To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (12 page)

And what will all these new federal agencies and programs do? They will regulate, they will issue rules, they will dictate. They will empower bureaucrats to decide what care you can receive, who can give it to you, and when you can get it.

Just look at the “essential health benefits” mandated by the law (Section 1302), which contains federal requirements for every private insurance policy sold in the United States to meet a certain minimum set of benefits or coverage. Individuals and businesses usually make these decisions, but under this bill, the federal government will decide. For example, if you are a single male with no children, the legislation still requires you to have maternity benefits and well-baby and well-child care coverage. You don’t want or don’t need that coverage? Sorry, you have to pay for it anyway.

The legislation signed by the president contains this and countless other expansions of government control. For example, the president pushed for, and Harry Reid included, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a new bureaucratic body of government appointees explicitly charged with reducing healthcare spending not just in Medicare, but in
the private market
as well.

The larger question is this: does anyone believe federal bureaucrats can effectively manage the largest, most complex sector of our economy? Let’s face it, the federal government could not get “Cash for Clunkers” right, and that formula was simple: 1) buy a car, 2) file paperwork, 3) dealer gets paid.

Despite limitless examples of government failure, the Left expect tens of thousands of new bureaucrats to run healthcare efficiently. And the argument that this bureaucratic system won’t reduce the range of your private healthcare choices is so preposterous that it’s hard to believe many Democrats actually believe it.

Instead of the miraculous cost savings the president claimed for his reform plan, healthcare rationing will be a much more likely outcome. Take comparative effectiveness research as an example. The new health reform law creates a new office of comparative effectiveness research that will study the value of one treatment or therapy to another to determine which is more effective. To be sure, this process can generate important knowledge that saves lives—we want to know which treatments are most effective, which medicines are more efficacious, and which approaches are best practices.

Secular socialism, however, has put comparative effectiveness research in the United States on the same path as in Britain: toward becoming a bureaucratic cost-control measure. The United Kingdom, which has a nationalized, single-payer health system, explicitly uses comparative effectiveness to ration medical care. Government uses this research to decide, sometimes with devastating consequences, which treatments its citizens can get.

Let’s say a government uses comparative effectiveness to determine the efficacy of new drug treatments. The research reveals drug A works 70 percent of the time and drug B works 50 percent of the
time. The government would then decide to cover drug A. But what if, as often happens in medicine, 30 percent of the people who did not respond to drug A did respond to drug B? Or what about the even smaller groups that may have responded best to drug X, Y, or Z? Not wanting to cover less effective drugs, the government may simply decree those people are out of luck. These are the problems patients face when the government is empowered to decide what medicine they can have.

Consider this: what happens when one drug is more effective than another but costs three times as much? Do you want government to decide that relieving your pain and suffering isn’t worth the cost? That’s what happens in Britain. Government approves and government decides—not patients and doctors. Here is what Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) tells its citizens:

During the healthcare debate, House and Senate Republicans offered amendments to prohibit the federal government from using comparative effectiveness research to deny or ration care. Democrats rejected them all and moved full steam ahead. But because of the citizen backlash against the federal government using comparative effectiveness research to ration care, the bill that the president
signed deceptively renames the new federal body the “Patient Centered Outcomes Research Initiative.”

All this was unsurprising: in healthcare, the goal of the secular-socialist machine is to use the power of government to control Americans’ health decisions. This goal is both an ideological imperative that places the power of government over the rights of citizens and a raw power grab. It is a symptom of secular socialism’s creeping totalitarianism—a mindset completely opposed to historic American values.

Economics 101 states that when government levies a tax on business, it is not the business that will ultimately pay it—consumers will. And the Left’s health reform has plenty of new taxes. The $28 billion tax on drug makers won’t dent the companies’ revenue; the firms will just raise the price of your medications. And health insurers will recoup the new $70 billion tax on them by raising your premiums—so said Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Douglas Elmendorf when discussing the original proposed fee on insurers: “Our judgment is that that piece of the legislation would raise insurance premiums by roughly the amount of the money collected.”

Look at what the Left will do to medical technology companies. There are more than 80,000 medical devices in the United States, everything from artificial heart valves, pacemakers, and NICU incubators to thermometers and toothbrushes. The new law will impose a 2.9 percent tax on the sale of medical devices. That will raise prices for thousands of medical products because these costs will be passed on to consumers through higher prices, higher insurance premiums, or through lost wages when an employer has to pay. Thomas Barthold, chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, commented, “We have analyzed this as largely falling on the consumer.”

And the law has even more tax increases, over half a trillion dollars in higher Medicare payroll taxes; new taxes on investment income; taxes on random services like indoor tanning facilities; and fees on all insurance policies to fund federal comparative effectiveness research.

All these taxes will drive up costs. Yet, while campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised that his plan “will save a typical American family up to $2,500 every year on medical expenditures.”

