DAY IN DC FOR THE GOOD OF PATIENTS-empowering physicians to put patients first.

In the Oath of Hippocrates, physicians promise to work for the good of their patients, according to the best of their ability and judgment, and to do no harm. We support a return to this ethic in American medicine, and oppose policies that harm patients by subjugating care to the interest of the government and third parties.

Reform Issues:

• Overregulation and mandates restrict access, stifle innovation, impede transparency, block competition & raise costs.
• Fraud, waste, and shortages are rampant because special favors to middlemen.
• Employer-based and government-run insurance discourages rational insurance practices.
• Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupting the federal government, states, and doctors.
• In the era of COVID, the consequences of usurping of patient and physician autonomy and freedoms are becoming increasingly apparent and dangerous.

Proposed Solutions: to protect freedom, increase options, encourage competition, and unwind unsustainable spending.

1. End mask, vaccine, and other mandates and policies that intrude on patient autonomy. This also includes protecting Americans from World Health Organization policies that too often become mandates.
2. Protect physician and patient freedom of speech in all venues, including the Internet. The government and media must not limit legal speech and must be transparent about their sources of funding and control. (See Texas HB 20.)
3. Protect physician and patient autonomy in treatment and vaccination decisions. Early treatment for COVID saves lives and should not be improperly blocked by government or other bureaucrats. See AZ SB 1416 and MO HB 2149). Vaccine mandates are hurting vulnerable patients at low risk for COVID and must end. (See FL HB 1B, 3B, 5B, 7B).
4. Protect due process rights of physicians who too often face retaliation, simply for advocating for patients, by employers, hospital administrators, licensing boards, and others who control their ability to practice. Needed reforms include repealing HCQIA’s qualified immunity for sham peer review, reform of the National Practitioner Databank, and rights for physicians employed by private equity controlled corporations.
5. Work toward independence from China CCP medications, tech, manufacturing, goods and WHO influence.
6. End regulations blocking alternatives to ACA, employment-based, Medicare, and Medicaid plans, while allowing those who wish to keep their current government plan to do so.
7. End ACA’s ban on physician owned hospitals. Section 6001 of the Affordable Care Act of amended section 1877 of the Social Security Act to generally prohibited those who know best how to care for patients from running the facilities where care for the most seriously ill and injured often takes place.
8. Encourage transparency. Health care entities receiving taxpayer-subsidized funds from any source must disclose all prices that are accepted as payment in full for products and services furnished to individual consumers. Transparency by agencies (FDA, CDC, NIH, etc.) that control and influence health policy and treatment guidelines is also paramount. Transparency in training, so that patients know the qualifications of the clinicians caring for them, is also needed as patients are increasingly pushed to obtain care from individuals with significantly less training than physicians. Databases disclosing potential conflicts of interest must include all entities receiving or offering payments (e.g. device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, PBMs, GPOs, hospitals, insurers) not just physicians.
9. Remove legal protection for kickbacks. Remedy GPO and PBM abuse of safe harbors by encouraging Congress to repeal 42 U.S.C. § 1320a-7b(b)(3)(C) and amplifying HHS-OIG efforts to stop exploitation of 42 C.F.R. § 1001.952(j) and related regulations. Ending kickbacks is a crucial aspect of ending America’s reliance on China for drugs and supplies.
10. Decouple Social Security benefits from Medicare Part A. Citizens should be permitted to disenroll from Medicare Part A without forgoing Social Security payments. This would immediately decrease government spending and open the potential for a true insurance market for the over-65 population.
11. Repeal Medicaid rules that decrease Medicaid patients’ access to independent physicians. ACA requires physicians ordering and prescribing for Medicaid patients to be enrolled in Medicaid. This creates barriers for Medicaid patients who seek care from independent physicians but wish to use Medicaid benefits for prescriptions, diagnostics, and hospital fees. This is a particular problem for Medicaid patients seeking treatment for opioid addiction.
12. Explicitly define direct patient care (DPC) agreements as medical care (instead of insurance) so patients can use their HSAs, HRAs and FSAs for DPC.
13. Expand Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).  Examples of needed reform include repealing the requirement that an individual making a tax-deductible contribution to an HSA be covered by a high deductible health care plan; increasing the maximum HSA contribution level; allowing Medicare eligible individuals to contribute to an HSA. HSA reform will help end tax discrimination. Individual’s payments for medical care should not be taxed differently than payments made by employers.
14. End Restrictions on Health Sharing Ministries. Open the door for secular charitable sharing plans. Health Care Sharing Plans engage in voluntary sharing and are not a contractual transfer of risk.
15. Encourage indemnity insurance and competition instead of managed care HMO plans. No limited networks of physicians and facilities.
16. Address shortcomings of the No Surprises Act, that unfairly increase insurance company control over the ability of patients’ to access care from the physicians of their choice on mutually agreeable terms and that increase red tape for physicians.
17. Increase options for addressing pre-existing conditions. Invigoration of competition, by implementing the above changes, would bring a variety of products for patients with pre-existing conditions, including reinsurance, and inexpensive guaranteed issue and renewability protections, and most importantly, lower overall cost of care.

