"Lies," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid calls the TV ads that feature people
complaining about ObamaCare. Sorry: The people in those ads are sick, but their
new health policies don't let them see the specialists or get the medications
they need.
These
patients aren't liars; they're people President Obama claimed he would help, who
instead are being harmed.
They
had insurance, but their plans got canceled because of the Affordable Care Act,
forcing them into ObamaCare. Now they're discovering that ObamaCare plans aren't
for sick people. They offer "free" mammograms, "free" colonoscopies and "free"
contraceptives - meaning you don't have a copay. But if you have cancer, MS or
Parkinson's, you're in trouble: Most ObamaCare plans skimp on specialists and
life-saving drugs.
Dr.
Jeffrey English, a Georgia neurologist who treats patients with advanced MS,
worries that such patients forced into exchange plans will deteriorate rapidly.
Some plans don't cover six out of the 10 drugs that can treat MS, including the
ones most effective at staving off irreversible paralysis.
"ObamaCare
is a throwback to the old HMO model of the 1990s, which promised a broad package
of coverage for primary-care benefits like vaccines and routine doctor visits.
But to pay for these benefits, the ObamaCare plans skimp on other things,
principally the number of doctors you'll have access to and also the number of
costlier branded drugs," explains Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a practicing physician and
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
It's
like a car with leather seats and Bose speakers, but a lousy engine. Another
aspect of this approach: Most exchange plans exclude the academic medical
centers that cancer patients look to when their local hospital runs out of
answers.
Dr.
Katherine Albrecht developed stage 3c breast cancer (which had spread to her
lymph nodes) in 2011. Doctors at her local hospital in Nashua, NH, told her to
get her affairs in order. But her Anthem PPO health insurance allowed her to go
to Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston, where she was successfully treated, and
afterward to Cornell Breast Cancer Center.
Her
Anthem policy was canceled late last year, because it didn't meet ObamaCare
mandates such as maternity coverage. Yet ObamaCare-compliant policies in New
Hampshire won't cover care at 10 of the 26 hospitals in the state, and none
outside the state - so if she'd been on ObamaCare when she got cancer, she
couldn't have gone to Boston for care. Albrecht says, "Under ObamaCare, I'd be
dead."
Recently,
the president urged Organizing for Action volunteers to enroll as many people as
possible in ObamaCare before the March 31 deadline, calling it "God's work."
Really? Maybe helping the uninsured is God's work. But not convincing people
with health problems to move into plans that won't provide the care they need to
stay alive. In the private sector, that would be fraud. It takes politics to a
new low.
In
February 2013, the Obama administration whacked people with pre-existing
conditions even harder by suspending the cap on out-of-pocket expenses under an
ObamaCare policy, which was originally set to kick in Jan. 1 at $6,350 for an
individual. Theodore M. Thompson, a vice president of the National Multiple
Sclerosis Society, said "The promise of out-of-pocket limits was one of the main
reasons we supported health-care reform."
Without
the cap, an MS patient on Copaxone, which costs $6,000 a month, will have to
spend about $1,500 to $2,000 every month for the co-pay on that one drug alone.
That's unaffordable for many.
Before
the Affordable Care Act, nine out of every 10 Americans with pre-existing
conditions had coverage. They got it through an employer-provided plan, Medicare
or Medicaid without discrimination. Only the individual-policy market let
insurers charge sick people more or turn them away - and even in that market
most got covered. Nationwide, only 2 million to 4 million people with health
problems couldn't get coverage. That's about 1 percent of the population - a
small, fixable problem.
But
ObamaCare doesn't fix the problem, it makes it far worse. As millions lose
on-the-job coverage this year or next and get pushed into ObamaCare, those with
pre-existing illnesses will have the same difficulty getting care as the
patients in the TV ads. It's no lie.
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