With all the new taxes passed on to consumers, and with all the new federal programs, departments, offices, and subsidies, could he truly believe that costs will go down? Why should the American people believe that
spending
trillions of tax dollars will somehow
reduce
healthcare costs? As CBO chief Elmendorf noted in summer 2009, “In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for healthcare costs.” Sadly, little changed in the final product that was signed into law.

Despite all this, the president boldly declared to Congress, “I will not sign [a healthcare reform bill] if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.” That promise was absurd, and the American people knew it. My friend, the pollster Frank Luntz, reported that by a 61 to 14 percent margin, more people believed scientists will discover life in outer space than believed the Democrats’ healthcare plan wouldn’t increase the deficit.

Throughout the healthcare debate, most Americans asked a question to which they never got an honest answer: “How will reform impact me?” For seniors, it was easy to answer: you’re in trouble.

To put seniors and Medicare in context, remember that the nonpartisan Medicare Trustees projects Medicare will be broke in six years—two years earlier than previously estimated. That is just the beginning of the problems. Medicare is already burdened with an unfunded liability of up to $85 trillion in benefits that have been promised future generations with nothing saved to cover them.

Democrats did nothing to fix the structural problems behind this shortfall. Instead, the law simply guts the program for today’s seniors to create a new healthcare entitlement. The cuts to Medicare will pay for the other aspects of the reform plan, like government subsidies and Medicaid expansion. They simply rob Peter to pay Paul while failing to fix Medicare’s fundamental problems.

The chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers both programs, estimated that the law would cut Medicare by $494 billion. This breathtaking figure is the amount of money that would have gone to doctors, nurses, and other providers who deliver care and coverage to seniors. According to CMS, the new law cuts deep and wide, including home health ($39 billion); hospitals ($131 billion); skilled nursing facilities ($22 billion); and Medicare Advantage benefits ($101 billion).

Clearly, you cannot cut Medicare by more than a half a trillion dollars and not jeopardize seniors’ access to care. Medicare access is already declining. The Mayo Clinic announced that on January 1, 2010, its Arizona facilities would stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries because the federal government does not pay the clinic enough to even cover its costs. According to Lynn Closway, spokeswoman for Mayo, the clinic lost $840 million in 2008 treating Medicare patients. And that’s before the Democrats’ half a trillion in cuts.

Jeff Korsmo, executive director of the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center, said with these kinds of cuts, “We will have to violate our values in order to stay in business and reduce our access to government patients.”

Just days before the president signed the legislation into law, Walgreens, the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chain, announced it would no longer accept the new Medicaid patients in Washington state. Why? Because the government pays the store so little to fill prescriptions for Medicaid beneficiaries that it loses money. Government often tries to control costs by cutting Medicaid reimbursements to providers, cuts which Walgreens described as “extreme.” With 20 million Americans being pushed into Medicaid by the new law, this is an ominous sign of things to come.

On the day that President Obama was sworn into office, the White House launched a new website that included this pledge: “President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history.”

As the debate over health reform heated up that summer, the president made another pledge:

Did the health reform debate live up to the president’s standard? Hardly. The American people were promised a fair, bipartisan, transparent process, but instead the Democrats wrote trillion-dollar, 2,000-plus page bills in secret with no Republican input and no public oversight. Republicans repeatedly offered constructive ideas,
only to be shut out and denounced as obstructionists. The one time the president actively sought out Republican ideas—the televised “Blair House summit” in February 2010—was a cynical public relations ploy to appear bipartisan at a time when Democrats had already pushed radical bills through the House and Senate on party-line votes, despite the president’s campaign promises not to do so.

Already opposed to the socialist bent of the reform bills, Americans were further disgusted by the ugly machine politics the Left used to ram the bills through Congress.

We already discussed President Obama’s disregard for his repeated promises to broadcast reform negotiations on C-SPAN. But there’s more. The administration and its congressional allies set artificial deadlines, not for any legitimate reason, but simply to rush the bills through at maximum speed. The president long demanded the House and Senate pass their respective bills by the August 2009 recess. When that deadline was missed, new ones were set in September . . . then October . . . then Thanksgiving . . . then Christmas . . . and then Easter recess. These self-imposed, politically-driven deadlines left little time for sound policymaking, public input, or even time for members to the read the ever-changing proposals.

Even if the process had been transparent and had a reasonable timeline, many lawmakers still probably wouldn’t have understood the bills’ mind-numbing complexity. “I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life,” said Delaware Democratic senator Tom Carper. Michigan Democratic congressman John Conyers put it even more bluntly: “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”
And he’s chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over matters like the federal courts and constitutional interpretation.

Such outrageous statements led to petition drives and grassroots protests demanding that lawmakers “Read the Bill!” There was even a high-profile website,
www.readthebill.org
, demanding that representatives actually know what they were voting on. Ignoring these appeals, Washington Democrats tried to recreate the panicked sense of crisis they had exploited to stampede Congress into approving the stimulus.