“When government controls so much of health spending, it can quash investments in innovation and interfere with the natural processes of scientific investigation by denying payment and therefore blocking access to its huge markets. Many investigations are better than one centralized government body in determining whether a product is efficacious. Governments too often make decisions in silos. Integrated private plans are more likely to see the overall benefit of paying for a costly drug to avert an even more expensive hospitalization.”
“It’s not hard to connect the dots. The Obama administration is using waivers to reward friends. On the flip side, business executives will be discouraged from contributing to the president’s opponents or from taking any other steps that might upset the White House or its political appointees at HHS. This is not what people had in mind when candidate Obama promised in his acceptance speech in August 2008 to undo ‘the cynicism we all have about government.'”
“There are a great many things wrong with Obamacare, but the biggest is perhaps one that neither party is paying any attention to: It is one huge entrapment scheme that will turn patients and providers into criminals. The most blatant example of this is in the ‘doc fix’ that Congress passed with major bipartisan support earlier this month, saving doctors from a nearly 23 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement that they would have otherwise faced this year. Congress has been passing this fix every year since 1997, but this time, in an effort to offset its $20 billion price tag, it has included a little twist to squeeze working families called ‘exchange recapture subsidy.’ Under this provision, the government will go after low-wage families to return any excess subsidies they get under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
“The regulatory state isn’t anything new, but the Obama administration is broadening and deepening it as a matter of philosophy and exigency. The administration has progressivism’s taste for rule by self-appointed experts, and now it has little choice but to work around a Republican-held House of Representatives to pursue its goals.”
“In fact—if we may use that term without PolitiFact’s seal of approval—at the heart of ObamaCare is a vast expansion of federal control over how U.S. health care is financed, and thus delivered. The regulations that PolitiFact waves off are designed to convert insurers into government contractors in the business of fulfilling political demands, with enormous implications for the future of U.S. medicine. All citizens will be required to pay into this system, regardless of their individual needs or preferences. Sounds like a government takeover to us.”
“Calling ObamaCare a government takeover of health care is the ‘lie of the year,’ according to the self-proclaimed oracle of all things true and untrue in the political debate. That outrageous proclamation from PolitiFact shows that its editors need a Truth-O-Meter of their own. Obamacare is a uniquely American government takeover of health care. Its 2,801 pages of legislation and insidious regulatory structure give the Secretary of Health and Human Services almost unlimited authority to rule over every corner of our health sector.”
“Under the 136-page rule, the federal government will now decide what counts as an ‘unreasonable’ rate increase, and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote to Governors yesterday urging them ‘to prevent unjustified and excessive health insurance premium growth.’ Apparently, ‘unreasonable’ means rate increases that exceed 10% next year, except when it doesn’t. If an insurer crosses this arbitrary threshold, ‘The review process would then determine if the increase is, in fact, unreasonable.’ So that’s cleared up.”
“Thin-skinned, vain, prone to seeing conspiracies — Barack Obama now broadens his Richard Nixon impersonation with the imposition of price controls. Obamacare is the gift that keeps on giving — giving us higher real taxes, a bigger deficit, a bloated federal state, and now, if past is prologue, significantly lower quality and less innovation in the field of health care. As some of the smarter critics predicted, Obamacare, butt-ugly as it was in legislative form, is turning into a real beast in the hands of the executive-branch geniuses charged with implementing it and dreaming up the new regulations to make that possible.”
“And yet the future of our health care system need not depend at all, as the future of our legal system unfortunately does to a considerable degree, on the whims of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Obamacare is a disaster for a host of reasons of which the individual mandate is only one. The 112th Congress need not wait for the courts to decide the fate of the mandate. For reasons constitutional, economic, and moral, Congress can repeal Obamacare and replace it with real health care reform.”
“The federal government claims that forcing people to purchase health insurance regulates economic activity because everyone eventually uses health care in some form. But as Judge Hudson points out, ‘the same reasoning could apply to transportation, housing, or nutritional decisions. This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation.’ The same reasoning would give Congress the power to force everyone to purchase a car because everyone eventually uses some form of ‘transportation.'”