Healthcare Daily Digest for Friday, 29 March: Do Americans Have a Right to Healthcare?

Based solely on the time you and I spend together looking at healthcare headlines, you’d get the impression — and a pretty fair impression at that — that I’m a pinko commie b-word. I’m pretty critical of conservative ideas about healthcare and am fully behind this Administration and healthcare reform.

Avik Roy‘s article, “Yes, Health Care is a Right — An Individual Right“? It’s a pretty compelling argument for the other side. I may quibble with his rhetorical practice; he opens with a story about a 12-year-old boy who died of an abscessed tooth and blames Medicaid.

It’s later in his remarks, though, where Roy’s arguments start to convince me more. In relating another story, this time about a man named Brian and his issues with Medicare (he doesn’t want to take part in it) and his healthcare savings plan, Roy gets at an insidious bit of bureaucracy:

Brian Hall is telling the government that he doesn’t want to take advantage of a government program. He’s saying, “take this taxpayer money and spend it on someone else. I’m happy to continue to pay into my private insurance plan and my private health savings account instead.” And the government responds by telling him that he has no choice but to enroll in Medicare and shut down his health savings account. If he doesn’t do what the government has told him to do, the Social Security Administration will confiscate his pension, even though his pension has no financial connection to the Medicare program.

He makes some other points — all worth thinking about; not all of them are points I agree with:

• It’s a great applause line, isn’t it, to say that “health care is a universal human right.” But after the applause has died down, we’re left with the question that the left rarely takes time to answer: what is health care?
• What if I smoke two packs a day, and I come down with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a costly chronic condition. Do I have a right to the money of other people, in order to care for a disease that I, in all likelihood, brought upon myself?
• Is all health care a right, or just some? And who decides?

Friday headlines:

12 Recommendations for Payment Reform in Healthcare: The National Commission on Physician Payment Reform has issued 12 recommendations for models to pay healthcare providers that maximize positive clinical outcomes, enhance patient satisfaction and physician autonomy and incentivize cost-effective care.”

Remove Medicare’s straitjacket: Come for the argument — “Don’t want to cut benefits? Then allow the system to pay for lower-cost drugs or care” — stay for the dreamy picture of failed VP nom Paul Ryan. You’re welcome.

If You Do the Math, It’s Kinda Like a Job?: A Carson woman has been sentenced to 156 months in federal prison in an $8 million Medicare fraud case in which she illegally paid kickbacks for referrals to patients whose beneficiary information was used to make bogus claims to the government health care program.” Divide $8 million by 156 and that works out to just over $50k a month.

Oh, Wait? That’s Still Going On?: “Last Saturday, a year after holding their first Occupy Town Square event in Washington Square Park, Occupy Wall Street activists returned to the park to offer free medical services, education and testing during an all-day health fair. The day’s theme was the burdensome costs of healthcare for millions either uninsured or unable to afford even basic medical care.” Because I know I want to get healthcare from hippie activists fresh off the hackie-sack field.

Connance Joins HFMA Healthcare Medical Debt Collections Task Force as a Founding Member: “The goal of the Task Force is to identify a common set of medical debt collection practices that can be standardized for widespread industry adoption that will lead to improvement in the overall collection process, the patient experience, and financial performance resulting in a fair collection process for patients.”

Here’s the Rule: If You Use the Phrase ‘Illegal Alien’ Then I Kinda Know You’re Mostly Not Worth Listening To: “Even as the state of California is drowning in debt and already suffering under an avalanche of unfunded mandates, a powerful healthcare advocacy group in the Golden State is pushing for free healthcare for all illegal aliens.”

Class Cert. Granted In TCPA Suit Over Medical Debt Calls: “A Florida federal judge on Tuesday granted class certification in a suit accusing medical debt collector Healthcare Revenue Recovery Group LLC of using patients’ cellphone numbers provided to a hospital system to leave debt collection messages without clarifying the true purpose of the calls.” (insideARM.com coverage here.)