The past year was the year of Obamacare whoppers. But the nastiest truth about the health law is still to be exposed — the tightening hold the federal government will have over your doctor, even if you’re paying with private insurance. President Barack Obama said, “You’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision-making.” It was a lie from day one, just like the president’s other sales pitches.
Videos By Rare
Obama’s often-repeated claim that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” is the obvious whopper of 2013. Over six million people have had their plans canceled already.
Then, on Dec. 20, the president brushed aside reporters’ questions about the latest changes to Obamacare by brazenly claiming “the basic structure of the law is working.” That’s a lie, too.
Premiums for Obamacare plans are 41 percent higher, on average, than what consumers paid in the individual market last year, with deductibles as high as double, and for all that, you generally won’t be able to use academic hospitals, top-tier cancer hospitals and the doctors who practice at these institutions.
But the truth is still to come out about the biggest whopper. Section 1311(h)(1) (B) of the health law gives the secretary of health and human services — a presidential appointee — blanket authority to dictate how doctors treat patients, and not just patients in government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, but also patients with private plans they pay for themselves.
On Dec. 2, 2013, in the Federal Register, it was disclosed that the rules are in the process of being written. Starting in 2015, insurance companies will be barred from doing business with doctors who fail to comply. Supposedly the rules are in the name of “quality,” but this could mean everything in medicine.
“The powers given to the secretary are so broad he or she could literally dictate how all physicians nationwide practice medicine,” warns Rep. Phil Gingrey, R – Ga., who is himself a physician. Gingrey is sponsoring a bill to repeal Section 1311(h)(1) (B). He explains that otherwise, the HHS secretary, a Washington bureaucrat with no medical training, could bar doctors from doing routine mammogram screenings until female patients turn 50, for example. The government will be calling the shots on what care patients get.
The rules have not yet been announced, but the president’s key health adviser at the time the Affordable Care Act was written, Ezekiel Emanuel, who continues to speak on behalf of Obamacare, discussed early on what government intervention was needed. Emanuel said doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.” As long as doctors are in charge, cost control would not be possible. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.” Emanuel advocates for top-down federal rules to allocate resources based on what he calls “social justice.”
Donald Berwick, the Obama nominee to run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, also insists that the federal government must step in between doctors and their patients to curb and redistribute the use of medical resources. Berwick says resources should be allocated based on “important subgroups.” These groups, rather than the individual patient in the doctor’s office, should be the “unit of concern,” according to him. Obama’s advisers would have these considerations override your doctors focusing on your needs.
Right now, states license and discipline doctors. And this is plenty of oversight. In 2006, when the U.S. attorney general tried to interfere in how Oregon doctors used controlled substances to treat patients, the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Oregon struck down the federal intrusion. The justices warned it would amount to a “radical shift of authority from the states to the federal government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality.”
This is what Obamacare does. It puts the federal government between you and your doctor, with an eye toward limiting your care — just what the president promised would not happen.
© CREATORS.COM
Related articles
- Obamacare architect: If you like your doctor, you can pay more for it (rare.go-vip.net)
- LIMBAUGH: Don’t be fooled – Obamacare is not getting better; it’s not fixable (rare.go-vip.net)
- SOWELL: A new year and old problems (rare.go-vip.net)
- MCCAUGHEY: The ‘compassion without compulsion’ Obamacare fix (rare.go-vip.net)
- MCCAUGHEY: Obama the dictator (rare.go-vip.net)
- MCCAUGHEY: Lying to the sick (rare.go-vip.net)