Conclusion: Congress has passed law after law that disrupts the patient-physician relationship, corrupts medical decision making, and increases costs. During the COVID era, overregulation and regulatory capture is a greater threat to our nation than ever.   Harmful laws and policies cannot be fixed by adding new regulatory burdens or further usurping patient and physician autonomy. True reform starts with repealing laws and correcting errors, restoring the freedom, under constitutionally limited government, that made America great.

Surprise medical billing is an insurance network problem not a federal government problem.

Ophthalmologist Jane Hughes, MD of San Antonio writes in:

Let’s all get on the same page about one thing. Surprise medical billing is not a federal government problem.

It is a contractual problem between the insurance company and the insured patient, largely because no one reads the fine print. It is also the direct result of networks.

There are steps that states can take that would largely solve the surprise billing that insurance has perpetrated and one step is mandatory price transparency.

On a federal level issues that are their purview involve Medicare/Medicaid. Mandatory price transparency and a concomitant rule that regardless of who is paying, the charge for the identical service or product at the same facility by or from the identical provider must be the same.

This is not price fixing as each entity decides the fee for product or service rendered. Just like a gallon of milk at a specific grocery store is the same regardless of credit card used, cash, or food stamps.

Gee, what a novel idea…

Freedom does not force people off plans but gives more options.

A case-in-point on how the media can mislead you, sent in by Beverly Gossage of http://www.hsabenefitsconsulting.com/

1) CNBC professes to tell you who will lose their insurance if the ACA is repealed. Not might…WILL…they say. Their number is 25 million.

2) They outline 3 groups but fail to mention that most people are in all 3 subsets. So their number is erroneous.

3) Truth: none of these people would be forced off a plan. Of course, there would be a ramp off the ACA and the current plans would be grandfathered as new options would become available subject to state regs not federal. States can amend their regs to tailor them to their state.

4) Freedom does not force people off plans but gives more options.

Fact Checking Sen. Menendez ACA Diatribe

Dear Senator Menendez,

As a N.J. citizen, taxpayer, physician, husband and father, I must offer factual correction on your healthcare policy ACA diatribes.

You tweeted:

Have a pre-exisiting condition?
Enrolled in Medicare?
On your parent’s healthcare?
Covered through the Medicaid expansion?

President Trump is attacking YOU by attacking the Affordable Care Act. #SaveOurCare pic.twitter.com/gjgMePcZsG

— Senator Bob Menendez (@SenatorMenendez) April 3, 2019

Nothing could be further from the truth in your partisan message:

1. Insurance coverage is not healthcare.
2. Forcing citizens into ACA Medicaid at taxpayer expense is foolhardy.
3. ACA through “guaranteed issue(preexisting conditions)” destroyed the risk pools that kept prices stable. Now ALL commercial plans premiums have doubled and tripled.
4. The individual insurance market was decimated by ACA, destroying any semblance of insurance competition.
5. ACA put most private practice independent physicians, that are more efficient and cheaper, out of business and working for hospitals. As you know, hospitals inflated pricing schemes also extorts taxpayer dollars
6. ACA also pushed insurers toward “narrow networks.” eliminated patients long-term relationships with physicians and further limited their choice of physician and facility.
7. ACA and forced government dependence will bankrupt the country and its citizens, as a whole and individually.
8. Remember the three big lies of Obamacare? Keep your doctor. Keep your insurance. Each family will save $2500. All proven false partisan narrative.
9. Attacking the president of the United States is a waste of time, money and energy when he would gladly work with you on these issues.

