Chiropractic Breakthrough

It’s become a symbol of sorts for the federal government’s budget dysfunction: Unless Congress acts before Jan. 1, doctors will again face steep Medicare cuts that threaten to undermine health care for millions of seniors and disabled people. This time it’s a 27.4% cut.

A report published today shows that the United States spent about $7,960 per person on health care in 2009 – about 2.5 times the average of the countries studied. It also found that health spending in the U.S. has increased faster than in all other high-income countries since 1970, even accounting for population growth.

The failure of the congressional super committee could mean automatic budget cuts totaling billions of dollars for everything from Medicare to biomedical research, starting in 2013.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: A dispute has erupted between President Obama and Democrats in Congress over a proposal to broaden the exemption from new rules that require health insurance plans to cover contraceptives for women free of charge. The White House is considering a change that would grant a broad exemption to health plans sponsored by employers who object to such coverage for moral and religious reasons.

Despite serving as the “foundational element” of the U.S. healthcare system, the nation’s primary-care network is experiencing “diminishing economic margins, and increasing workforce attrition compounded by diminishing recruitment of new physicians, nurses and physician assistants into primary care,” according to the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

A state-by-state analysis finds that from 2003 to 2010, premiums for family coverage increased an average of 50%. At that rate, the average family premium would balloon to nearly $24,000 by 2020, according to the study, which was conducted by The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health policy foundation.

More and more employers are demanding that workers who smoke, are overweight or have high cholesterol shoulder a greater share of their health care costs, a shift toward penalizing employees with unhealthy lifestyles rather than rewarding good habits. Policies that impose financial penalties on employees have doubled in the last two years to 19% of 248 major American employers recently surveyed.

With the high court’s announcement Monday that it would decide on the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, we are assured of a decision coming smack dab in the middle of the 2012 general election campaign.

At 10 a.m. today, the Supreme Court issued its orders for the upcoming 2012 term, which includes the details of how the oral arguments related to the health law will shape up.

This week conservative legal activists renewed their calls for Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to abstain from cases involving President Obama’s healthcare law. Conservatives say Kagan should recuse herself from suits over the law’s individual mandate because the administration began planning its defense while she was solicitor general.