You’ve smelled this particular emanation of bovine feces before; remember when Obama and all the Democrats were assuring us that ObamaCare would bring down the cost of health care???
And now we’re learning – you know, after Nancy Pelosi said we have to pass ObamaCare “so you can find out what is in it” – that ObamaCare will actually TRIPLE the damn cost of health care.
So now the left and the Democrats and Obama and the mainstream media are assuring us that trampling on the First Amendment, on religious freedom, on personal conscience and on the rights of people NOT to have Antichrist governing every aspect of our increasingly miserable lives will give us a cost savings. They’re telling us that health insurance companies will save all kinds of money if Obama forces the Catholic Church to violate its theology that Catholics had held for one thousand-five hundred years and provide birth control, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization. And that they will then pass all that savings on to you.
Well, that sounds good, but it’s a lie just like pretty much every other thing that the left says.
Here’s the FACTS:
Obama: Mandate Saves Money; Mandate Authors: HHS Forbid Determining If It Saves Money
By Terence P. Jeffrey
February 16, 2012CNSNews.com) – There would be no consideration of cost effectiveness.
That was the explicit condition that the Department of Health and Human Services imposed on the panel of health-care experts it commissioned to develop the “preventive services” mandate that will require virtually all health-insurance plans in the United States to cover sterilizations and contraceptives—including those that cause abortions.
The fact that HHS prohibited the panel from considering the cost effectiveness of the mandate it developed sharply contrasts with President Obama’s declaration at the White House last Friday that his administration had adopted the panel’s recommendations precisely because they will “make the overall cost of health care lower.”One economist who served on the panel, meanwhile, suggested in a dissenting opinion that the panel’s recommendations in fact might not be cost effective and that the panel’s process for arriving at its recommendations “tended to result in a mix of objective and subjective determinations filtered through a lens of advocacy.”
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) that Obama signed in 2010 included a provision that all new health care plans would be required to cover “preventive services” without charging any fees or co-pay to the insured. The law allowed the secretary of health and human services to determine which “preventive services” would be mandated for women.
HHS commissioned and funded a committee of scientists, operating under the auspices of the Institute of Medicine (a part of the National Academies of Sciences), to recommend which “preventive services” for women should be included, cost free, in all insurance plans.
The panel—The Committee on Preventive Services for Women–had only 6 months to do its work and met only 5 times. On July 19, 2011, it issued a report with its recommendations. These included the following: “The committee recommends for consideration as a preventive service for women: the full range of Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for women with reproductive capacity.”
Less than two weeks later, on Aug. 1 of last year, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued the panel’s contraception-sterilization recommendation as a new federal regulation—set to take effect on Aug. 1 of this year.
In its report, the committee had noted the short time in which it had to work and repeatedly reiterated HHS’s order that it could not consider cost effectiveness in determining its recommendations.
“The committee met five times within six months,” the report said.
“The cost-effectiveness of screening or services could not be a factor for the committee to consider in its analysis leading to its recommendations,” the report said.
“However, it should be noted that the committee did not have adequate time or resources to conduct its own meta-analyses or comprehensive systematic review of each preventive service,” the committee warned.
“Finally,” the committee said, “cost-effectiveness was explicitly excluded as a factor that the committee could use in developing recommendations, and so the committee process could not evaluate preventive services on that basis.”
“Furthermore,” the committee said, “for consistency in approach with the other three guidelines used by the ACA and given the time limitations for this study, the committee was restricted from considering cost-effectiveness in its process for identifying gaps in current recommendations.”
One of the 16 members of the panel—Prof. Anthony Lo Sasso an economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health–issued a dissenting report. He criticized the panel’s process for lack a rigorous analytical method and for filtering things “through a lens of advocacy.” He also suggested there was good reason to believe the panel’s recommendations might not be cost effective.
“Readers of the Report should be clear on the facts that the recommendations were made without high quality, systematic evidence of the preventive nature of the services considered,” Lo Sasso wrote. “Put differently, evidence that use of the services in question leads to lower rates of disability or disease and increased rates of well-being is generally absent.
“The view of this dissent,” wrote Lo Sasso, “is that the committee process for evaluation of the evidence lacked transparency and was largely subject to the preferences of the committee’s composition. Troublingly, the process tended to result in a mix of objective and subjective determinations filtered through the lends of advocacy. An abiding principle in the evaluation of the evidence and the recommendations put forth as a consequence should be transparency and strict objectivity, but the committee failed to demonstrate these principles in the Report.”
