In an LTE to the Denver Post, Dr. Paul Hsieh succinctly sums up the problem with one of the most vaunted of ObamCare’s features—-the Accountable Care Organization (ACO): In theory, ‘accountable care organizations’ should encourage physicians to provide cost-effective, “integrated” care. In practice, they will reward physicians for limiting care. He then poses a hypothetical: Suppose [...]
In today’s American Spectator, I discuss Herman Cain’s claim during last week’s Republican debate that he’d be dead if ObamaCare had been in effect when his colon and liver cancer were diagnosed. Cain pointed out that ‘from March 2006 all the way to the end of 2006, for that number of months, I was able to [...]
Over at Pajamas Media, Paul Hsieh discusses how ObamaCare’s “Accountable Care Organizations” incentivize doctors to make choices that aren’t in the patient’s best interest: Under the ACO system, patients basically become cost centers for hospitals and doctors. ObamaCare … Hence, even if a patient sees a specialist in another city who then orders expensive tests [...]
Health care in the U.S. has traditionally been delivered by a decentralized network of providers. Most physicians have practiced independently or in small groups, and most hospitals have been stand-alone, not-for-profit entities run by unpaid community leaders. But those days are over. By passing ObamaCare, the President and his congressional accomplices have created incentives that [...]
Paul Hsieh points out at Town Hall, that ObamaCare is essentially a Soviet-style central planning scheme based on the notion that a group of Beltway apparatchiks can outsmart the market: Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) represent the latest attempt to control escalating health costs by government central planning. Through financial carrots and sticks, doctors and hospitals [...]
In his latest column for Pajamas Media, Paul Hsieh drives home the point that the battle over government-run health care is as much about individual liberty as it is about medicine: Benjamin Franklin once warned Americans that ‘they who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.’ Yet in the seemingly [...]
Paul Hsieh’s latest column for the Christian Science Monitor provides a great metaphor for ObamaCare’s top-down, centrally-controlled health care model: Suppose President Obama declared he would tackle rising food prices by forcing everyone to eat at government-supervised restaurant chains. Small restaurants would be nudged to merge with national ones. Bureaucrats would monitor menu items and [...]
