HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius claims ObamaCare is a partnership between the federal government and state governments, not a national take-over. Given the vast new powers claimed by Washington after ObamaCare, the pleas of cooperation ring hollow.
Indiana’s proven health reforms are about to be overturned by ObamaCare’s Washington-led directives. “A key part of American federalism is states’ ability to serve as laboratories where the consequences of various programs can be explored without committing the entire nation to what may turn out to be expensive blunders. For instance, Wisconsin successfully took the lead on welfare reform in the early 1990s, setting the template for national bipartisan legislation in 1996 that lifted millions of women and children out of poverty. But in health-care reform, President Obama and congressional Democrats didn’t wait for state experiments to run their course. State reform efforts—on the left and right—were still in their earliest stages in March 2010, when Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, committing the nation to trillions of dollars of new health-care spending. The consequences of this rush to national reform could be dire.”
“One of the more illuminating remarks during the health-care debate in Congress came when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told an audience that Democrats would ‘pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it, away from the fog of controversy.’ That remark captured the truth that, while many Americans have a vague sense that something bad is happening to their health care, few if any understand exactly what the law does. To fill this vacuum, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top House Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, asked his staff to prepare a study of the law, including a flow chart that illustrates how the major provisions will work… It’s a terrifying road map that shows Democrats have launched America on the most reckless policy experiment in its history, the economic equivalent of the Bay of Pigs invasion.”
ObamaCare creates a nightmare of new bureaucracies. There are so many new boards, commissions and agencies created that a new Congressional Research Service report said an accurate count is literally “unknowable” because the law is so vaguely drafted. This creates huge opportunities for bureaucratic malfeasance.
“What would you think if bureaucrats confiscated your iPhone because they decided it didn’t provide enough value? State regulators may help the federal government do just that to the health-care benefits of millions of Americans. The most important element in implementing ObamaCare will be the requirement for health insurers to meet what is called a medical loss ratio.”
Gail Wilensky, former head of the Health Care Financing Administration, believes that government agencies will be overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of pages of new regulations ObamaCare instructs them to develop. “The national health reform law includes the phrase “the secretary shall” more than 1,000 times, each of which refers to a new task for the Health and Human Services secretary.”
Despite successfully passing a law beginning a government take-over of the health care sector, the Left won’t stop until they get their “public option” and then a full-blown single-payer system. “The new national health care law may represent the largest expansion in the role of government since the Great Society, but for liberal activists, it was just the appetizer. Here at the annual Netroots Nation conference for self-described progressives, organizers discussed their strategy for pushing toward their ultimate goal of a fully government-run, or single-payer, health care system.”
ObamaCare’s new preventive services guidelines creates huge incentives for medical lobbyists to get their prefered treatments designated as preventive care. “When government agencies are making non-scientific value judgments–e.g., are these studies reliable enough to merit an A or B recommendation? what should be the thresholds for an A or B recommendation? will the benefits of mandating this coverage outweigh the costs?–politics does even better. Witness Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md) overruling a USPSTF recommendation when she ‘inserted an amendment in the [new] health-care law to explicitly cover regular mammograms for women between 40 and 50.'”
ObamaCare lets the government define what is or isn’t “preventive care” and thus provided cost-free by insurers. While rulings were previously merely advisory, their increased role will subject them to substantial lobbying pressures, which could lead to politicized decision-making. “Under the new health care overhaul law, insurers will be required to pay fully for services that get an ‘A’ or ‘B’ recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a volunteer group made up of primary care and public health experts. [I]t puts the group in the crosshairs of lobbyists and disease advocates eager to see their top priorities – including routine screening for Alzheimer’s disease, domestic violence, diabetes or HIV – become covered services. ‘It’s a wide-open door for lobbying,’ says Robert Laszewski, a health insurance industry consultant.”
“Unfortunately, Dr. Berwick’s prescription for reform – a bolder, more determined bureaucracy – is the wrong strategy for an industry that has labored under increasing government control for the past 50 years. Instead, health care is in desperate need of more consumer-driven innovations like the iPhone that have the potential to change the way we think about health and health care.”