Lo Sasso also raised a question about the potential cost effectiveness of offering some preventive services for free because it would create a “benign moral hazard”—leading more people to utilize the free service.
“Whether coverage of preventive service leads to a reduction in healthcare expenditure depends on the fraction of enrollees using the service before the service becomes covered and the magnitude of the response among enrollees who experience the reduction in out-of-pocket price,” wrote Lo Sasso. “Knowing how elastic patient demand is to preventive services is a critical element to a coverage decision even if one already has good estimates of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. This is self-evidently a useful parameter to know for any preventive service because it highlights the impact that first-dollar coverage of the service will have, perhaps in relation to other forms of outreach.”
Because the committee was not given the time to do a serious analysis of the real impact of the recommended “preventive services,” Lo Sasso recommended that Secretary Sebelius not mandate the services “until such time as the evidence can be objectively and systematically evaluated.”
Despite the fact that this scientifically panel charged with coming up with the recommended preventive services had been expressly forbidden from looking at their cost effectiveness, President Obama declared that his administration had moved forward with the recommendations precisely because of their cost effectiveness.
“As part of the health care reform law that I signed last year, all insurance plans are required to cover preventive care at no cost,” Obama said last Friday at the White House. “That means free check-ups, free mammograms, immunizations and other basic services. We fought for this because it saves lives and it saves money–for families, for businesses, for government, for everybody. That’s because it’s a lot cheaper to prevent an illness than to treat one.“We also accepted a recommendation from the experts at the Institute of Medicine that when it comes to women, preventive care should include coverage of contraceptive services such as birth control,” said Obama. “In addition to family planning, doctors often prescribe contraception as a way to reduce the risks of ovarian and other cancers, and treat a variety of different ailments. And we know that the overall cost of health care is lower when women have access to contraceptive services.”
So we have a tyrant who states something as a FACT that he EXPLICITLY demanded not be tested to see if it was true. Which ought to tell you that his “fact” is in fact probably false.
We have become a nation of despicable people who believe lies. That’s the bottom line. People who believe lies and reject the truth are little better than the people who tell the lies in the first place.
We’re seeing “the big lie” over and over and over again from this administration. And what is most frightening is how Obama lies “in the name of science.”
On the economic front, Obama is telling one lie after another – and using a methane-foggy haze of cooked “statistics” to sell them to an amoral people.
A little after 1 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “Fox Fund” whose mission would be to attack the Fox News Channel.
“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”
“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”
What Frisch proceeded to suggest, however, went well beyond what legitimate presidential campaigns attempt. “We should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff,” he wrote.
After that, Frisch argued, should come the legal assault: “We should look into contracting with a major law firm to study any available legal actions that can be taken against Fox News, from a class action law suit to defamation claims for those wronged by the network. I imagine this would be difficult but the right law firm is bound to find some legal ground for us to take action against the network.”
Frisch went on to call for “an elaborate shareholder campaign” against News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News: “This can take many forms, from a front group of shareholders, to passing resolutions at shareholder meetings or massive demonstrations are [sic] shareholder meetings.”
We also find that this taxpayer-funded leftwing hit organization met routinely to coordinate with top-level White House officials such as Valerie Jarrett. And that their propaganda was routinely picked up by major media sources such as MSNBC, the Washington Post, etc. And if that isn’t enough, Obama has developed his own Ministry of Propaganda euphemistically called the “Truth Team” to do Obama’s billion-dollar-funded campaign bidding.
Obama is playing the most naked brand of divisive politics to pit – in purely socialist terms – one group against another while he has continually made false promises to poor people who frankly ought to know better by now. He is promising people whatever it will take to ensure his re-election.
Obama demonically pitted women against Catholics in order to win the women’s vote by sacrificing the Catholics and forcing them to pay for “services” they have found morally reprehensible for one-and-a-half millennia. That’s how he rolls.
I think back to some haunting words:
…..Any opposition to Hitler is ruthlessly eradicated. Tens of thousands are imprisoned. Journalist Stephan Laurent dared to criticize The Fuehrer…..
“I am writing this from cell 24. Outside a new Germany is being created. Many millions are rejoicing. Hitler is promising everyone precisely what they want. I think when they wake to their sobering senses, they will find they have been led by the nose and duped by lies.”
America will discover one day – especially if it re-elects this despot – that they voted for a truly evil man who did nothing but hurt them while constantly promising he would heal them.
Start Thinking Right 