Just saw an ad by Republican Senator Ted Cruz....another outright Republican liar! Says Obamacare will get between you and your doctor. How low will these traitors go? Claim: You won’t be able to choose your own doctor. Claim: The government will be between you and your doctor. FactCheck.org says: False. These claims are variations on the fear that the government will be taking over health care — choosing your doctor, telling him or her what treatment to administer, etc. But the law doesn’t create a government-run system, as we’ve said many times. It actually greatly expands business for private insurance, by about 12 million new customers, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. And individuals will choose their own doctors, just as they do now. These type of fear-mongering claims appear to have quieted a bit in 2013 — along with the more extreme death-panel-type hysteria — but they’re still percolating. A TV ad this summer from the conservative Americans for Prosperity featured a mom named Julie, gently asking, “If we can’t pick our own doctor, how do I know my family’s going to get the care they need?” And: “Can I really trust the folks in Washington with my family’s health care?” View gallery . docpatient It turns out, Julie doesn’t really mean that she might not be able to select her doctor herself. Part of the group’s support for the claim is the small net decline, as estimated by the CBO, in those who get insurance through their employer, a drop of 7 million people by 2018. (A total of 158 million are expected to have employer-sponsored coverage that year.) The CBO has said that those losing coverage would mainly be low-wage workers who could get subsidies to buy insurance on the exchanges. And, certainly, there’s a chance the doctor a worker had been seeing won’t be in the network of providers on a new plan. Some exchange policies could keep prices low by limiting those networks. But no one will choose policyholders’ doctors for them. They simply won’t be guaranteed that a new plan would have the same network of doctors, just as there’s no guarantee of that now (more on this in a minute). As for the government-coming-between-you-and-your-doctor claim, the law’s regulatory provisions are more like putting the government between you and your insurance company — and in a way that brings added benefits to consumers. The law says insurers can’t have caps on coverage, turn down customers based on preexisting conditions (or charge them more), and can’t spend more than 15 percent or 20 percent on non-medical-related costs (see Obama’s rebate claim above). Republicans also have attacked the Independent Payment Advisory Board as some kind of rationing board. But the IPAB — which is made up of medical professionals, health care experts, economists and consumer representatives — is charged with slowing the rate of growth of Medicare spending, and limited in how it can go about doing that. The law says the board’s proposals “shall not include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums … increase Medicare beneficiary cost sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co-payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria.”
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 23:15:10 +0000
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