No, These Aren’t Health Care Reform Fairy Tales
I listened carefully in my committee last month as the idea that U.S. Preventive Services Task Force decisions resulting in the rationing of health care was said to be a fairy tale.
And yet in the bill that had already passed the House, on page 1762, the same U.S. Preventive Services Task Force was given the authority to determine the “frequency,” “the population to be served,” and “the procedure or technology to be used” for breast cancer screenings covered under the Indian Health Service. Further, Section 303 of the legislation states: “The Commissioner shall specify the benefits to be made available under Exchange participating health plans.”
In plain English, those two sentences mean the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and the new “health choices commissioner” will determine what preventive services, including mammograms, are covered under the health insurance plan envisioned in the House health care reform bill.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is an outside, independent council of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They are not supposed to make federal policy or determine what services should be covered by the bill, but the bill makes it plain that their recommendations are going to have the force of law.
I’m familiar with this particular issue from personal, family experience. I have an aunt who passed away in her early 50s as a consequence of breast cancer, and a sister who was diagnosed with breast cancer in her 30s. She’s had proper treatment — a mastectomy — and so far, in the last 10 years, is cancer-free. I have a wife under the age of 50 and she has annual mammograms. And I have a good friend who was just diagnosed with breast cancer who is in her mid-40s. Again, she’s undergoing treatment and hopefully she’s going to have a good outcome.
It is wrong, in my opinion, to have an unelected task force make the recommendations that have already been made, and it is wrong to have in the House health reform bill the authority that’s given to unelected bureaucrats to make health care decisions, including coverage frequency for mammograms.
The situation is much worse than Texas Congressman Joe Barton thinks. It really does not make, in the long run, any real difference if politicians in Washington pass “bills increasing and supporting research, prevention, and the early detection of breast cancer.” Government run healthcare will inevitably result in huge cost overruns. The financial pressures will simply force bureaucrats to cut services. In one way or another, women—and men will be far less able to obtain medical procedures to detect the early detection of cancer. The system will be hard pressed to pay for far more mundane things like broken arms and emergency heart attacks.
The biggest argument that Joe Barton could make against Obamacare is this one: If it’s so good—why will there be entirely different programs available for Obama and the other elites? Why doesn’t the president want his own family to take advantage of these presumably fantastic medical services? Barton is a great guy and he is on our side. Nonetheless, he is weakening his argument by refusing to violate the tacit agreement made between Republican and Democrat office holders. They are not supposed to strongly emphasize the reality that not every American will participate in Obamacare. Even Obama will not be a participant! I am utterly convinced that most Americans supporting Obama’s healthcare plans are unaware of this fact. They most assuredly and foolishly believe that it is truly a program for all the citizenry. Does anybody doubt what I say? If that’s the case, the very next time you talk to a government health care supporter ask them, “Do you know that none of the politicians—or bureaucrats in Washington will be signing up for Obamacare?” The odds are that their jaw will drop to the ground in total disbelief. They have no idea.
From Congressman Barton’s article:
These statements are unexceptionable. I agree with them completely. Nor would I expect any conservative or libertarian to disagree. Yet unelected bureaucrats and regulators do ration, de facto, other commodities that we nominally get through the marketplace.
Probably the best known case is the web of agencies and regulations that bind American agriculture. There are regulations that determine how much of crop X a farmer with acreage Y may produce, and to whom he’s allowed to sell it, and at what prices. In some cases, the limitations are explicit; in others, they result from the application of subsidies, fees, penalties, and “marketing orders” applied during the New Deal years, which have never been lifted nor modified.
So: If it’s wrong to ration medical goods and services by federal ukase, what makes it acceptable for federal regulators to ration any other product or service?
Just askin’.
mmm mmm mmm
Look north, Canada, if you want some answers, we’ve been through this whole process years ago. Bureaucrat verses insurance company? Take the insurance company, once government, unions and the bureaucrats get their hands on it you have no one to turn too. Input from anyone else is rejected, you’re up against a brick wall of the government’s always right, you’re wrong, and cover your ass job protection by the unions.
The Obammunists are not only clueless, they are incompetent. Elections have consequences. The MSM failed the People and the People failed themselves. The evidence was plain to see, and yet a majority of the People averted their eyes and saw nothing. Now we count the days to January 20, 2012.
Whoops – that should be January 20, 2013.
….death panels.
what did you expect ?
Health care should be between the doctor and the patient and no government. I can understand Bartons concern about health care, but where are the concerns over laws being made by the EPA and other non-elected entities.As I recall all laws are made in the legislative branch. If the politicians did their jobs and not let other entities do it for them, they wouldn’t have all this time be corrupted.
there has always been a struggle between the good of the collective and and the good of the individual. If it is your mom or wife, you want the good of the individual to be paramount. If you are a mindless bureaucrat with the power to dole out dollars, then the good of the collective empowers you.
As a practicing physician myself, I can assure you that the mindless bureaucrat has had his paws in this for years. The only saving grace we have is that there are private payers and insurance plans that will pay for additional studies and treatments.
