we watch HHS roll-out the largest expansion of government power in a generation, we should keep a watchful eye on Secretary Sebelius, her team of former trail lawyer enforcers and the Department’s gamesmanship of short term “wins” that will undoubtedly provide desperately needed political points for the ruling party.

A cynical person might even suggest that HHS has become nothing more than a political arm and proof point for an embattled Democratic Party that faces a wary public and an even tougher election this fall.

Luckily, the Democrats will have their #1 special interest – the personal injury bar – at their side as they seek to curry favor with voters.

Congratulations, this is your tax dollars at work.

Let us know what you think about this story and House Democrats’ apparent attempts to cover it up.

Previously, 54% of voters have favored repeal and 42% have opposed it.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters nationwide finds 38% still oppose repeal, including 32% who strongly oppose it.

Looks like the Administration and Congressional Democrats have a lot of explaining to do as more and more America voters wake up to reality of the coming government takeover of our health care.

Reform’s Great, But We Need More Doctors

Health reform has passed, and the United States is poised to join the rest of the industrialized world in providing most of its citizens with affordable health coverage.

But having health insurance doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy to find a doctor. Even before reform, reports projected a shortfall of 40,000 primary care physicians over the next decade. Thirty-two million newly insured Americans, plus the millions of baby boomers entering Medicare age, will only make this shortfall worse.

As a primary care doctor in New Hampshire, I have had the opportunity to observe the effects of health reform in neighboring Massachusetts, which enacted a similar approach to universal coverage in 2006.

To its credit, Massachusetts covers 97 percent of its residents, the highest in the country. But its wholly unprepared primary care system was unable to handle the 500,000 newly insured patients looking for a regular doctor. According to the Massachusetts Medical Society, a primary care internist had an average wait time of 50 days for new patients, with almost half refusing to accept to new patients.

When Amherst, Mass., family physician Kate Atkinson decided to accept newly insured patients, she was forced to close her doors six weeks later. She told the Boston Globe that “there were so many people waiting to get in, it was like opening the floodgates,” saying that her office is getting “10 calls a day from patients crying and begging.”

And this is a state that already has the highest number of doctors per capita nationwide. It’s frightening to imagine how other parts of the country, most of which have significantly fewer primary care doctors, can handle the influx of patients if Massachusetts can’t.

Any hope to bolster the primary care work force, unfortunately, is not on the horizon.

With medical students graduating with an average educational debt exceeding $150,000, new doctors overwhelmingly choose to become specialists, which offer salaries several times more than those of primary care doctors. In the 2010 residency match, fewer than half of family practice residency slots were filled by American medical graduates, compared with more than 95 percent in fields like radiology, anesthesiology and orthopedic surgery.

Furthermore, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who can help alleviate the shortage, are also enticed by the lucrative allure of specialty care. As Newsweek recently reported, “almost half of current nurse practitioners and physician assistants work in specialty practices, where the money is.”

Health reform does try to help primary care, through modest improvements to Medicare and Medicaid primary care clinician payments, better funding of loan repayment programs and pilot programs for new primary care models. But these incremental solutions fail to appreciate the enormity of the problem.

Nor do they address the phenomenon of physician burnout currently plaguing the field. A survey published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that nearly half of primary care doctors reported practicing in a work environment “strongly associated with low physician satisfaction, high stress … and [an] intent to leave.” Indeed, almost one-third said they were likely to leave their practice within two years.

At a time when primary care physicians are needed most, health reform does little to relieve these frustrated doctors of the unreasonable time pressures and onerous bureaucratic requirements that worsen their practice conditions and obstruct their patient relationships.

Providing affordable health care to an additional 32 million Americans is certainly worth celebrating. But whether our beleaguered primary care system can meet the challenges that lie ahead will be critical in determining health reform’s success or failure.

Kevin Pho, a primary care physician in Nashua, N.H., blogs at KevinMD.com and is on Twitter @KevinMD.

The House is expected to vote by week’s end, before both chambers begin a spring recess.

Post recess, the Senate will begin anew. Standby.

As PPF.org readers know this bill passed the House of Representatives late Sunday night with no Republican support. The bill was approved by the Senate in December. A separate compromise package of changes also passed the House on Sunday and still needs to be approved by the Senate. The Senate cannot begin debate on the package before Obama signs the underlying bill into law. READ: The President is going to sign into law almost a trillion dollars in government health care entitlements and then Congress is going to tweak it into what they want….. Sounds a bit fishy to us.

The fun is not over yet. Senate Republicans have promised to continue fighting the reforms, with 11 state attorneys general also announcing they will file lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the bill’s mandate for people to buy health insurance and requirements for states to comply with its provisions.

As well, once the House compromise bill hits the Senate floor the chamber’s rules stipulate that there must be 20 hours of debate. If any provision in the package of changes is rejected or changed, the entire package would then have to go back to the House for another vote.

And don’t forget, Senate Democrats will be using reconciliation to avoid a full and transparent vote.

While PPF.org believes it is inevitable that the Democrats will get their package through, we’ll keep our fingers crossed that moderate Senate Democrats and Republicans will do the right thing and temper this massive government power grab.

PPF.org has to give it to the Dems, even after failing to pass their reform package for the last year (and countless approaches – public option, exchanges, czars, the list goes on), they are headed back to the Floor for a vote. And the best part is that, yep you guessed it, they really haven’t changed a thing.

Regardless of how they dress this up, the end result is where we started — Government-run Health Care.

Time to hit the phones and tell Congress we simply have had enough. Click here to look up the number for your member of Congress and tell them to VOTE NO on Sunday!

And then come back and tell us all about it.

The unanswered question is exactly what will they be voting on – will it be an up or down vote on the Senate bill or a vote on a rule that deems the bill passed without actually voting on the bill, now being called the “Slaughter Solution.”

Today, Republican Parker Griffith (R-AL) is trying to clear up that mess, putting forth a resolution that would require an up-or-down vote on the Senate Health Care bill and block the Democratic leadership from proceeding with its “Slaughter Solution.”

PPF.org hopes that commonsense prevails and Griffith is successful. While, in the end, we aren’t sure it will make any difference to Democrat plans to push through their reform package, it will at least make this a more honest process.

More to come…