There’s a lot of health policy going on this week in North
Carolina and nationally, so we’ll just summarize this week.
Gov. Perdue
owns ObamaCare with her veto of HB2, a bill to protect health care freedom
in North Carolina. Republicans in the House have 69 of 72 votes to override
the veto. They may already have two of the three additional votes they
need.
The veto is the latest course reversal for Perdue. Her
reasoning was self-contradictory and all wrong. She said (1) HB2 was
unconstitutional because it contradicts federal law, but (2) a majority of
states have challenged the constitutionality of ObamaCare. She also claimed the
bill would hurt North Carolina financially. Experts from the John Locke Foundation,
Cato Institute, Center for Constitutional Law, and the General
Assembly’s legal staff all demonstrated the faulty reasoning in these
rationalizations.
Exchanges
A Republican bill to create an ObamaCare
exchange gets debated in committee tomorrow. You can listen online starting
at 10am. Judge Vinson’s stay makes it more prudent for the state to put off
creating an exchange until the constitutional issues are resolved, since we
should expect a final decision in "months, not years." The Democrats’
bill is online, too.
Tort reform
The Senate passed
last week medical
malpractice reform that would cap non-economic damages at $500,000 and
protect emergency care providers from liability.
Licensing midwives is not the answer
Emily "Amy" Medwin was arrested
February 20 for illegally midiwifing a birth. Certified professional
midwives staged a demonstration to demand
they be licensed. While I sympathize with their cause, their solution gets
it backward. We
need less licensing, not more, if we want more access to quality health care.
Instead of seeking to carve a new licensing niche for their work, midwives
should seek decriminalization
and broader scope of practice for health professionals.
UNC market power hurting cancer patient
The Raleigh News
& Observer put a human face on the
state-run UNC Hospital System’s continued effort to squeeze more money from Aetna
and the people to whom it provides health insurance. Hospital groups have
significant leverage over insurers, particularly when they have market power,
like the combined network of UNC Hospitals and Rex Healthcare. But Roper is one
of the highest paid state employees and supported ObamaCare, so you won’t hear
complaints against him from the so-called
advocates of affordable health care over this dispute or UNC Hospitals’ unfair
competition in building its network
of doctors.
Click here for the Health Care Update archive.
