House GOP's ACA replacement plan shouldn't have come as a surprise, and other letters

Regarding the ongoing coverage of the Republicans' efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act ("24 million would lose coverage under GOP's Obamacare repeal plan," ModernHealthcare.com, March 13), a large portion of the healthcare industry—including not-for-profit hospitals, physicians, hospital corporations and pharmaceutical/medical supply companies—is very worried about the House replacement proposal, the American Health Care Act, introduced earlier this month.

I don't blame them. Since last year, I have been writing op-eds explaining how the Paul Ryan-Tom Price health reform proposals would be a disaster for America. The AHCA clearly is the latest incarnation of those ideas.

I have a lot of industry experience, having been a senior executive of several healthcare companies over several decades and director of health planning for the state of Georgia. But I do not consider myself to be uniquely qualified to examine healthcare reform issues. Others are well aware of the negatives of movement away from the ACA, as well as the downside of gutting traditional Medicaid and meddling with Medicare.

Where were the lobbying organizations for the above groups, out to lunch? Why did the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association and others decide to support the Price nomination for HHS secretary? Had they ever read his House bills, which parallel the AHCA?

The bottom line is that they were either completely naive or scared to death of President Donald Trump and frozen in place. My bet is the latter. I just hope that their lobbying is not coming too late.

Jack Bernard

Regarding the article “Will the cost of cancer drugs break the economy?” (ModernHealthcare.com, March 14), this is not a new question, since in the early 2000s the New England Journal of Medicine published an article showing the very minimal improvement in longevity vs. the excessive pricing of new cancer drugs.

Currently, patients and their insurance companies lose because there's no free market to check and balance pricing vs. value. It's all about “Big Pharma” pushing profiteering without boundaries. As well, to what extent are a select group of community oncologists oblivious to this point, given the higher profit they derive from the costlier drugs?

Given the cohort of aging baby boomers, watch how the excessive pricing of cancer drugs eventually leads to a form of single-payer, given how nobody will be able to afford their Medicare Part D and everybody demands the latest miracle drug without consciously thinking about the cost and its efficacy. Ironically, although Big Pharma's marketing prowess has encouraged such patient demands, it will eventually be pharma's downfall, as more patients won't be able to afford these drugs.

M.E. Singer