Obamacare seizes control of health care and centralizes control over benefits and prices into an unaccountable centralized bureaucracy. That turns health care into a source of special interest larding, that will become important to buying the loyalty of the Democratic Party’s many and varied benefit goody-grasping constituency groups.
We have already seen the pattern before the law goes fully into effect. Bureaucrats, following an advisory group’s recommendations, have now imposed free birth control, breast feeding services, domestic violence screening (not health care!) and other “reproductive health” benefits onto every health insurance policy in the country. From the story:
The Obama administration says health insurance plans must cover birth control for women with no copays. The requirement, affecting most insurance plans, is part of a broad expansion of women’s preventive coverage. Breast pumps for nursing mothers, an annual “well woman” physical, counseling on how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and other services will also be covered at no cost to the patient. The new benefits won’t take effect for at least another year, Jan. 1, 2013, in most cases. Insurers are expected to pass the cost on to their customers through slightly higher premiums.
And when they do, they will be denounced as greed heads. Nor will they likely be allowed sufficiently increased premiums to cover the eventual expense. Count on it.
And it won’t end there. The pattern is set. Special interest constituencies will continually demand ever more; e.g. coverage for illegal aliens, coverage for abortion, coverage for IVF, etc. etc. etc. At the same time, powerless people will be offered ever less, e.g., imposition of futile care theory and health care rationing against the morbidly elderly, the dying, and people with severe disabilities. See, these groups have no powerful political constituency groups grabbing pieces of the pie for them. They will matter little in the emerging corrupt system of exchanging health care benefit spoils in return for political support, which is the essence of Obamacare.
But all the political machinations don’t change economic rocks and hard places. Because it is not really market based, stifles innovation, and aspires to create equality of results, Obamacare is not financially viable or economically sustainable. It will eventually crash and burn–and take what’s left of the country’s economy with it.
Post Script: For you liberals who like the idea of forcing private insurance to cover a crescendoing array of benefits, remember the sword will cut both ways. If the government can force private insurance to cover all “reproductive health” (vast term inflation in this regulation), by the same means, a conservative government could forbid any health insurance policy from covering abortion.
August 1st, 2011 | 12:33 pm
Wesley,
It is precisely because I largely agree with your opposition to imposing these mandates on private insurance companies, in particular because they come from the federal and not the state level, that I feel a need to point out how your way of presenting your particular argument here will backfire. You have indulged your taste for hyperbole in a way that could undermine the core validity of your concerns and arguments.
First, you come across as a purist, fulminating free marketeer. But, as you know, insurance in general, and health insurance in particular, has long been regulated, primarily at the state level. Both the cost of and the coverage provided by health insurance policies are not purely market driven, but are constrained by legal requirements. Insurance is one of a number of industries, others include utilities and residential rentals, for which governments do not generally permit an absolute right to contract. You need to at least somehow acknowledge that broader context.
You should instead maintain your focus on the way these benefits have been mandated through an unaccountable, and at least partially politically motivated, bureaucratic fiat. They are imposed in a way that gives all parties (not just political parties) cover behind supposedly objective “research based” criteria.
In the case of the particular benefits for women under discussion here, you could also talk about the ways that such services are already or could be provided to low-income women without imposing such a mandate. Many of them can, or should be, means tested in order to focus any resources on low-ncome women. In response to the anticipated “Viagra” argument, I, for one, would be in favor of removing “erectile disfunction” from the list of benefits covered by Medicare as a kind of quid pro quo. Also, at least some types of birth control are morally objectionable to many people because of the possibility that they take effect post-fertilization but pre-implantation into the uterine wall. So the arguments against mandating that benefit are not just economic.
Also, while you are right to object to the increasingly broad and fuzzy use of the term “health care” to cover any number of problems that are not strictly medical, it is not enough to say that screening for domestic abuse is “not health care”. A number of states already require health care workers to ask women about domestic abuse and to offer assistance or referrals, and there is a valid basis for such requirements. Health care workers are in a good position to catch signs of abuse and ask questions, in private. In the case of the federal mandate on private insurance companies though, my questions would concern what types of services beyond the actual screening, basically asking some questions, would the insurance have to pay for and under what definition of “health care” and “domestic abuse”.
Your concerns about how such mandates could harm health care services in general and in particular shift resources away from critical and palliative care and services for the severely disabled are quite valid. But that argument is already a difficult one to make in the current climate, and you don’t help your cause when you indulge in hyperbole.
Another way you engage in hyperbole is when you later conflate political pressure with actual results. Of the three potential mandates you hypothesize in your next to last paragraph, only IVF stands a reasonable chance of gaining the necessary political support. Just because benefits are imposed by a bureaucracy does not mean that agency gets to operate in a political vacuum.
On a more personal note, I am ticked off by your inclusion of a hypothetical mandate for benefits for illegal aliens in that list. The only “powerful” ally they may have in that particular debate might be hospitals. But, politically, there is no way any such mandate would ever be imposed on private health insurance companies, let alone any expansion of federally funded benefits for any non-citizens, legal or “illegal”. Throwing “illegal aliens” into that list is a rhetorical cheap shot and just adds to the piling on of everybody’s favorite scapegoat. You can do better than that.
Sincerely,
your long-winded, but loyal, opposition
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 1st, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Famous last words…
August 1st, 2011 | 2:20 pm
So, you are saying the “party of no” will no longer be able to say “no”.
