Twila Brase is the president and co-founder of Citizens' Council for Health Freedom which exists to protect health care choices and patient privacy. She is a certified public health nurse and provides daily commentary on her 'Health Freedom Minute' broadcast. Twila has been called one of the '100 Most Powerful People in Health Care.'

The Obama administration decided that a special enrollment period for Obamacare was needed for those who may find themselves surprised when they have their taxes prepared and discover that they owe a penalty to the federal government for being uninsured. The enrollment has been opened up until April 30^th. However, there haven't been very many taking advantage of this which has led Twila to believe that a lot of people are choosing to pay the penalty rather than get themselves covered under Obamacare or some other way.

Listeners must keep in mind that Obamacare is a national health care program. You have to apply to the federal government for it which means you are enrolling in what Twila describes as Medicaid for the middle class on a sliding fee scale. Any private insurance company connection has that company acting as a contractor for the government's program. In addition, the coverage is poor, it's expensive, the deductibles are high, if you get subsidies you're relying on taxpayers to cover you and the networks are narrow so you have limited options regarding where you can go.

Several years ago a law was put into place establishing the amount of pay for physicians treating Medicare patients. The law automatically trimmed pay according to the amount that healthcare expenses rise. There have been stop-gap bills created for years to stop this trim from occurring. Now they want to repeal the formula that's in place and come up with a new way to pay doctors taking care of Medicare patients. The new method is really about putting the federal government in control of the doctors.

The new proposal is called The Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (HR-2—also known as the 'Doc-Fix' bill). It has already passed the House and is sitting in the Senate. HR-2 would do number of things including: (1)--Start a new merit-based pay system for doctors based upon 'quality.' This factor would be decided not by the doctors themselves but by the government. (2)--Resource use. How many staff, dollars and pieces of equipment is the doctor using to take care of you? Your doctor would have to report this to the federal government. (3)--Does your doctor use electronic health records and is this information being reported to the federal government?

Jim and Twila also discussed negative examples of the impact of Obamacare on individuals and businesses; why the House overwhelmingly passed HR-2 when many of them campaigned heartily against Obamacare during the election; Obamacare for released prisoners; the battle in Florida over Medicaid expansion; how Obamacare can be fought; the privacy concerns surrounding a national patient tracking system and much more.

More Information

www.refusetoenroll.org

www.cchfreedom.org

651-646-8935

info@cchfreedom.org

Senate switchboard-202-224-3121