Highlights from Health Wonk Review: Outstanding Health Care Posts

Health Wonk Review offers a summary of some of the most provocative health care posts of the preceding two weeks. The newest edition went up today, and it’s hosted by the “Disease Management Care Blog’s” Jaan Sidorov here

Highlights:

Over at “Health Affairs,” Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and co-author of Health Law, the nation's standard textbook for that subject, offers lucid in-depth analysis of yet another section of the Affordable Care Act (ACA): the temporary high risk health insurance pool.  Under the reform legislation insurers will not be able to deny coverage to customers suffering from pre-existing conditions—but that provision doesn’t kick in until 2014.  To bridge the distance between now and then ACA offers a temporary high risk pool known as the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, or PCI.P.  The program can be run either by the states or by the federal government through a nonprofit entity.  Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia chose to operate their own plans, while HHS will administer the program in 21 states. The federal PCIP  is in fact already taking applications, as are several state plans.

What Does the Missouri Vote on the Individual Mandate Tell Us?

That Republicans don’t support health care reform.

Opponents of health care reform have been touting the results of yesterday’s primary in Missouri as if it were a national referendum on “the will of the people.” After all, more than 70 percent of voters who came out for the primary cast ballots in favor of Proposition C, a  measure that would allow state residents to opt out of mandatory health insurance.

New "Small Area" Data From Census Reveal Wide Fluctuations in Insurance Coverage

The U.S. Census Bureau released a report last week that includes the latest figures on the number of uninsured in each county, of each state. It’s an exhaustive breakdown that highlights the wide fluctuations both between states and among individual localities. At 26.8%, Texas has the highest rate of uninsured residents under 65 in the nation—there are a whopping 6.1 million uninsured residing there. New Mexico (26.7% ) and Florida (24.2%) round out the top three. The state with the fewest uninsured residents is, not surprisingly, Massachusetts (7.8%) where the state mandates health coverage for most residents. These figures, which are from 2007 “do not include the impact on millions of people who lost their jobs and health insurance after the recession began in December 2007,” according to this piece in The Washington Post, so are likely to underestimate the problem.

A Reply to the Cato Institute’s Report on Health Care Reform, Part 2--The Individual Mandate

In “Bad Medicine” the Cato Institute white paper exploring “The Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law,” Cato senior fellow Michael Tanner declares the individual mandate "perhaps the single most important piece of health care legislation.” By insisting that citizens have insurance --or pay a penalty-- Congress has taken an “unprecedented” step, says Tanner. Like many who object to the mandate, he argues that “The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence.”

In fact, that isn’t quite true.

But before getting to what the federal government has or hasn’t required of its citizens in the past, let me say that I agree with Tanner on his first point: the individual mandate is the lynchpin at the center of the Accountable Care Act (ACA). 

A Final Response to Cato on Public Support for Reform: Opposition Based on Misinformation Fading, Though Seniors Remain “Confused”

Summary:  As regular readers know, not long ago Cato Institute senior fellow Michael Tanner published a 52-page critique of the new health care legislation titled Bad Medicine,  and I decided to write a series of posts, rebutting Tanner’s arguments about the  Real Costs and Consequences of the Law. In my first post,  I took on Tanner’s assertion that “ObamaCare remains deeply unpopular,” with the majority of Americans supporting repeal.  

Tanner’s colleague, Michael Cannon replied to my post, and I responded to his reply,   Since then, Cannon has written another post titled “ObamaCare Still Unpopular: Round Two of My Exchange with Maggie Mahar.”  Once again, he focuses on what the polls say about the public’s appetite for repeal.