If recent history is any guide…
Obamacare is wise and sustainable.
Here is an example of why:
Presently, if an uninsured patient is hospitalized for a week by an emergency appendectomy followed by infection, etc, etc, the cost will run up to $30K.
Will that person ever pay back the money? No. He or she will set up an account and pay back the hospital at $25/month. So, that person needs to stay alive for 100 years to pay back the hospital – at cost. I’m not even taking into account the interest or inflation (of course the US is really at risk of deflation, but anyways).
So, the US just forks out more and more to medicare and takes in less and less.
Obamacare eliminates much of this.
We’ve seen the tea party congress in action, is this really what we want to continue?
Rebecca Taylor Reply:
August 1st, 2011 at 10:35 pm
@David, Since Obamacare my healthy family’s insurance premiums have doubled and now are more every month than our mortgage. And we don’t even have a great plan. This is the reality of Obamacare. It doesn’t make insurance (or healthcare) more affordable it just makes hard working families like mine who can already barely afford healthcare pay for everyone else’s goodies.
SVT Reply:
August 2nd, 2011 at 11:04 am
@David, Lies.
August 1st, 2011 | 2:25 pm
“If the government can force private insurance to cover all “reproductive health” (vast term inflation in this regulation), by the same means, a conservative government could forbid any health insurance policy from covering abortion.”
Well, we’re trembling with fright. Isn’t that what YOU guys have been trying to do all along?
HW
August 1st, 2011 | 6:22 pm
Birth control and breast pumps are not “health care”.
Domestic violence screening is not “health care”.
Free health care is only justified on the premise that a civilized society does not let its own citizens die of preventable causes. A humane society cannot do nothing.
This is only possible if we recognize that resources are finite. We have enough resources to provide medical coverage to those in genuine need – or we can take those resources and distribute goodies instead. There is no evidence to support the fantasy that we can have it all.
Those who vote for abandoning the truly sick so that they can have free goodies need to be called out, recognized for what they are, and shamed publicly. Stigma does in fact exist for a reason: we need to take the idea of stigma back from the quote-unquote “progressives” and start using it for its correct purpose: to protect society from parasites (rather than to enable parasitic behavior).
August 1st, 2011 | 6:45 pm
you missed the point about mandating payment of abortion pills aka morning after pill.
Won’t be long until we pay for the later abortion pill too.
August 1st, 2011 | 9:38 pm
That’s not going to be cheap unless they loosen restrictions on who can do preventative care, and encourage economies of scale. It wont be a “slightly higher” premiums if they have to do all of them through a M.D.
If they can manage to make these like how we handle flu shots-by letting pharmacies and other places handle them and reduce the costs, we might be able to do this. But I fear they just are adding things to please the base-why no free prostate cancer screenings for men? or just free checkups in general?
August 2nd, 2011 | 6:45 am
Peter S.
Even Canada`s health system does not cover any drugs, even birth control. It does not cover breast pumps and free `health`counselling unless that is part of the annual exam – which takes me 6 months to get in to see my doc.
Is this GE`s product line.
August 2nd, 2011 | 7:45 am
[...] finding the best doctor, Obamacare is reducing healthcare to who has the best lobbyist. And it won’t end there. The pattern is set. Special interest constituencies will continually [...]
August 2nd, 2011 | 4:53 pm
I am so deeply disgusted by Obama using (corrupt) Chicago-style giveaway as his primary re-election tactic. I woke up this morning thinking about this: given the young people we have today (and the not so young who have been sheltered from certain harsh realities, raised and fed on a steady diet of should-haves instead of what’s real), is there any way to even explain to them what is wrong with spending money we don’t have to bribe them with goodies in exchange for their votes?
Are they so alienated and cynical that they genuinely don’t care what happens, and unable to tune into anything except this moment’s “what’s in it for me?”
Horrible thought.
August 3rd, 2011 | 2:01 am
The march to the single-payer objective (the bottom line of Obamacare) continues.
The promise was that we could keep our current insurance if we wished. But by systematically driving our insurers out of the market, those policies will not be available. The Feds then will come to the rescue, rescuing us from the greedy capitalists who refuse to do business at a loss.
Single payer is the logical, necessary, and intended end game.
Obamacare must be annihilated, root, stem and branch.
August 3rd, 2011 | 2:04 pm
Morning after pills and sterilization implants are not “health care” either.
This is Malthusian social policy acting under the guise of a supposed “independent” board.
August 5th, 2011 | 1:06 pm
[...] I posted earlier about how the Obamacarians have now paid off political allies by forcing every pr…. This is how banks are broken and healthcare becomes unaffordable. And here’s the irony: The very Obamacarians who railed against “Cadillac” health insurance policies, are in the process of turning every policy into a Cadillac. I mean, why women who make $200,000 per year should be able to access all of these services for free is beyond me. [...]
August 23rd, 2011 | 10:42 am
[...] Obamacare used that very real problem as a front to place nearly the entire American healthcare system under the control of the federal bureaucracy–which in my view, will seriously damage the quality of US healthcare–as it eventually breaks the bank. Thus, as I have written, federal bureaucrats can now just give goodies to favored political constituencies and make the private companies pay for it–as in the ludicrous imposition by Obamacrats imposing upon private health insurance the requirement … [...]
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