19 Jun 2014 NCPPR’s Hogberg Discusses Health Care Hassles in Several TV Interviews

Dr. David Hogberg, the National Center’s policy analyst for health care issues, appeared on two television interviews this week.

On the Soul of the South’s “D.C. Breakdown” program on 6/16/14, David was asked about the 8 million people the Obama Administration claims are signed up for ObamaCare through the federal and state health care exchanges.  While that number may be correct, David said it is also highly likely that between 10 and 20 percent of those who signed up for ObamaCare before the mid-April deadline may no longer be attached to ObamaCare by the end of the year because they are not qualified to enroll, non-payment of the policy they signed up for, they got a job with employer-provided care or qualified for and enrolled in Medicaid instead.

David said the Obama Administration has only itself to blame for problems regarding qualifications because, for example, the enrollment system was originally set up to take people on their honor about financial information.  Likewise, there was a lack of foresight into how the policy would develop and evenutally cost that is now causing people to find that policies available to them on the exchanges are much more expensive than they anticipated.

On the 6/17/14 edition of “Wilkow!” on Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV network, David discussed the possible politics and methodology behind a new report by the Commonwealth Fund that purported to find American health care to be both the most expensive and lowest quality among 10 other “peer” countries.  David called the report “utter rubbish.”

Host Andrew Wilkow saw the report as a means for the political left to continue to push American health care toward a government-run single-payer system.  David agreed that the demonizing of American health care was an obvious goal of the report.  He also noted that the way the report was put together — in which Britain was ranked the best peer — seemed to ignore important factors such as wait times, quality of care an conditions and factors such as cancer-survivability that would have made America look much better in comparison.