A new poll shows that most voters want the Supreme Court to overturn President Obama’s health care law, with opposition and support falling largely along party lines.

Overall, voters oppose the law by 48-40%, according to the Quinnipiac University survey. Democrats support the Obama health care effort by 70-19%, while Republicans oppose it by 86-8%.

The Quinnipiac survey found independent voters opposed to the law by 45-38%.

Of course, voters won’t decide the fate of the health care in the Supreme Court — that’s up to the justices themselves, and they are expected to make a ruling by late June.

Continue reading about health care and the Supreme Court at USA Today

Federal officials on Friday effectively shut down part of the health care law that would have helped consumers cover some long-term-care costs, saying they could not find a way to make it work financially.

After looking at a variety of options, the Obama administration determined the CLASS Act program could not simultaneously meet three important criteria: be self-sustaining, financially sound for 75 years and affordable to consumers.

The move does not affect the rest of the health care law, although it does remove more than $70 billion in expected federal budgetary savings over 10 years.  The savings would have come having policyholders pay premiums for the first few years, but not receive benefits until 2017.

The program – championed by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy – would have allowed working adults to apply for insurance that would provide up to $50 a day in cash benefits if they became disabled. The money could be used to help with in-home assistance or nursing home care.

Read more from Kaiser Health News

Says PHC4 in a press release issued today:

Ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) in Pennsylvania remained financially healthy overall in fiscal year 2010 (FY10), according to a new report from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4). The statewide average operating and total margins for ASCs were 26.20% and 26.29%, respectively. The margins remained in the 26.00% to 26.30% range over the last three-year period (FY08 to FY10).

The ASCs’ average total margins among the nine regions in Pennsylvania ranged from a low of 17.66% to a high of 35.04%.

“In general, ambulatory surgery centers in Pennsylvania are thriving,” said Joe Martin, Executive Director of PHC4. “After a decade of considerable growth, the number of ASCs increased only marginally between FY09 and FY10.”

Eight new facilities opened and four closed, for a net growth of only four facilities in FY10. In the period from FY01 to FY09, the number of ASCs increased from 98 to 262, an average increase of 18 facilities per year.

In response, the Hospital & Healthsystem Association of PA released a statement saying that the data in the report continues to raise questions about the ability of the uninsured and people on Medicare and Medicaid to gain and maintain their access to health care.

Writes HAP in a press release:

According to PHC4, there are now 266 ambulatory surgery centers (ASC) in the state, up from 72 ten years ago, far exceeding the number of general acute care hospitals (165). ASC total profit margins have exceeded 26 percent in each of the past three years. This is in part due to the fact that Medicaid accounted for only 4.5 percent of ASC revenue in 2010, compared to 11.8 percent of general acute care outpatient revenue.

“As the congressional deficit-reduction ’super committee’ gets to work this fall, it is imperative that members of the panel—and by extension all members of Congress—understand the pivotal role that acute care hospitals play in providing a health care safety net for our most vulnerable citizens,” said HAP President and CEO Carolyn F. Scanlan. “With ASCs treating healthier, and usually better insured, patients, the financial and clinical demands on acute care hospitals, which are a safety net for all Pennsylvanians, continue to grow.”

“Under the original Affordable Care Act health reform law, hospitals nationwide already have accepted shared sacrifice amounting to $155 billion in payment reductions—$9 billion in Pennsylvania alone,” Scanlan said. “In addition, Pennsylvania’s fiscal year 2011-2012 state budget cut Medicaid payments to hospitals by 4 percent.”

Scanlan noted that these cuts do not include additional cuts imposed by regulations, and she said that the Medicare and Medicaid programs already underpay hospitals, paying less than the cost of care.

“The bottom line for our patients is access,” Scanlan said. “We continue to support maximizing insurance coverage for all Americans, but it cannot be done by reductions to providers, without whom nobody — insured or not — will be able to get care.”

Alane Basco, from Poulsbo, Wa., lost her job in 2008 and was on her husband’s insurance plan until he switched to a new employer who didn’t offer health coverage. She was on COBRA through his old company until she couldn’t afford it anymore and is now uninsured.

“I have two medical conditions that put me in the high-risk category and I have been denied private insurance,” said Basco, 36.

There is a state program for high-risk individuals offering such policies at a discount, about $278 a month for her coverage.

“It’s not extremely high, but it is outside of our budget,” she lamented.

Ashleigh Menzies is about to turn 26 and, as a result, has lost her insurance because she’s no longer covered under her parents’ policy — a benefit that came out of health care reform.

