Some people take longer than others to see the light. For Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren it took much longer than most. But, as the saying goes, “better late than never.”

It took 13 years, but Senator Warren is at long last acknowledging that ObamaCare has increased healthcare prices and industry consolidation. Who would have believed it? Government price controls and profit caps have resulted in unintended consequences.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board says, “The Massachusetts Senator and Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana this week wrote a letter to the Health and Human Services Department inspector general complaining that the nation’s largest health insurers are dodging ObamaCare’s medical loss ratio (MLR). The result, they say, is higher costs for patients.”

The MLR is a de facto cap on profits. It requires that insurers spend at least 80% or 85% of premium dollars on medical claims. Democrats claimed the rule would make health spending more transparent and reduce insurer spending on overhead. “Consumers will receive more value for their premium dollar,” the Obama HHS said.

WSJ says, “Instead, as we’ve been pointing out for years, the rule has spurred insurers to merge with or acquire pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), retail and specialty pharmacies, and healthcare providers. This has made healthcare spending less transparent since insurers can shift profits to their affiliates by increasing reimbursements.”

The Senators cite a Journal news story in September that found insurers were paying affiliated specialty pharmacies more than 20 times for generic drugs what manufacturers charged. Patients can get slammed by hefty out-of-pocket cost for these drugs if they have high deductibles or co-insurance requirements.

“Even worse,” the Senators write, “insurers can use their PBMs to steer patients to their own pharmacies, while disadvantaging competing pharmacies with lower reimbursements and predatory fees.” In a 2017 editorial, WSJhighlighted complaints that CVS’s PBM was paying independent pharmacies less than the wholesale drug cost while billing Medicaid for significantly more. The Senators complain that insurers have evaded the MLR by vertically integrating with other companies in the healthcare supply chain. “

They correctly point out that an insurance conglomerate can inflate medical payments to affiliates to comply with the MLR “while keeping more money for itself.” Market competition would normally act as a check on premiums and profits. However, by driving industry consolidation, ObamaCare has reduced healthcare competition and increased costs.

Hospitals have acquired independent physician practices to gain more leverage with vertically integrated insurers, allowing them to bill more for services. Today, over 70% of doctors are employed by hospital systems, according to some surveys. Independent pharmacies have closed or been sold to the giants. It’s no surprise, then, that health premiums have risen on average about 20% faster since 2011 when the MLR took effect than in the five preceding years.

It’s encouraging to see that a liberal Senator like Warren is finally seeing the truth about ObamaCare. It has failed to deliver on its promises of providing high quality universal healthcare at lower prices. But it has delivered on the promises it made to its original biggest supporters – hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, and those who believe in government-controlled healthcare.

Truth is not relative; it does not depend upon the “context”, and it is not possessive. This would seem to be unnecessary to explain to a university whose iconic motto is Veritas – Latin for “Truth.”

Harvard University was founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts colonial legislature, “dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches,” to provide a proper Christian education for ministers. Although never formally affiliated with any denomination, it was primarily training Congregational clergy in its early years. Alas, the founders of this prestigious university are probably rolling over in their graves in anguish at how far their institution has fallen since those heady early days.

If you’ve been traveling lately, or just awakened from a coma, you might not be aware of what has happened lately concerning some of our most hallowed grounds of higher education. Last week three presidents from three of our most prestigious universities appeared before Congress to answer questions concerning antisemitism on their campuses following the October 7^th massacre of Jews in Israel by Hamas.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board put it this way: “The great benefit of last week’s performance by three elite-school presidents before Congress is that it tore the mask off the intellectual and political corruption of much of the American academy. The world was appalled by the equivocation of the academic leaders when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated their codes of conduct. But the episode merely revealed the value system that has become endemic at too many prestigious schools. 

The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania hid behind concerns about free speech. But as everyone paying attention knows, these schools don’t protect speech they disagree with. They punish it.”

Penn President Elizabeth Magill resigned in the wake of her testimony, as did board of trustees’ chairman Scott Bok, as pressure mounted from angry donors. But Harvard President Claudine Gay remains in office as her board of trustees supported her despite morally bankrupt statements, not to mention allegations of plagiarism in her academic work. It seems Harvard is more interested in maintaining their identity politics rather than protecting their Jewish students.

Gerard Baker of The Wall Street Journal was particularly incensed in his column. He said, “In Ms. Gay’s case, the attempts to mitigate the fallout from her response were so awful she should be fired for them alone, let alone what she actually said at the congressional hearing last week.”

He explains: “First she issued a statement that made a straightforward mockery—untruth might be a better word—of what she had said a day before at the hearing. Anyone threatening Jewish students would be “held to account” it said—suggesting that the “commitment to free speech” she touted in Congress was no longer operative now that her job was on the line. Clearly the damage-limitation squad didn’t think even this volte-face went far enough, and so a little later she gave an interview to the student newspaper, the Crimson. It’s worth reading the whole thing for a valuable insight into the mind of the person who holds the most prestigious job in higher education.

