A Catholic university in Ohio said Tuesday it is being forced to end a student health insurance program over increased costs it claims are associated with President Obama’s contraception mandate and other provisions of the health care overhaul.

Franciscan University in Steubensville, Ohio, said it has so far excluded contraceptive services and products from its health insurance policy for students and will not participate in a plan that “requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.”

Read more: Catholic university drops student health insurance, cites ObamaCare | Fox News.

Via Ari Armstrong.

The RAND researchers we reviewed before have come out with a follow-up study in Health Affairs of the potential impact of consumer driven plans on the American health care system. This is “Growth Of Consumer-Directed Health Plans To One-Half Of All Employer-Sponsored Insurance Could Save $57 Billion Annually,” by Amelia M. Haviland, M. Susan Marquis, Roland D. McDevitt, and Neeraj Sood.

Most of the media reports have been reasonably accurate, see The Hill and The Washington Post, but have missed the real potential in the study. …

Are these savings due to selection? No, the authors controlled for that. …

Are “vulnerable populations” (high risk and/or low income) disadvantaged? They don’t seem to be.  …

Do people cut back on necessary care? Here it is hard to tell. …

[T]his kind of quality research may persuade the so-called “research community” to finally put aside their partisan opposition and begin to take this trend seriously. It is the future of health care.

Read the whole post: Consumer-Driven Health Plans Could Save $57.1 Billion per Year | John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog | NCPA.org.

In a new report prepared for Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp R-Mich., data from Americas Fortune 100 companies show they could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year under the new health care law by simply terminating health insurance for their workers and dumping these employees into taxpayer-funded health care exchanges.

Read more here: Job-Based Health Coverage to Become Even More Expensive under Affordable Care Act.

Via FIRM

Eastern European hackers have stolen 780,000 people’s medical records, including 280,000 Social Security Numbers, from the Utah Department of Health. “On March 30, they downloaded 24,000 files to computers in Eastern Europe,” according to The New York Times. “Each file contained records for hundreds of recipients.” Many were children’s records, preferred because “their identity can be exploited for years.” Already the identity of “some 10 percent” of American children has been stolen. Meanwhile, a new report reveals a rise in breaches at hospitals. Specifically, 27% of respondents had experienced a security breach in the last year, up from 19% in 2010 and 13% in 2008. How vulnerable will patients be when the National Health Information Network (national medical records system) is fully in place?

The United States continues to experience a long-term trend of loss of patients’ control of health spending. Attempts to reverse this with tools such as Health Reimbursement Arrangements, Flexible Spending Arrangements, Medical Savings Accounts, and Health Savings Accounts have not resulted in systemic change.

As a result, Americans control less of our own health spending than do residents of other developed countries. After ObamaCare is defeated, reversing his long-term trend must be the top priority of the real health reform that replaces it.

Read the whole post: What is Unique about U.S. Health Care? Lack of Patient Control of Spending | John Goodmans Health Policy Blog | NCPA.org.

Two recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have exposed a little-known but growing problem of sloppy science and ethical misconduct in medical research that could be dangerous to American patients. …

Under ObamaCare, physicians will be increasingly pressured with financial carrots and sticks to adhere to centralized “practice guidelines” established by “comparative effectiveness research.” But any such practice guidelines are only as good as the underlying science.

Even worse, the investigators in the New York Times piece found that, “The higher a journal’s impact factor… the higher its retraction rate.” Some of the most prestigious medical journals (such as the New England Journal of Medicine) had the highest retraction rates. Yet these are supposed to be the most authoritative sources for practice guidelines. …

Just as Americans have become increasingly skeptical of “global warming” policy proposals based on questionable government-funded climate science, they should be skeptical about mandatory medical practice protocols based on increasingly questionable government-funded medical research.

Read the whole article: PJ Media » Government-Funded Medical Research Is Hazardous to Your Health.

If the Obama administration expended as much creative energy saving taxpayers money as it does obscuring the costs of Obamacare, we’d probably have a program worth saving.

But from day one, the health care law has been larded with double-counting gimmickry to conceal its $1 trillion price tag. It started by measuring eight years of services against 10 years of taxes, and it has continued with an avalanche of waivers that shield friends of the White House from the cost of the very law they helped pass.

We now have another unsavory example of how government-controlled health means politicized health care.

