The Road To Health Care Rationing

Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and senior policy adviser to the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, has a very illuminating column in today's Wall Street Journal. The column sheds new light on Obama's contraception mandate and argues that ObamaCare will lead to higher health care costs, rationing and premature deaths.

In their wisdom, the liberal Democrats who wrote the ObamaCare legislation dramatically expanded the authority of United States Preventive Services Task Force. That might sound like some shadowy outfit from a B movie, but the members of this task force might be better known as ObamaCare's mandate makers.

Dr. Gottlieb writes that it is the job of this task force to "evaluate preventive health services and decide which will be covered by health-insurance plans." The committee will mandate some medical tests and treatments while refusing to cover others.

If the government tells insurers, "You MUST provide services A, B, and C, and, by the way, your profits are now capped," -- and that is exactly what ObamaCare does -- then they will have to cut back on other services. As Dr. Gottlieb explains:
"Health plans will inevitably choose to drop coverage for many services that don't get a passing grade from the task force and therefore aren't mandated. Insurance companies will need to conserve their premium money, which the government regulates, in order to spend it subsidizing those services that the task force requires them to cover in full."
Prior to ObamaCare, your insurance company determined the cost of your premiums based on your health factors and the level of service you wanted. If your rates went up, you had the freedom to find another company. But now, thanks to ObamaCare, your premiums will be decided by Big Government, which is adding more and more mandates, and there will be very little competition in the price as a result of all the mandates that every insurer will be required to cover.

By the way, the task force is not subject to any of the other rules and procedures that govern similar federal agencies. There are no requirements for it to hold public meetings or to consider public comments, there is no process to appeal its decisions and it cannot be sued. How's that for big government?
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Gary Bauer is is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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