Micro-Managed Obamacare

Do you like the ability and freedom to call your doctor for an appointment and to see recommended specialists when needed? Do you enjoy the freedom to choose what medical services you want and don’t want, or wish to have a second opinion when you want one? Obamacare would tell you TOO BAD!

Both the House and Senate versions of Obamacare create detailed new federal regulations that micromanage all health insurance decisions. Specifically, Section 2713 of the Senate Health Bill would give the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force the force of law by requiring all health insurance plans to provide coverage (with no patient co-pays) for “items or services that have in effect a rating of “A” or “B” [recommended] in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force.” 

Under Obamacare, last week’s Task Force decision to give annual mammograms a “C” rating (not recommended) will henceforth be viewed by insurers and employers as a justification for discontinuing coverage. This move to give the evidence-based medicine determinations of health experts the force of law is not incidental to Obamacare: this cost control rationing is the very heart of Obamacare’s promise to control health care costs.

Trying to convince wayward moderates that Obamacare would control health care costs, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag wrote in the Washington Post last Friday:

An independent Medicare commission … will ensure that reforming the health-care system is not a one-time event but an ongoing process that implements the most recent progress in medical science with the goal of improving care and lowering costs.

Obamacare supporter Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told ABC News that Republicans have “Politicized Breast Cancer.” However, the leftists have it exactly backward: it is Obamacare that is guaranteed to politicize every single medical decision between you and your doctor.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rushed to say don’t worry. The decision had “caused a great deal of confusion and worry among women,” she said, promising that no policies would change. New Jersey’s Frank Pallone vowed to hold hearings, and Senator Dick Durbin leveled the gravest charge Democrats can make: The task force was “appointed by President Bush.” We knew the “blame Bush” excuse wasn’t far behind.

In any event, the distinction between cost effectiveness and clinical effectiveness will be moot if ObamaCare passes. The House bill gives the HHS task force the mandate to review “the benefits, effectiveness, appropriateness, and costs of clinical preventive services” in making its de facto insurance coverage rulings.

What’s really going on here is that the left knows its designs will require political rationing of care, but it doesn’t want the public to figure this out until ObamaCare passes. Then it will begin the campaign to instruct the rest of us that we must follow the guidance of Princeton professors about what medical care we can receive. Americans will simply have to accept that the price of government-run health care in the name of redistributive justice is that patients and their doctors must bow to the superior wisdom of HHS task forces.

When the government becomes responsible for providing everyone’s health care, everyone’s health care becomes everyone else’s problem. Barack Hussein Obama once pitched his version of health care as “Everybody in. Nobody out.”

In reality, Obamacare will mean “Everybody in your health care business. Nobody out.” Indeed!