Weekend Update

The 113th Congress of the United States was sworn in last Thursday. The House is now in recess for a week and the Senate is in recess for two weeks according to the Hill's Floorwatch.  The Hill also reports that "House and Senate appropriators have been quietly working behind the scenes for months to craft 12 compromise annual spending bills to avoid a shutdown that is slated to occur when the current six-month stopgap spending bill expires [ on March 31]." Similarly, the Federal Times reports that "Two top lawmakers from opposing parties [Senator Tom Carper (D Del) who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and Rep. Darrell Issa (R. Calif.) who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee] this [past] week pledged cooperation to put the U.S. Postal Service back on its feet financially." That, of course, will require legislation.  By the way, Rep. Blake Farenthold (R - TX) will chair the House Oversight Committee's subcommittee with responsibility for the FEHBP.

The AMA News reports that although the Medicare doc fix is in place for another year, the 2% cut in Medicare pay to doctors created by the sequestration law remains looming. Congress punted the sequestrations down the road for two months to March 1, 2013. The doc fix stuck it to the hospitals while the sequestration sticks it to the doctors. It is conceivable that the sequestration may take effect.

The FEHBlog was startled yesterday by the Washington Post's below the fold headline that the breast pump industry is booming due to the ACA. This is front page news?? Did the Post reporter never see the movie Field of Dreams?  If you build it they will come. In the women's preventive health care rule that created the contraceptive mandate, the Obama Administration also mandated that health plans cover breast milk pump rentals with no cost sharing. That mandate became applicable to the FEHBP on January 1. A breast milk pump costs $30 on Amazon.com ($110 for an electric model.) Adding the complexity of insurance and removing any consumer incentive to engage in price comparison will drive the cost curve up.