Thursday, March 15, 2012

Would He Lie to You?

Remember the contentious healthcare debate? Our very own President told us that in a bit of legerdemain resembling something with loaves and fishes providing lunch for a multitude, he was going to provide better than Medicare benefits to everyone, not just those over 65, and do it for less money. The mouth-breathing masses marveled at the genius of the proposal.

As the war raged on, it was pointed out that the budget estimates for this wondrous achievement used various methods of double-accounting, not the least of which was providing a ten-year cost estimate that employed the blatant mechanism of using ten years of tax collection to provide six years of benefits.

Well, now we're at a point where ten years of program means ten years of revenue on one side of the ledger and ten years of expenditure on the other. Guess what?

Obamacare Not $900B! Now $1.76 TRILLION and Rising

But fear not, we are still two years away from the 2014 benefit implementation date. It's going to get a lot more expensive.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

No kidding it's going to get worse.

They promised healthcare for 35 Million people who were not covered. It is an immutable law of economics that you cannot subsidize something without getting more of it. That's about a 15% increase in the pool of privately covered lives, and once they have health insurance, they're going to start using it (more doctor visits, more labs, more prescriptions, more imaging, more procedures, etc.). So figure a 10-15% increase in utilization.

Then they promised that it would cost 15% less than it costs today, total (not per-unit). So they're adding 15% to our workload, and cutting reimbursement 15% total, for a 30% hit to our margin.

I don't know a single healthcare provider that has a 30% margin. Most operate on 2-10%. We're going to get killed.

And don't believe the baloney about savings through reductions in "Fraud, Waste and Abuse." Nobody believes that there is even 10% there. Probably less than that is even achievable.

The other pipe-dream is "Accountable Care Organizations" (ACOs). Supposed to be a re-engineering of the method of care to reduce total costs. Except Romney-care in Mass. allready tried that, and it was a DISASTER. Cost MORE for the same patient care, not less.

The entire industry now feels like we're on a freight train with no brakes heading full steam for a cliff. When the train wreck comes, it's going to be epic. Personaly, I predict that the unwritten goal of Obamacare was to permanently break the system so badly that the feds will have to step in with Single Payor (Britian's NHS style).

And I'm not a wookie-suiter with a trucker hat sitting on a pile of gold coins, canned goods and shotguns, either. I'm a senior executive of a 9-figure healthcare system that's been in business for over a hundred years, and we're just trying to figure out how to survive the next 5 years.

FormerFlyer