First of all: “I am sorry,” she said. “Words matter. “Anyone thinking of attending Harvard might like to note that it took the head of that institution more than 48 hours to appreciate that “words matter”—and this after a quarter-century in academia.”

But the worst was yet to come. Ms. Gay tried to explain her unconscionable remarks in the hearing by explaining what went wrong. “I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures. Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.” (emphasis mine)

I have never described truth with a personal pronoun. Truth is not possessive; it does not belong to one or another. There is only one truth and it does not claim ownership. Truth is absolute – whether you recognize it or not. How could she describe it as “my truth?”

Baker explains: “Few phrases are as reliable as “my truth” for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk. Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun. If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths. “My truth” is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the “truth” for a narrow ideological cause. And this is what we saw last week at that hearing—the narrow, exclusive intolerance of the ideology that has our universities in its grip.”

Sadly, our universities seem to be more interested in protecting their ideology and signaling their compliance with the new liberalism that doesn’t protect free speech – it punishes that speech it disagrees with.

Baker says classical liberalism might be described as the Voltaire principle: I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. The new liberalism seems to follow Lenin’s principle: I disagree with what you say, and I will do all I can to prevent you from saying it.

It’s time to reconsider where to go to get the best education in America.

Even in these times of divided government, you would think we’d all agree that finding a cure for disease is a good thing. You would be wrong.

Progressives, like President Biden, have been trying to implement socialized medicine in this country since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. They’ve never achieved this dream of full government control of your healthcare, but they’ve made significant strides in the last two Democratic presidencies; Obama and Biden.

The passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, better known as ObamaCare, was a major step forward to achieving their dreams, but they couldn’t call it socialized medicine because that was political suicide. Therefore, they have looked for ways to implement socialized medicine practices in more subtle ways.

The latest example of this is highlighted in a Wall Street Journal editorial. The editors say, “The Food and Drug Administration may soon approve two gene therapies with the potential to cure more than 100,000 Americans with debilitating sickle-cell disease. Now the bad news: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) may soon limit access to such breakthrough treatments.”

Gene therapies fix missing or defective genes. The one-time treatments have the potential to cure inherited disorders with early death sentences. The FDA has approved nine gene therapies for such diseases as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, spinal muscular atrophy and retinal dystrophy.  Next up are two gene therapies for sickle-cell disease, which is caused by a genetic mutation that disfigures red blood cells. Patients require repeat blood infusions and can suffer strokes and organ damage. One of the treatments would be the first ever for any disease using the gene-editing tool CRISPR.

FDA chief of biologics Peter Marks has pressed the agency to expedite gene-therapy approvals since the earlier children receive treatment, the better their prognosis. Gene therapies would reduce healthcare spending over time, the way hepatitis C treatments did when they came to market a decade ago. Children cured of sickle-cell disease won’t need blood transfusions or organ transplants.

Yet state Medicaid officials have been slow to cover the treatments because of their high upfront costs—some upward of $1 million. Hence, CMS is seeking to bludgeon gene-therapy developers into accepting lower prices that don’t take into account their lasting therapeutic value and would limit access to treatments.

In other words, the Biden administration doesn’t want to spend the money to cure sickle-cell disease. It would be racist to assume this might be because sickle-cell disease predominately occurs in black Americans; or that a majority of the patients needing this treatment might be on Medicaid. But these are incontrovertible facts.

A proposed rule would require manufacturers with the highest drug Medicaid spending per claim to turn over confidential information justifying their prices. CMS would post the information online, seek public comment, and compel manufacturers to “address” their pricing in a public forum. The goal is to browbeat companies to reduce prices.

As the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine noted in a comment on the rule, “the improper disclosure of confidential, proprietary and competitively sensitive information can pose significant risks to a company’s commercial viability.” CMS would let manufacturers avoid the public show trial and disclosures by paying state Medicaid programs “supplemental rebates,” on top of the program’s mandatory statutory 23.1% discount. Such payments in Medicaid are supposed to be prohibited.

The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine rightly notes that CMS is trying “to administer de facto price controls on behalf of state Medicaid programs.” But manufacturers may decide it’s not worth selling drugs to Medicaid because the prices are too low. About a quarter of gene and cell therapies approved in Europe have been withdrawn from that market because they weren’t commercially viable at the prices that government payers demanded. That could happen with Medicaid if CMS finalizes its rule as it is expected to do. The victims in the case of sickle cell will mostly be minority children.

The business model of every socialized medicine system in the world is to limit access to care, by increasing waiting times, and withholding treatment for diseases and conditions that are too expensive. That way they save money – at the expense of lives. The Biden administration is just following that template for our healthcare system – without calling it socialized medicine.