Medicare Rationing Leads to Private Insurance Rationing

Conservatives looking to balance the federal budget know the importance of reining in the cost of Medicare. But how you reduce the cost of the program is almost as important as whether you reduce the cost. The implications are enormous and here is why.

Burke Balch, the Director of the Powell Center for Medical Ethics, has done extensive research into the intricate connection of policy provisions contained in the ObamaCare legislation that all lead America down the road to rationing. Balch sees three avenues to rationing, with the primary danger coming from the creation of the new Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).

In the State of the Union speech, President Obama said of what people are allowed to spend on health care, “The health insurance law we passed last year will slow these rising costs.” And he called for “further reducing health care costs.”

As Balch notes, What Obama didn’t mention was how the Obama health care law will “slow . . . rising costs.” It will do so in large part by forcing doctors and other health care providers to limit care, through “quality and efficiency” standards imposed on them that will establish one uniform national standard of care for what treatment may – and may not – be offered patients. Beginning in 2015, these “quality and efficiency” standards will be drawn from recommendations of an 18-member Independent Payment Advisory Board that is directed to come up with ways to limit what private citizens choose to pay, using their own funds and private insurance, so that they cannot keep up with the rate of medical inflation.

In short, the recommendations by the Independent Payment Advisory Board, will force private health care spending below the rate of medical inflation. In many cases treatment that a doctor and patient deem needed or advisable to save that patient’s life or preserve or improve the patient’s health but which runs afoul of the imposed standards will be denied, even if the patient wants to pay for it.

The same reasoning rests behind the Food and Drug Administration’s crusade to deny women with breast cancer the ability to use the drug Avastin in their fight for life. If the government can restrict reimbursement for the drug – the goal of the FDA — private insurers will surely follow.

This is how President Obama will “bend the cost curve,” by restricting access to treatment. It’s called rationing and it is the inevitable result of a government run health care system – and the skelton of the system is already in place.