For about 12 million Medicare beneficiaries, private insurance plans lower costs and drive up quality. If the law had been followed as written, Obamacare should have slashed the popular market-oriented Medicare Advantage program this year. The cuts are needed to divert funding to a Medicaid expansion that will provide coverage to millions of uninsured — the central case for the creation of Obamacare.

It’s no surprise that Medicare’s most market-focused program pushes down premiums and enrollment up. So rather than allow millions of enrollees in vital swing states, such as Florida, to experience a major benefit cut right before an election, the administration founded an $8.5 billion pilot program.

Read the rest of the article: Obamacare’s Newest Fraud at Reason.com.

David Hogberg also comments at the Investors Business Daily:

If it walks like a political program, and talks like a political program …

The problem is that 12 million Medicare beneficiaries, most of them seniors, are in MA plans, and cutting them could prove very unpopular. The last thing Obama needs right now is millions of angry seniors showing up at the polls in November. …

As Capital Hill has pointed out before, most of the ObamaCare cuts to Medicare are unlikely to occur because of the potent political forces that will array against them. The recent GAO report is just more evidence of that.

For more on this, see Peter Suderman’s recent posts on why the Obama Administration opposes Medicare overpayments to private insurers except when it doesn’t, and on Elizabeth Warren and the medical device tax.

Read more: The Most Expensive Demonstration Project In Medicare History.

See also: Success of Health Savings Accounts & high-deductible insurance.

John Goodman also has a good review of ways people in the U.S. can save money for medical care, and how this can be improved.

Via FIRM.

Once insurance exchanges are up and running, participating health insurers could experience substantial bumps in enrollment in their individual products. But the market that develops outside of the exchanges could be more vibrant and lucrative, particularly if coverage costs are lower due to adverse selection. And that has some state regulators and exchange boards petrified.

Under the reform law, insurers that participate in an exchange will be allowed to sell products outside of it as long as there is similar pricing for similar products. While the sale of insurance products inside and outside exchanges will vary from state to state, stakeholders are concerned that too many healthy people will seek coverage outside the exchanges, leaving behind a shallow and costly risk pool. …

The exchanges also will attract the previously uninsured and people who were covered through a state Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (i.e., high-risk pool). That sort of risk pool will make adverse selection within the exchanges a significant threat.  …

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) recently issued a white paper that examined the potential for adverse selection as a result of exchanges. The report concluded that adverse selection was likely inside of the exchanges if health insurers are allowed to sell low-cost, “stripped down” products outside of them.

This could be another example of government controls begetting yet more controls.  The article continues:

Nearly half of 153 health plan executives whose companies are likely to participate in an exchange cite adverse selection as a top concern, according to results of a survey conducted by consulting firm PwC (previously PricewaterhouseCoopers).

Read the whole article: Inability to Disarm Exchange ‘Assassin’ May Leave Exchanges With Costly Enrollees with Chart: Adverse Selection Tops Insurers’ Exchange Concerns.

Some excerpts from the transcript:

[CO Trust's VP of Communications] Christie McElhinney says the Trust wants the site to be a politically neutral forum where people can learn about health care, express their opinions and debate ideas.

But not everybody buys that. Brian Schwartz is a blogger for the Denver-based Independence Institute, which bills itself as a free market think tank.

Schwartz: To me, it’s a glossy marketing campaign to advance their policy agenda.

Reporter: Schwartz says the Trust has a long track record of supporting policies that he calls more government control of health care, and that their new website only offers one perspective.

Schwartz: So you might think that going to this Project Health website, that they’re interested parties presenting policy suggestions from all different points of view, but it’s not, they’re only presenting one flavor of solutions.

Reporter: He’s got a point. Experts featured on the site reflect the Trust’s overall stance that enrolling more people in government-funded health programs is good for Colorado. It doesn’t include opposing points of view, like those at the Independence Institute. …

Schwartz says the Trust has a long track record of supporting policies that he calls more government control of health care, and that their new website only offers one perspective. …

Schwartz: if you were buying a used car from someone, if the used car salesman says, I want you to be able to get to work and back and go wherever you want, that’s my goal for you, that’s different from saying, I want to sell you this car, right? Which is  really for the most part, what a lot of salesmen want to do.

Thanks to Colorado Public Radio reporter Eric Whitney for contacting me after reading my article Don’t Trust the Colorado Trust, published in the Boulder Daily Camera.