I would be glad to work with you and other legislators on competitive free-market plans and assure quality and give patients best choice and restore personal responsibility and freedom.

Sincerely
Craig M. Wax DO
Independent family physician, media host and healthcare policy expert

What is Healthcare? And How to Fund It.

Dear Chairman Alexander,

Thank you very much for asking America’s MD and DO Physicians to weigh in on solutions to improve Americans’ health and launch an efficient and sustainable path for the healthcare ecosystem.

The first critical step is educating your colleagues that there is a difference between medical care and health insurance. My recent article published in Medical Economics may help policymakers understand that the difference matters: https://www.medicaleconomics.com/med-ec-blog/what-healthcare

Solving the current healthcare policy disaster ultimately means less federal intervention and regulation, combined with more freedom and liberty.

Please consider:

1. Expanded universal HSA heath savings accounts for all, independent of insurance, and usable for every healthcare service, medication and device.

2. Remove ACA restrictions on insurance policies and stop multi-billion dollar bailouts of the insurance industry. Insurers have driven up costs. Instead allow a diversity of insurance plans to compete side by side: from catastrophic with high deductible to first dollar HMO-coverage. Unique individuals should be shopping for unique plans to suit their own needs.

3. Repeal the Group Purchasing Organization safe harbor to the Anti Kickback Statute that is also being abused by Pharmacy Benefits Managers. The federal government has permitted kickbacks disguised as “rebates“ for decades and it must stop. Make kickbacks illegal again. GPO and PBM middleman must compete legally and not extort manufacturers.

4. Innovative solutions like Direct Primary Care (DPC), and similar direct payment arrangements between specialists and their patients are must not be subject to over-regulation under insurance rules . These arrangements are not insurance but cut out the third party bureaucracy driving up the cost of care. DPC serves to strengthen patient-physician relationships not interfere in them. This healing relationship is critical for regaining health and health maintenance. It makes both patients and physicians responsible to each other directly, as it should be.

5. Allow physicians and patients to opt out of Medicare, MACRA, and other top-down government programs. They should be voluntary, not compulsory. Direct contracting between patient and physicians will save lives and tax dollars.

6. Consider legislation to protect patient access to physicians of their choice, even if they are not in their plan’s network. Narrow networks serve to trap patients into obtaining care in the most expensive settings instead of from higher quality and less expensive options like independent physicians.

Please feel free to contact me via letter, email, social media, phone, or any other mechanism for short and long-term planning. Together we can harness free market and personal individual responsibility to organically solve America’s healthcare crisis.

My article catalog: https://www.medicaleconomics.com/authors/craig-m-wax-do

Best wishes for good health,

Craig M. Wax, DO
Family Physician
VP Healthcare Policy, Practicing Physicians of America
National Physicians Council on Healthcare Policy member
Independent Physicians for Patient Independence
Host of Your Health Matters
Rowan Radio 89.7 WGLS FM
Twitter @drcraigwax
HealthIsNumberOne.com

10 Reasons to ‘Refuse to Enroll’ in Obamacare

From our friends at Citizen’s Council for Health Freedom:

OPEN ENROLLMENT 2018: 10 Reasons to ‘Refuse to Enroll’ in Obamacare

‘Command and Control,’ ‘Claw Backs,’ ‘Narrow Networks’ and More Are Reasons to Stay Out of an Expensive, Privacy-Compromising Gov’t Plan.

Just a few days remain in the open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and for those still on the fence, Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF) is sharing the top 10 reasons to “Refuse to Enroll.”

“For more than eight years, the Affordable Care Act has been changing America’s health care landscape—and not for the better,” said CCHF president and co-founder Twila Brase. “Costs have skyrocketed because younger, healthier Americans wisely chose not to enroll, unlike the Obamacare architects thought they would. Health plans that were already making money hand over fist received bailouts for insuring older, sicker individuals, some with uninsurable conditions. With a new administration that’s making bold steps against the ACA way of doing health care, there are many reasons not to enroll in a flawed government system that compromises care, ties doctors’ hands and shares our private medical information.”

CCHF’s “10 Reasons Not to Enroll in Obamacare” include the following:

1. Obamacarecoverage is a government program; not private insurance.
2. It’s “a second Medicaid-style program,” said former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin.
3. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges facilitate redistribution of American’s wages, reported Fox News in 2010, just days after the law was signed.
4. User fees added to premiums fund operations of these ‘command and control’ exchanges, according to an “Overview of Health Insurance Exchanges” from the Congressional Research Service.
5. ACA exchanges may automatically enroll you in Medicaid, such as this story in Minnesota.
6. If you underestimate your income, the IRS can ‘claw back’ premium subsidies you received.
7. Your choices are limited, as a result of “narrow networks” of doctors and hospitals.
8. Federal law and most states no longer penalize you for refusing to buy insurance.
9. Health care sharing is a more affordable, cash-based option for coverage.
10. The federal exchange database (“Health Insurance Exchange Program” System of Records) collects, stores and shares private information from all enrollees.

For many years, CCHF has also shared a list of wise—and legal—alternatives to signing up for costly government coverage:

1. Buy private insurance outside the government exchanges, such as a private policy, employer-sponsored coverage or a private insurance exchange.
2. Claim one of several general exemptions to the mandate or one of its many hardship exemptions. The Trump administration added several hardship exemptions in April, including one related to abortion, and also announced earlier this month that documentation is not required for those who take these exemptions.
3. Become a member of a health care sharing ministry, a viable, affordable option for some families that is skyrocketing in enrollment—and the second of the nine general exemptions.

“Americans also need to understand that although the mandate and penalty are gone in a practical sense, they are technically still in place,” said Brase. “While Congress zeroed out the penalty tax starting in 2019, Congress did not repeal the ACA mandate to be insured or the penalty itself. It only zeroed out the penalty for going uninsured. The language for the mandate and the penalty are still in law, but the cost of the penalty is now zero dollars. While this provides welcome relief to many, a future Congress could turn around and easily reinstate the penalty for being uninsured because the penalty language is still in law. They could simply go from zero to whatever penalty they wish to impose for going uninsured.”

Americans should also know that the individual penalty was zeroed out beginning in 2019, so those who went without coverage in 2018 may be still on the hook for penalties—and may still be able to claim exemptions to avoid those penalties.

For more information about CCHF, visit www.cchfreedom.org, its Facebook page or its Twitter feed @CCHFreedom. Also view the media page for CCHF here. For more about CCHF’s initiative The Wedge of Health Freedom, visitwww.JointheWedge.com, The Wedge Facebook page or follow The Wedge on Twitter @wedgeoffreedom.

Can Organized Medicine Say Goodbye to Bias?

As physicians are saying goodbye to organized medicine maybe organized medicine should realize it is time to say goodbye to bias.

In a recent email “Update” the NJ Association of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons trumpeted a headline copied directly from the Governor’s press release:

Governor Murphy Announces Impact of New Jersey’s Actions to Stabilize Health Insurance Market

Can’t we at least report the news without bias and have the debate and discussion in our newsletter rather than a rosy review a Partisan headline?

The recitation of the Governor’s talking points continued:

The reduction in health insurance rates is the direct result of New Jersey’s first-in-the-nation action to continue an individual mandate, after the elimination of the mandate by the Trump Administration at the federal level, and to implement a reinsurance program beginning in 2019. The two laws, signed by Governor Murphy in May, were cited by the Center for American Progress in its listing of New Jersey as the national leader among states for having taken action to protect consumers from federal sabotage of the Affordable Care Act.

Why isn’t the headline, “Governor Murphy forces mandatory tax payer bailout of insurance companies per ACA.” ACA 2010 forces taxpayers to bailout insurance companies and their cronies under penalty of law and IRS.
We can objectively and comparatively report on what health insurance cost in 2009 when basic and essential (B&E) coverage by Horizon was inexpensive before it was canceled due to ACA. For many New Jerseyans, their premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket costs doubled due to ACA since 2010.

Can’t we at least Report the news without bias and have the debate and discussion in our NJAOPS newsletter rather than a rosy review a partisan headline directly from Trenton?

We do credit NJAOPS for excising this sentence from its version of the Governor’s missive:

“Our work is based on the core belief that health care is a right – not a privilege,” said Governor Phil Murphy. “

 

We also credit NJAOPS with responding positively to this inquiry that they will try to improve their reporting in the future

However, IP4PI will take this opportunity to educate NJ Governor Murphy:

Insurance denials must stop!

To: Lily Tyson, Chief Health Insurance Bureau
NJ Department of Banking and Insurance

Re: Horizon BCBS discrimination

Dear Chief Tyson,

This letter is to make you aware that Horizon BCBS and its affiliates are harming a patient with their precertification, prior authorization, appeal and denial of services processes. The patient indicated below has diabetes and multiple medical conditions, which he diligently and routinely follows up at our office. For the past three months, the patient and I have aggressively pursued a continuous glucose monitoring device to assist both of us in getting his blood glucose under best control.

Despite the fact that the patient and I agree on this, Horizon BCBS and its affiliates have denied the patient this medically necessary item. Further, while the Endocrinology Society, The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the American diabetes association clinical societies all recommend continuous glucose monitoring for best management of diabetes Horizon BCBS and its affiliates insist on harming the patient by denying him this medically necessary tool.

Furthermore, Horizon BCBS medical directors have denied this patient the necessary medical monitoring device, thereby potentially causing their insured harm, and may be liable as they are making care decisions and denial of care decisions for the patient.

I ask:

1. Do they have the patient’s informed consent to make care decisions?
2. Are they licensed physicians in NJ?
3. What is their malpractice coverage for this activity?
4. Are they specialty trained in endocrinology?
5. As employees of Horizon BCBS, do they have a conflict of interest?

Horizon BCBS precertification, prior authorization, appeal and denial of service processses are harmful to both patients and physician providers of medical services.  Please put Horizon BCBS on notice to case and desist making clinical care decisions for patients through their onerous and harmful money making processes. This is especially critical in light of the pending NJ law that would mandate the purchase of insurance products like those offered by Horizon BCBS.

Sincerely,

Craig M. Wax, DO, Family Physician

CEO Pay Watch: United Health CEO $27 Million in 2017

$27 Million earned in one year for UnitedHealth’s outgoing CEO, reports the Star Tribune. That’s a lot of moohlah, right?

In the big picture it’s chump change. Get your barf bag ready:

The CEOs of 70 of the largest U.S. health care companies cumulatively have earned $9.8 billion in the seven years since the Affordable Care Act was passed, and their earnings have grown faster than most Americans’ during that time, according to an Axios analysis of federal financial documents.

https://www.axios.com/the-sky-high-pay-of-health-care-ceos-1513303956-d5b874a8-b4a0-4e74-9087-353a2ef1ba83.html

And the above numbers don’t even include 2017.

$10 Billion would pay for a year of Direct Primary Care memberships for over 11 million Americans; that’s almost everyone enrolled in an ACA plan on the individual market.

Anyone wonder where your healthcare dollar and Obamacare ACA tax money is going?

Call your congressman and demand the repeal of ACA Obamacare and let’s let the free market bring up quality and prices down! Capitol Hill Switchboard: (202) 224-3121.

 

Promoting Choice and Competition to Empower Patients and their Physicians

A friend of IP4PI writes in:

I just read President Trump’s executive order on choice and competition across state lines. It has these amazing provisions which have not been discussed in the media at all!! These provisions go to the heart of a competitive market-based healthcare system.

“(c) My Administration will also continue to focus on promoting competition in healthcare markets and limiting excessive consolidation throughout the healthcare system. To the extent consistent with law, government rules and guidelines affecting the United States healthcare system should:

(i) expand the availability of and access to alternatives to expensive, mandate-laden PPACA insurance, including AHPs, STLDI, and HRAs;

(ii) re-inject competition into healthcare markets by lowering barriers to entry, limiting excessive consolidation, and preventing abuses of market power; and

(iii) improve access to and the quality of information that Americans need to make informed healthcare decisions, including data about healthcare prices and outcomes, while minimizing reporting burdens on affected plans, providers, or payers.”

The whole order can be read here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/10/12/presidential-executive-order-promoting-healthcare-choice-and-competition . I love the title to promote choice and competition.  I don’t think the order was overreach, because the language is to ” PRIORITIZE three areas for improvement in the near term: association health plans (AHPs), short-term, limited-duration insurance (STLDI), and health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs).” and “FOCUS on promoting competition in healthcare markets and limiting excessive consolidation “.  I did note this part:” Public Comment. The Secretaries shall consider and evaluate public comments on any regulations proposed under sections 2 through 4 of this order.”

Stay tuned for opportunities to comment!