Menzies lives in Washington, D.C., and works full time as a nanny, but did not negotiate any healthcare insurance coverage when she was first hired.

Read more from MSNBC

A panel of three federal judges indicated they may be prepared to declare at least part of last year’s health care law unconstitutional, tossing a barrage of skeptical questions at a top Obama administration lawyer.

The judges in the hearing here on Wednesday did not state plainly that they will overturn the law, but all three inquired — more than once — about whether the law’s requirement that nearly everyone buy insurance by 2014 could be struck down while the rest of the law is upheld. The questions suggested at a minimum that the judges were thinking hard about declaring the mandate unconstitutional.

“I can’t find any case like this,” said Chief Judge Joel Dubina of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. “If we uphold this, are there any limits” on the power of the federal government?

Judge Stanley Marcus appeared to agree. “I can’t find any case” in the past in which the courts upheld “telling a private person they are compelled to purchase a product in the open market. … Is there anything that suggests Congress can do this?”

That question is at the heart of the constitutional challenge to the health care law, an argument that initially was waved aside by many legal commentators, but which has now sharply divided the federal courts. So far, three federal district judges have upheld the law and two have ruled it unconstitutional. Three cases now have reached appeals courts, with a fourth appellate panel scheduled to hold a hearing in September.

For the rest of the article, read Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

A report by McKinsey & Co. has found that 30% of employers are likely to stop offering workers health insurance after the bulk of the Obama administration’s health overhaul takes effect in 2014.

The findings come as a growing number of employers are seeking waivers from an early provision in the overhaul that requires them to enrich their benefits this year. At the end of April, the administration had granted 1,372 employers, unions and insurance companies one-year exemptions from the law’s requirement that they not cap annual benefit payouts below $750,000 per person a year.

But the law doesn’t allow for such waivers starting in 2014, leaving all those entities—and other employers whose plans don’t meet a slate of new requirements—to change their offerings or drop coverage.

Previous research has suggested the number of employers who opt to drop coverage altogether in 2014 would be minimal.

Read more at, The Wall Street Journal

In the world of health care, hospitals and doctors routinely battle with insurers. But with Highmark Inc. entertaining a takeover of the struggling West Penn Allegheny Health System, the Pittsburgh insurer could become a provider — or at least might become heavily invested in one — altering the regional health care landscape.

While such a move is unusual these days, it was more common following the HMO Act of 1973. That law provided funding for the creation and expansion of health maintenance organizations. And it had the corollary effect of allowing insurers to build their own provider organizations and “prepaid group practices,” getting physicians to join HMOs, or even acquiring entire hospitals.

“That’s when you saw a lot of these carriers buying these hospitals and networks, thinking that would be the most effective way to deliver care,” said Tom Tomczyk, principal and health expert with Buck Consultants’ local office.

But “if you go across the country, those are far and few between” now, he said.

The best-known example nationally might be Kaiser Permanente, the multi-state hospital system and health plan based in California. And, of course, Highmark’s top rival, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, operates a nonprofit hospital system and a for-profit insurance plan.

Another insurer-provider partnership is in our backyard: Geisinger Health System and Health Plan, the mostly rural, mid-state hospital system and insurance plan headquartered in Danville, Montour County.

Geisinger’s health plan has been in place since 1985, with a parent board overseeing both the health system and its health plan. Today it has 250,000 members in 42 Pennsylvania counties, coming as far west as Somerset, Cambria, Clearfield and Jefferson counties.

Geisinger has been nationally recognized for successfully building a vertically integrated, multi-speciality system.

“We believe that to make care more efficient, have better clinical outcomes and contain the growth of costs, there needs to be integration of insurers and providers,” said Frank Trembulak, executive vice president and chief operations officer for the Geisinger Health System.

Theoretically, an integrated provider-insurer makes sense — when the hospital and the insurer are under the same umbrella, there’s no haggling over prices, cost limits are easier to achieve, and quality control and preventive care goals can be more broadly aligned.

For the rest of the story, read Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“A second federal judge ruled on Monday that it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact a health care law that required Americans to obtain commercial insurance, evening the score at 2 to 2 in the lower courts as conflicting opinions begin their path to the Supreme Court.

But unlike a Virginia judge in December, Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., concluded that the insurance requirement was so “inextricably bound” to other provisions of the Affordable Care Act that its unconstitutionality required the invalidation of the entire law.

“The act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker,” Judge Vinson wrote.”

Read more from The New York Times