“Fannie Med”

Health care reform isn’t ‘coming’, it’s already here. Snuck into that fat stimulus bill rushed through Congress was increased spending on the Medicaid welfare program, and the groundwork to create a government run health care system.

I interviewed Bob Moffitt on ‘America’s Lifeline’ a few days ago, the Heritage Foundation’s Director of Health Policy Studies, and longtime expert on the subject. Interesting….when he first arrived at Heritage in 1991, his first task was to study President Clinton’s plan to nationalize the US health care system. He isolated himself in a room with nothing but the 1,342 page proposal and a few yellow legal pads. After five days of reading and taking notes, Moffitt had drafted Heritage’s analysis of that mammoth plan. And he proposed a consumer-driven health care policy that would provide tax credits to help people buy the health insurance of their choice in a competing market.

So. Moffitt knows the field as well as anyone. He’s realistic, and he’s concerned. “A public, government-run health plan will end competition and unlevel the playing field and cause a massive erosion of private health insurance,” he said. President Obama campaigned on the promise that people who already have insurance could keep it and nothing would change, except it would become less expensive. And on the promise that those who don’t have health insurance will “be able to get the same kind of health insurance Member of Congress get for themselves” (October 2008 speech in Canton, Ohio). Moffitt says Obama will have to break his solemn promise that every American will be able to choose their own doctor without government intervention, because of the ‘reform’ already underway in the congressional budget process, the ‘stimulul plan’.

Something to watch and follow, says Moffitt: The ‘Federal Council for Comparative Effectiveness’ is the beginning of the end of choice in health care. “What will their regulatory authority be?” he asks, and that’s the critical question because the possibility looms of it morphing into something comparable to the British NICE system. Moffitt calls it “the Supreme Court of Health” and says it will be autonomous in power, even insulated from the scrutiny of Congress. Former HHS nominee Tom Daschle conceived of this omni-board, and it’s still likely to happen.

Daschle envisions a remote board of “experts,” perhaps modeled on the Federal Reserve Board. This board, he says, would be “insulated from politics. Congress and the White House would relinquish some of their health-policy decisions to it.” Shielded from public opinion and from representative government, it would have “teeth,” says Daschle, potentially deciding such things as premiums and appropriate services, and “all federal programs would have to abide by [its recommendations].” He also imagines that the board would “link the tax exclusion for health insurance to insurance that complies with the Board’s recommendations.”

Tom Daschle’s Federal Health Board would have enormous power over medical decisions affecting every American. This is unacceptable…

But still a very real threat, because though Daschle is not the HHS Secretary, he was the architect of the Obama administration’s plans.

And now, a patients’ rights grassroots movement has just launched a public awareness campaign to give people information and motivation to be pro-active in forming whatever health care reforms Americans want and need. Because the government’s plan, in the early going, is getting out of control.

Set against the backdrop of the $787 billion stimulus bill and deficit spending that dwarfs the federal outlays of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s “Great Society,” the idea of spending hundreds of billions – or even trillions of tax dollars – to buy universal health care coverage for all Americans isn’t much of a stretch anymore…

The problem is that “universal health care” and “patients’ rights,” while sounding harmonious, are in direct conflict.  The path to effective health care reform must be approached from the perspective of individual patients and their relationship with their doctors, and not from a top-down, big government perspective.  Anything that interferes with an individual’s freedom to consult their doctor of choice to make health care decisions defeats the purpose of meaningful health care reform.

A government board that controls health care decisions will do that, and much worse. Think ‘utilitarian medicine’ and ‘health care rationing’. Especially once doctors and nurses lose their conscience protections, and start to leave health care.

Sound Orwellian? Yes. Seem possible? Now more than ever.

0 Comment

  • From the blog post — “Moffitt says Obama will have to break his solemn promise that every American will be able to choose their own doctor without government intervention, because of the ‘reform’ already underway in the congressional budget process, the ’stimulul plan’.”

    The only Americans who currently have complete choice in healthcare providers are those who are either self-insured or who have an old-fashioned health insurance policy with no managed care elements to it or who have a health savings account with catastrophic coverage for major health events. This is a very small group of Americans. Most Americans who have insurance are enrolled in some sort of managed care plan — a PPO or an HMO — where their choice of provider is limited, and access to specialists is regulated by the plan and by a referral from a primary care doctor.

    The current American system of health coverage is a travesty. The patchwork of coverage, where federal and state governments finance over 50 percent of all health care in the country, with the rest provided by private health insurance, still leaves about 15 percent of the populace uninsured, a number that hasn’t budged much (except to go up slightly) in 20 years. The U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, and it still can’t provide coverage for 15 percent of its population, and U.S. health outcomes are nowhere near the top compared to the rest of the country.

    So, something has to change.

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