Audits and investigations into the effects of ObamaCare from congressional committees, government auditors, advocacy groups, and others.
The Senate bill, which became the enacted version of Obamacare (in connection with the “reconciliation package”), was never intended to be final law — and it reads like it.
ObamaCare’s increased regulations, restrictions, and oversight would more adversely affect doctors than those working in any other profession, and they would further undermine the doctor-patient relationship.
In a 2008 speech in Great Britain, President Obama’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid under ObamaCare calls for health-care decisions to be made by politicians, not privately; praises the British system and criticizes the “American plan”; and says that a just health system “must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.”
Since 1997, 13 years before the passage of ObamaCare, it has been illegal for health insurers to drop someone because they are sick — and, even before then, the practice almost never happened.
Those concerned that ObamaCare would produce an American health-care system that’s all-too-similar to Britain’s National Health Service will find no solace in President Obama’s nomination of Donald Berwick, Harvard professor and staunch advocate of the NHS, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
ObamaCare is causing insurance companies to buy up medical clinics and doctors’ practices so that they can manage doctors more closely and thereby comply with ObamaCare’s myriad of mandates, restrictions, and requirements, while doctors are selling their practices to hospitals — all of which would mean longer lines, more impersonal treatment, and less patient choice.
The Massachusetts health-care experiment foreshadows the almost inevitable results under ObamaCare: rising health costs, insurers struggling to stay in business (with the government poised to take over), increased wait-times to see doctors, and a shrinking numbers of doctors willing to accept new patients — except that, under ObamaCare, relying on the federal bailout money that has kept the Massachusetts program afloat won’t be an option.
By nominating Dr. Donald Berwick to head Medicare and Medicaid under ObamaCare, President Obama telegraphs that — in Dr. Berwick’s words — he intends to lead us out of “the darkness of private enterprise” and into the ‘light’ of government control and third-world medicine.
As a doctor writes, government-run health care means less freedom for doctors and fewer procedures approved for patients — and it makes even insurance-based private care seem comparatively patient-centered, generous, and flexible.
ObamaCare’s huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will especially hurt rural hospitals. “Nestrick said President Obama’s health care plan likely will end up costing his business and others in rural areas more money because the plan focuses on sending more patients to larger, city-based clinics where they can receive cheaper medical services.” The new medical device tax will be passed on to patients, raising the costs of care and reducing innovation in the industry.