Mandates: The Obama administration seems ready to force insurance companies to include birth control coverage in their plans. So much for the president's promise of bending health care costs downward.
The ObamaCare legislation gives the administration the authority to compile a list of female preventive services that all new health insurance plans will have to cover without employing deductibles or charging co-payments. A medical advisory panel is recommending that birth control services should be one of these services.
The committee from the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine that issued the guidelines also suggests that free breast-pump rentals, counseling for domestic violence, annual wellness exams and HIV tests be part of all health insurance plans.
These mandates won't come without significant costs. The additional benefits won't be free, despite the left's loose usage of that word in association with health care. The mandates will force insurance premiums higher and someone will pay.
The Congressional Budget Office said years ago that existing mandates at the state level — there are more than 2,000 of them, according to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance — raise premiums by 15%.
That's just a starting point. CAHI, which has done heavy work on this issue, believes that state mandates push premiums up by 20%. In some states, the increase can be as high as 50%. The result is a cost curve that bends upward, not down.
Mandates at the state level run from the expected to the bizarre. They require insurers to provide such unorthodox coverage as wigs (hair prostheses), Oriental medicine, port-wine stain elimination, smoking cessation, acupuncture, midwives, counseling, and marriage, occupational and massage therapists.
As we've noted before on these pages, the state mandates are an insult to common sense. Why would a single man need an insurance package that covers in vitro fertilization, maternity leave, midwives, breast reduction or mammograms?
Does it make sense for a childless, unmarried woman to be forced into a plan that includes care for a newborn and screening for prostate cancer? And is there any reason a teetotaler's policy should cover alcohol abuse?
These regulations are not only asinine, they wreck the health insurance marketplace. The longer the list of mandates, the less competition there is. When insurers have to carry these gold-plated packages, they can't compete with lower-priced plans that have fewer benefits. This can price some customers entirely out of the private market.
The administration isn't bound by the commission's recommendations. But the group did its work at the request of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who gushed Tuesday that the panel's guidelines are "historic."
Media reports have made it clear that the White House is eager to incorporate the ideas into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
This is squarely consistent with its effort to take over U.S. health care. ObamaCare is not some kind-hearted, well-meaning effort to make sure that all Americans have access to adequate care. It's a Trojan horse for a statist program that's being quietly pulled into the private sector.
Democrats, of course, deny that's their goal. So has PolitiFact. But Rep. John Conyers admitted earlier this year that ObamaCare is a "platform" that will take the country to a single-payer health care system. If there's a single payer, it will be government. That means it has control over the entire sector.
Already, long before ObamaCare and its tangle of regulations is implemented, the government controls 45% to 60% — depending on who's counting — of all health care dollars spent in this country. It's well on its way to a full takeover. A birth control mandate would be just another costly step in that direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment