From Fox News:

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer was in the hospital on Wednesday after getting a pneumonia diagnosis a day earlier, and was expected to make a full recovery.

The Maryland Democrat, 79, was admitted to George Washington University Hospital on Tuesday with pneumococcal pneumonia, his office said in a statement.

Comment: We believe Rep. Hoyer is almost certainly on acid blockers, which have been linked to pneumonia, as well as tuberculosis and typhoid. The stomach is normally a sterile environment, with stomach acid killing off harmful bacteria we’re exposed to through food and liquids. Reducing stomach acid with acid blockers changes the pH of your stomach and allows bacteria to grow. These drugs cause more problems than they fix, since a lot of heartburn cases are caused by too little stomach acid, rather than too much.

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Hospital prices are not determined by supply and demand but are purely administrative decisions. These decisions are made by the institution’s Chargemaster. Hospitals are not required to make their Chargemaster public. Read Full Article.

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Last week, the Senate considered a number of bills to repeal and/or replace Obamacare—all of which failed. For those interested in keeping score:

• One version of the Better Care Reconciliation Act included Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) initiative that insurers be allowed to sell catastrophic and other health coverage and not have to conform to Obamacare regulations. As we explained, however, those plans would have been in the same risk pool as Obamacare plans, meaning the Cruz reform would not create the consumer-driven alternative to Obamacare that we need. This bill was defeated by a 45-55 vote.
• The Obamacare Repeal and Reconciliation Act would have repealed Obamacare without specifying a replacement. This bill failed by a vote of 45-55.
• Then there was the so-called “skinny repeal” bill (The Health Care Freedom Act), which would have repealed the individual mandate but left Medicaid expansion and Obamacare policy requirements intact. That bill was defeated when Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and John McCain (R-AZ) voted against it.

With Obamacare still standing unamended, primarily because of the power of special interests, the problems facing our health care system are not going away. Premiums in parts of the country are expected to increase by as much as 50%. Providers are continuing to opt out of providing coverage on the state exchanges, leaving consumers with fewer and fewer choices. In some counties, there are no choices left.

As we’ve been saying for some time, there is an elegantly simple solution that does not require repealing Obamacare. The single most important reform that is needed is to allow a consumer-driven health insurance market to develop alongside government-run insurance like Obamacare.

In particular, ANH-USA has fought to legalize catastrophic-only insurance policies in a standalone risk pool. This is central to establishing a consumer-driven system. If catastrophic-only plans were put in the same risk pool as Obamacare plans, then consumers purchasing the cheaper catastrophic plans would see their premiums balloon to subsidize the more expensive Obamacare plans.

The system we propose would allow insurers to offer plans that consumers actually want, while continuing to allow those who want Obamacare plans to purchase them. We suspect that, in the long run, the consumer run system would take over, because it would bring healthcare costs down.

Last week’s flurry of action on health care reform is likely not the final word. Legislators still need to hear from constituents that they want health care reform to happen without a repeal of Obamacare being necessary.

Action Alert! Write to your Members of Congress and tell them you want a consumer-driven alternative to government-run insurance. Please send your message immediately.

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• The Reinsurance Program subsidizes any “expensive medical claims” from enrolled individuals. This subsidy is funded by a fee paid by nearly everyone who has health insurance. The amount of the fund is set by statute: $10 billion in 2014, $6 billion in 2015, and $4 billion in 2016.
• The Risk Corridor Program pays insurers when they lose money on the plans they sell in the individual market, which puts taxpayers at risk for a potentially unlimited bailout. In this subsidy, money is transferred directly from taxpayers to insurers.The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the Risk Corridor Program would decrease the federal budget. Skeptical of this claim, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform surveyed fifteen insurance companies and twenty-three ObamaCare co-ops (representing about 80% of people enrolled in the exchanges), and found that their projections differed significantly from the CBO’s. They expect Risk Corridor payments of about $725 million directly from taxpayers in 2014, about one-third higher than in 2013. Extrapolating these estimates for the entire population enrolled in health insurance exchange plans, taxpayers may be on the hook for upwards of $1 billion in 2014 alone. Many companies deliberately underpriced their plans in expectation of this bailout.
• The Risk Adjustment Program transfers money from plans with healthier individuals on average, to plans with sicker individuals. Although ObamaCare is required to be budget-neutral, more insurers expect to receive more payments than they make. This past May, the companies surveyed by the Committee were expecting 2014 net payments through the Risk Adjustment program to be about $346 million—nearly twice as much as they received 2013.

The report finds that the size of the bailout is a combination of two factors: an enrolled population that is less healthy than insurers initially expected, together with provisions in the legislation that make those bailouts generous. After the Obama Administration announced that payments would be implemented in a budget-neutral manner, they were lobbied heavily by insurance companies, and the reimbursement formula was tweaked to satisfy 80% of insurance companies’ demands, according to communications between administration officials and various insurance companies.
What do patients who prefer alternative and integrative medicine do for coverage? We’re on our own. The insurance offered on the exchanges does not provide coverage for CAM, and by and large natural health proponents do not use many of the services covered by insurance—yet we are are forced to support these costs through our tax dollars anyway.
CAM consumers may prefer to purchase a high-deductible insurance plan in conjunction with a Health Savings Account. We were concerned that these programs might disappear under ObamaCare, but fortunately—likely due to grassroots activism from people like you—they survived and remain the best option.

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The post Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act Could Save Many Lives first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

• Medicaid. Many more prisoners and parolees will now qualify for Medicaid, which is expanding to cover more childless adults.
• Obamacare. It’s true that the ACA expressly prohibits the enrollment of inmates who are serving full-time sentences. However, there’s a loophole for prisoners awaiting trial. This incentivizes cash-strapped states to sign as many inmates up for Obamacare as possible.

 
Sadly, because the ACA is based on a conventional medical paradigm (“drugs and surgery for all!”), it’s unlikely that newly-covered prisoners will receive the natural health treatments for anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric disorders that could actually help. Instead, they’ll be prescribed psychotropic drugs that are linked to violent (homicidal and suicidal) and criminal acts.
 
Is it wise to prescribe highly addictive, violence-sparking drugs to a population already prone to violence and crime? There’s already evidence that psychotropic drugs—particularly SSRI antidepressants—may be linked to the rise in mass public shootings. OnTime Magazine’s list of top ten legal drugs linked to violence, seven are psychotropics: three are SSRI antidepressants, two are another class of antidepressants, and two are for the treatment of ADHD. (To learn more about the link between SSRIs and violence, read our February 2013 and March 2011 articles.)
 
The latest possible link between mass violence and SSRIs just came out—the army has admitted that the shooter at Fort Hood had just recently been prescribed such drugs.
 
Antipsychotics are also extremely addictive: amphetamines (ADHD drugs like Adderall) and benzodiazepines (antianxiety drugs like Xanax) are both considered two of the world’s most addictive drugs. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 18% of federal prisoners and nearly 17% of state prisoners say they committed their offense to obtain money for drugs, while up to 80% of inmates already have substance abuse problems. Enrolling inmates in federal health programs could introduce populations already vulnerable to substance abuse to even more addictive drugs. This could serve to perpetuate—not break—the cycle of drug-fueled crime.
 
Given the high potential costs to incarcerated Americans, public safety, and our wallets, it seems a forgone conclusion that inmates should not be pushed into these drugs. How could states and the administration ignore this elephant in the room?
 
Perhaps it’s hidden behind the giant pile of Big Pharma profits and campaign finance dollars. Let’s take a look at who stands to benefit:
 

• State and county jails are the biggest winners here. Because Medicaid is a federal program, and because they can charge the cost of the Affordable Care Act enrollees to the federal government, theirbudgets will shrink drastically—it’s estimated that $6.5 billion in annual healthcare costs will be shifted to the federal government (i.e., taxpayers like you).And we can’t help but think jails see some appeal to a population controlled by drugs. What they may actually get is anything but a sedated inmate population.
• The Obama Administration. If this fledgling program is implemented nationally, there will be a huge jump in enrollment numbers—especially in the coveted young adult group as of 2002. 60% of the prison population is between the ages of 18 and 34. Although the administration hasn’t publically advertised expanded coverage for inmates, it is funding one organization that enrolls Illinois prisoners in Obamacare programs.
• Big Pharma. Psychiatric drugs are a big, fat Big Pharma cash cow. In 2008 alone, sales of a single schizophrenia drug (Zyprexa) represented 23% of Eli Lilly’s total earnings; Johnson & Johnson’s antipsychotic franchise generated $3.8 billion. This program cracks an untapped market wide open, generating billions in new sales and—since psychotropic drugs are so addictive—what could be lifelong customers.

 
So far, only six states and counties are signing up prisoners under the new ACA rules. But if this program is implemented nationally, many of the seven million Americans behind bars, on parole, or on probation, as well as the thirteen million booked into county jails each year, would be eligible for taxpayer-subsidized drugs linked to violence.
 
Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve used government-subsidized healthcare to boost Big Pharma profits: after all, children on Medicaid are four times more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic drugs. Please note: that isn’t anti-depressants. It is highly toxic antipsychotic drugs that have not even been tested on a pediatric population. The FDA says that it is opposed to untested, “off-label” use of drugs. Why doesn’t it stop this cruel experimenting with children on Medicaid?

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We have a major new concern, and it isn’t about the website.

The post What You Need to Know about the Healthcare Exchange Policies first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Medicare prices and policies flow through all of medicine.

• Medicare sets a payment schedule for 7,500 separate tasks, varied by location and other factors. This translates into coverage of about 6 billion medical price transactions at any one time.
• Hospitals are paid as much as three times more for many procedures than private physicians. For example, Dr. Thomas Lewandowski, a Wisconsin cardiologist, found that he received $150 for an echocardiogram versus $400 if done by a hospital employee; $60 for a stress test versus $180; and $10 for an electrocardiogram versus more than $25. Eventually, he, like many other physicians, gave up and sold his practice to a hospital. When he did, he agreed to follow hospital guidelines for treatment that limited his independence and also agreed to see more patients per day.
• The Medicare coverage and price schedule is so complex that if you call Medicare for instruction, and ask different personnel, you will get widely varying answers, as documented by a number of studies. But if a physician makes a mistake and bills for something not covered, he or she has committed fraud, punishable by jail. Moreover, one cannot rely on advice from Medicare personnel as a legal defense. It is not surprising that a significant number of doctors, estimated at 15% but much higher in some areas, refuse to treat Medicare patients, and the number is likely to grow rapidly.
• Medicare does not pay for phone calls, email, or showing patients how to do things for themselves. So these tools, which have revolutionized other service professions, are rarely used.
• Medicare also refuses to pay for blood tests not connected to a specific illness. The use of blood tests to identify health problems before they emerge has the potential to revolutionize medicine, but Medicare says no.
• Doctors and patients can also benefit from computer and cell phone applications or “apps” such as those which monitor blood pressure and send the information to the doctor. Will Medicare pay for them? No, unless the “app” has been taken through the FDA approval process at vast cost. Meanwhile, the FDA says it is concerned about the proliferation of medical software for cell phones, and may crack down on anyone selling it without approval. The same applies to electronic sensors.
• And what about genetic testing? With a few exceptions, Medicare will not pay for that either, even if it has been taken through the FDA. In this way, American healthcare is essentially frozen in time, unable to take advantage of any new technology whose owner has not paid millions, or hundreds of millions, to get government approval, or in some cases, even after such approval.
• If an elderly patient comes to a doctor with more than one problem, Medicare will not pay the doctor for treating more than one problem at a time. So if the patient has high blood pressure and also diabetes, there must be two appointments. Of course it is not quite that simple. A specialist may be given half pay for treating a second problem at the same time, unlike a family doctor who gets nothing.

Unfortunately Medicare pricing not only governs the Medicare system. It also serves as the foundation for private insurance. The two are more closely connected than people realize. Most of Medicare is run by private insurers who find it more convenient for tie the two systems together as closely as possible.

To make medical pricing work better, we need to bring it out into the light of day, let consumers know what things cost, and give them a way to reward hospitals and doctors who provide better care at a more reasonable cost.

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