Take Back Medicine.com

ObamaCare Baby So Ugly That Democrats Try to Deny Paternity
 
By: Jane M. Orient, M.D.
 
Before passage, Democrats were urged to vote for ObamaCare as a smart political move. In time, they thought, people would come to love the new benefits. “Good policy is good politics,” Obama said.


Now, a lead Wall Street Journal editorial queries: “Who’s ObamaCare’s Daddy?” As people find out what’s in the bill, Families USA advises a new message: The bill isn’t perfect, but we’ll improve it. Forget about the extravagant claims of reducing medical costs and the federal deficit: “Keep claims small and credible.”

None of the left-wing groups that pushed for passage are doting on the baby or sending out pictures. Electioneering politicians aren’t bragging about their authorship of “historic” legislation.

At our county medical society, there’s a mood of impassive resignation. The society is making a deal with a business group to help doctors survive—and to help the society slow the loss of disenchanted members. There’s no applause for the AMA’s endorsement of the bill.

Small medical practices won’t be able to afford the crushing new “compliance” requirements, say the society’s leaders. They have 3 years to figure out what they are going to do. The alternative to closing or merging is, in this view, to outsource responsibility for studying the new rules, collecting the documentation, and filing reports. (Declaring independence from the system hasn’t occurred to them yet.)

Patients have no cause to celebrate either. Sure, more people will be covered—by Medicaid and by unemployment benefits. As employers look at the cost of “minimum essential coverage” or penalties such as $3,000 per employee if any worker qualifies for subsidies, there will be fewer hires and more pink slips. Especially around the thresholds of the 201st, 101st, or 51st employee, where new requirements based on “bigness” kick in.

Small businesses may have been excited about the 35% tax credits touted on a postcard sent at taxpayer expense. But if they did the math or used the National Federation for Independent Business internet calculator, they probably figured out that they didn’t qualify.

States might be glad that they too got the “Cornhusker Kickback” reportedly used to buy Sen. Ben Nelson’s vote. The federal government will foot the bill for the swollen Medicaid rolls—until 2016. Meanwhile, they’ll lose the premium taxes on people crowded out of private plans and onto Medicaid—taxes that now fund up to one-third of that program. They’ll also have new demands on already strained or broken budgets, such as the requirement to monitor insurance premium increases or to set up insurance exchanges.

Dr. Orient's annotated copy of "ObamaCare."

In reading the 906 pages of statutory language, in order to write an article entitled “ObamaCare: What’s in It?” for the fall 2010 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, I used colored sticky notes for the various features of the bill: taxes, regulations, punishments, favors to special-interest groups, and social engineering. There are no “patient protections” and nothing that makes care more affordable. There are only ways of shifting the increased costs to other people or taxpayers.

Features that most Americans will hate include billions of new tax reporting forms (including 1099s for the sandwich shop), more crowded emergency rooms, fewer available doctors, loss of medical privacy, more marriage penalties, and lots of new taxes—either because you are defined as “rich” or because you are paying the taxes that “rich” businesses such as medical device manufacturers pass along to you.

Even Rosemary’s Baby, of course, was pleasing to its real daddy. There are things in the bill that some people will like: federally funded abortions; lots of multiculturalism; national servitude for doctors; acceptance of death by dehydration or starvation; thousands of new jobs for IRS agents and bureaucrats; millions of unwilling new customers for managed-care schemes and federally certified computer systems; and grants for developers of medical cookbooks, ineffective smoking cessation aids, or politically correct “counseling” or “education” programs.

If ever an abortion of a misbegotten monster was warranted, to save the life of the mother (our country), this baby would qualify. It’s been conceived and implanted, but it has a lot of growing to do before it matures around 2014—in the course of which it will suck the economy dry while displacing the professionals and institutions devoted to caring for the sick. We need to starve it of funding, disown it, repeal it, enjoin it, and nullify it on the state and individual level. The ideas and their purveyors need to be expelled from the halls of Congress and the palaces of the executive branch, and the society that harbored them needs to be immunized by this experience against future schemes for a government takeover of medicine.

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