Health Care Reality In Obama’s Hype Hope And Change Era

“Yes we can!  Yes we can!” Well, unless you mean we can keep seeing our doctor, as Obama repeatedly promised.  Then it’s, “No, you can’t!  No, you can’t!”

Doctor’s Office Closes Up Shop Without Warning
By AMANDA RAUS
Updated 12:15 AM EDT, Sat, Jun 19, 2010

Laura Wojcik‘s little girl, Elizabeth, is due Saturday. So imagine her surprise when she learned she’d have to find another doctor for the delivery and find one in just one day.

“I was pretty upset because I love going here and everything. They’re good doctors, and then I had to change,” said Wojcik.

A doctor from the Norwich OB-GYN Group will be on call this weekend, but inside the office, the waiting room is empty, and there are no doctors in the exam rooms. The office stopped taking patients Thursday when it decided it could no longer meet the financial demands of running the practice.

“We’ve had a reduction in reimbursement from the state-funded insurances, because the budget situation, things had slowed down, so April, May were very slow, and June continued to be slow,” said Bernadette Grecki, the practice administrator.

Add to that the payments from the largest state-funded insurance provider wouldn’t be arriving till July, and the office says it had no choice but to close.

“It was too much for the doctor. He realized he couldn’t keep funding the practice,” said Grecki.

The group says it is working with other OB-GYN’s in the area to accommodate patients, and the files of pregnant patients who are at 32 weeks or more have already been transferred to Backus Hospital, so doctors will be prepared when the women go into labor.

“We’ll be able to provide them the care that they need, being able to take a look at their medical history, assess any special needs they may have,” said Keith Fontaine, Chief Communications Officer at Backus Hospital.

Even though the office isn’t seeing patients, it will be open for the next three months with staff available to answer any patient questions, give referrals and to make sure patients have access to their records.

I saw the words, “because the budget situation,” and I couldn’t help but think of this:

The 1974 Budget and Impoundment Act requires Congress to pass a budget resolution by May 15 of each year. Congress hasn’t done so yet in 2010. But that isn’t so unusual. Delays are common.

They are usually the result of interparty or intercameral disputes. But this year is different. Congressional Democrats aren’t simply delaying, they’re deliberately refusing to offer a budget until after the November elections. They’re simply choosing to ignore the law.

“Budget situation”?  WHAT BUDGET?!?!?!?

Democrats are running around Congress like the bandits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre saying, “Budget?  We don’t need no stinking budget!” And of course, like bandits, not needing a budget just allows them to steal more and more of the taxpayers’ money from generations yet uncollected.

In the age of Obama, in the age of pseudo “hope and change,” budgets are irrelevant.  They are practical realities in an era in which neither “practical” nor “reality” have anything to do with anything.

We could talk about where the rubber meets the road.  Only there’s no rubber, and there’s no road.  Just a bunch of meaningless rhetoric and empty demagoguery.

It’s all pretty much just about “Just words” now.  And how dare anyone think that the facts should get in the way of all of Obama’s oratorical gibberish.

Laura Wojick’s situation of suddenly realizing she doesn’t have a doctor just when she needs one most is not a random coincidence.  It is part of a very real pattern of ObamaCare:

You’re losing your plan
ObamaCare’s true face emerges
By SCOTT GOTTLIEB
Posted: June 14, 2010

Late last week saw the first leaks of the administration’s draft regulations for implementing the ObamaCare law — and everything is playing out just as the critics warned.

The 3,000-odd pages of legislation left most of the really important (and controversial) policy decisions to the regulations that government agencies were told to issue once the bill passed. Now that those regs are starting to take shape, it’s clear that the Obama team is using its new power to exert tight control over the payment and delivery of all formerly “private” health insurance.

The ObamaCare law references the Secretary of Health and Human Services almost 2,200 times and uses the phrase “the secretary shall” more than 725. Each reference requires HHS to set new rules on medical care, giving control to an existing federal office or one of 160 new agencies that the bill created.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (who was once the Kansas state-insurance commissioner) has taken to these tasks with zeal. In some circles, she’s now known as the nation’s “insurance regulator in chief.”

She’s starting off by applying new regs to health plans offered by large employers — even though these costly rules were supposedly only going to apply to plans sold in the state insurance “exchanges” that don’t get created until 2014. This twist is spelled out in an 83-page draft of a new regulation that leaked late last week.

Bottom line: Sebelius means to dictate what your insurance plan must look like almost from day one, no matter how you get your coverage.

Indeed, the draft regs envision more than half of all policies having to change within three years — an unmistakable break with President’s Obama’s oft-repeated promise, “If people like their insurance, they will be able to keep it.”

Yet that may be the least of the broken promises.

Ultimately, these rules force consumers to buy one of just four health policies — which vary mostly only by trading off higher co-payments for lower premiums, while offering essentially the same actual benefits. In arguing for passage of the law, ObamaCare’s defenders claimed the rules were aimed at health plans sold in the “exchanges.”  Oops: Now Sebelius is applying them to employer plans.  Eventually, this would force all but the very wealthiest Americans into a single government-designed insurance scheme.

This is far from the only area where Secretary Sebelius is exploiting the law’s fuzzy language to tighten her control over the private insurance market.  In recent weeks, she has said that the new law gives her authority to review and even set the rates on health policies sold in private markets, a role previously left to state insurance regulators.

The ObamaCare bills were written to paper over an intellectual divide between White House economists and HHS policy wonks. Some economists wanted genuine competition to take root in the new federally managed insurance “exchanges.” The HHS crew favored a one-sized government plan with tight federal regulation over benefits.

The law itself didn’t explicitly side with either school — but it did leave the writing of the implementing regs to those same HHS wonks. Unfortunately, those more moderate White House economists are now leaving the administration, including the rumored departure of widely admired businessman and health-care expert Robert Kocher.

Washington insiders refer to this HHS team as “true believers” — a group of earnest, left-leaning activists who’ve long favored a single nationalized health plan. They are massaging the law’s vagueness to give themselves the tight federal control over health care that will bring their vision into practice.

Critics warned that the Obama bill meant a federal takeover of health care, with Washington bureaucrats making core decisions about medical care. With ObamaCare taking shape, that’s exactly what consumers are getting.  Saying “we told you so” is no consolation to those who took the president at his word.

Scott Gottlieb, a physician and American Enterprise Institute fellow, was a senior official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is partner in a firm that invests in health-care companies.

What else can I say but, “I told you so”???  Nobody would believe that the effect of the bill was inherently socialist; nobody would believe that the bill would be filled with death panels (160 death panels, in point of fact).

And that article above dovetails with another bit of info from Investor’s Business Daily:

Administration: 51% Of Companies’ Health Plans Won’t Pass Muster
By Sean Higgins and David Hogberg
Fri., June 11, 2010 5:05 PM ET

Internal White House documents reveal that 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage by 2013 due to ObamaCare. That numbers soars to 66% for small-business employers.

The documents — product of a joint project of the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department and the IRS — examine the effects new regulations would have on existing, or “grandfathered,” employer-based health care plans. […]

According to the report, by 2013 51% of all employers — 66% of small employers (3-99 employees) and 45% of large employers — would have to relinquish current coverage.  In a worst-case scenario, 69% of firms would lose their grandfathered status.

This could pose a serious threat to President Obama’s claim that if you like your coverage, you’d get to keep it.

Hint: if Obama’s lips are moving, he’s lying.  If the Obama administration says anything about anything, it’s lying.  The only time these people wouldn’t be lying is if they said, “We’re lying.”

You voted stupidly, Americans.  And now you’re going to increasingly start paying dearly for it.