One problem I see is that the American people are not engaged and don’t have a personal stake in controlling costs. There are a lot of folks who have RV payments that would never consider buying health insurance or just paying the Doc for the visit out of pocket. I have personally seen retirees drive 20 miles to get free tylenol from their military health facility. Until we have a paradigm shift in this thinking, the bureaucrat will gain more control.
I obviously am not an expert in health economics, but I support some simple measures.
1. Health savings account. Have high deductible private insurance, say 10,000. Supply another 10,000 dollars to meet the deductible and all qualified medical expenses. What you don’t spend at the end of the year, you place in your qualified retirement plan. Surely, you could afford a mammogram with this and go to Walmart and pay for your medicine.
2. Open competition by allowing marketing of health insurance across state lines to buy these large deductible catastrophic policies. Whether the government supplies this freely or requires purchase is another argument, but either way, it is better than universal cradle to grave coverage that is being proposed.
3. “Loser pays tort reform” and limits on class action law suits. Why should I have to pay lawyers tens of thousands in fees if I am found innocent? Why should Lawyers fish for the Lotto with class actions when the individual plaintiff gets a pittance?
4. A common single national license to practice. Why should there be 50 different bureaucracies to feed in order to practice in a different state?
Until there is a consumer incentive to control cost, we will forever be enslaved to this beast.
The first fairy tale is “deficit neutral government program.” Then we may digress into more fairy tales, that while at first seem humorous are actually quite harmful. Let us try ‘medicine by political consensus’. ‘Elective surgery’ is also hysterical if we vote on which cosmetic issue to endorse. Your issue, mammograms, could be voted on by a select committee of top partisan experts and lawyers to begin at either 20 or 60 years of age, depending on the polls. Why bother with years of medical training when congress can decide the best prescriptions and procedures? If this mindset wins, then voter popularity will overcome objective reasoning and we can all be rock stars. Blue patients and red patients can go to blue and red doctors.
Not only is rationing a preordained event under the language of the bill, there is another problem that defies logic or rational thought inherent in the legislation.
The bill from the Senate mandates coverage and fines offenders via IRS enforcement. However, the fines are relatively small when compared to the cost of insurance. That logically means that many, especially the young will fail to acquire mandated coverage and pay the fine if caught. The system will be bankrupt from the start as financilly it is built upon millions more insured paying premiums to the insurers. Denying this inevitable outcome makes no logical, rational or intellectual sense, yet the two bills fail completely to deal with this reality. When benefits begin to flow there will be an immediate fiscal crisis, the likes of which has never been seen in this republic before.
When this occcurs the Liberal Marxists who schemed this up will blame insurers. Those insurers currently make a profit of 3% before this disaster of legislation is imposed upon us.
The entire debate regarding this subject is so out of touch with reality that it is hard to comprehend. When Americans start paying more in taxes, thats when they will get the message. Meanwhile, the legacy media continues to utterly fail to analyze of report on the details of this mess, the worst piece of legislation in the history of the United States.
I’m still looking for the section in the Constitution that gives the federal government authority to run a health insurance business on the backs of the Taxpayers. No luck so far.
In all the years I’ve been pointing out a few simple facts, nothing I’ve heard or read changes the reality…
As long as the relationship between provider and consumer is corrupted by bureaucratic intermediaries, we will see failure in health care, which we have been watching for decades. Health care – and lately, health care insurance – costs have skyrocketed in direct proportion to the amount that government and comprehensive group health insurance companies interpose themselves between the health care provider and consumer. We need to get government OUT of the business of regulating and/or insuring against health care costs, where it has no Constitutional authority to operate and stop subsidizing comprehensive, group health care insurance policies which ultimately force costs to increase overall.
The fact that anyone is even discussing the merits or myths of the current socialized medicine bill – especially given the fact that NO ONE has a comprehensive understanding of what’s in it – is indicative of how completely our Republic has been degraded by decades of morally adolescent thinking.
While I am against this health care bill for various reasons, this:
“We don’t ever want rationing of health care in America and we don’t ever want task forces and commissioners to intervene between doctors and patients,…”
is just dishonest, since many insurance companies right now have no problem getting between doctors and their patients as well as rationing health care.
#13 Robert V: the difference between insurance companies getting between doctors and patients and the government getting between them is that the patients are voluntarily choosing to put the insurance company into the picture. If the insurance company screws up the role the patient (or the employer on behalf of the patient) has chosen it for, the patient can disintermediate the insurance company. I, on the other hand, can have no say in whether, for example, Sen. Harry Reid gets re-elected to stand between me and my doctor, because I don’t live in Nevada. Even less can I stop some bureaucrat from standing between me and my doctor, because the people I don’t elect hire the bureaucrats who hire the bureaucrats who hire the bureaucrats who, under this health care bill, would stand between me and my doctor.
If you see no difference between an insurance company that is chosen by an HR guy who answers my emails because my husband works for his company, and a government insulated from my choice by layer upon layer of bureaucratic incompetence and office politics, then there truly is no hope for you.
@13. Robert V: – …this … is just dishonest, since many insurance companies right now have no problem getting between doctors and their patients as well as rationing health care.
On the surface you have a point, Robert.
But here’s the difference: when insurance companies deny a claim (i.e., effectively ‘rationing’ health care – at least in terms of their willingness to PAY for it – you’re not prevented from paying for it directly), you can always move to another insurance company and try to get a better deal. This is not the case with socialized medicine, where you’re forced (at the point of a gun) to take whatever the government dictates and suck wind if you don’t like it.
Now, having said that, comprehensive group health insurance does NOT solve this problem since, as you infer, they make their profits specifically from “getting between doctors (providers) and their patients (consumers)”.
That’s why – rather than hand the broken system over to a broken government – we need to FIX the system and get back to a free, functional health care market by eliminating comprehensive group insurance subsidies and using every other means available to make comprehensive group insurance as unattractive as possible. Outside of government meddling, that is the one thing that’s driving health care costs up.
Of Sausages and Obama the Octo-liar
Otto von Bismarck:”Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
Sometimes we forget.
Sometimes we have to connect those underwear dots that went unconnected on Christmas Day. Sometimes we need a wake-up call, a kick in the pants to remind us to make those connections.
I have to confess something. In 1976, I was no big fan of Gerald Ford but I voted for him rather than the peanut farmer from Plains who, if nothing else, seemed fairly bright and ultra-sincere and honest; he did have the temerity to admit in that Playboy article that he “lusted” in his heart.
So, after Carter beat Ford I said, Okay, change can be good and this guy deserved a chance.
I was soon disabused of the notion that Jimmah was as competent and as innocuous as he seemed.
With Barack Hussein Obama, I needed no such disabusing,
Mid-2008, I said to myself, Self, there’s no way on Allah’s green, polluted Earth that a plurality of the electorate could possibly fall for this charlatan. I forgot to factor in the 98% of Blacks who would vote for him, the huge number of self-hating Whites suffering from terminal cases of White Guilt, and ACORN.
I had no naive hopes for Obama that I had for the now-senile Carter but I did actually buy into his pledges and the promises of the Democrat Party as a whole that the 2008 election would bring a new age to American politics even if I felt that change would be repugnant.
One of the principal ”changes we can believe in” would be the oft-heard buzz term, “transparency in government . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1409)
16. Berlet98:
great post
I know a lot of otherwise insightful people who insisted that Obama – after being elected and getting a more complete and view of the issues at hand – would actually apply his intellect and energy in a more or less objective manner to do what is best for all of us. Oops.
What we have instead is blind allegiance to sophomoric leftist notions that “the man” is always exploiting the disadvantaged among us and this needs to be changed. It is a bit like the disgruntled employee who thinks he is being screwed and knows better how to run the company and who all of a sudden finds himself in charge. There is a business to run, products to design and build, customers to serve, finances to manage, etc. – but he concentrates instead on increasing worker wages and benefits, adding hundreds of new HR managers, mandatory employee empowerment training programs and new pool tables in all of the break rooms. This is all he knows or cares about. Meanwhile the business crumbles, key contributors leave to work elsewhere and the business fails. Oops again. His business doesn’t have customers – just obedient tax payers and the ability to print money.
The scare-mongers have always been with us….
“It is socialism. It moves the country in a direction which is not good for anyone, whether they be young or old. It charts a course from which there will be no turning back.”
—Senator Carl Curtis (R-NE), in 1965, opposing Medicare
“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”
—Ronald Reagan, in 1961, arguing against the creation of Medicare
I appreciate what you have to say here, Rep. Barton, and you’re one of the good guys, but I will take you to task along with your Congressional colleagues. You folks on Capitol Hill write some of the most God-awful law known to man. It’s convoluted and complicated and obtuse and when we accuse you of not even knowing what you’re voting for, you shrug and say “oh, you can’t possibly expect us to read this stuff or even know what’s in it.” You leave it to bureaucrats and regulators and commissioners to make the actual law and you don’t pay any attention to what they’re doing (I remember a time SCOTUS had to chastise you for allowing bureaucrats to take your law places it was never intended to go). You abdicate your responsibilities to us by shuffling us off on and subjecting us to the tender mercies of people who seemingly take great delight in having things done their way and who are not in any way accountable to us.
If this health care legislation passes, it will be the absolute worst example ever of the above as it leaves so much to the discretion of HHS bureaucrats and newly formed commissions, boards and task forces, NONE of whom will be accountable to the citizens and voters. People who have their lives and livelihoods taken over by nameless, faceless bureaucrats against whom they have no recourse can not be said to live in a state of liberty.
I hope your caucus will start to take this kind of thing seriously, because I assure you, we are taking it quite seriously and we have no intention of succombing.
The USPSTF did its job well and was thrown under the bus. Shame!
See http://bit.ly/8R0wAx