You don’t need a crystal ball: If you want to glimpse your future under Obamacare, look no further than the mammogram flap. Recommendations by HHS’s Preventative Task Force against mammograms for women under 50 not get mammograms may sound to you like a cheap trick. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s response is basically this: Be happy. Don’t worry. Sebelius says there was a lot of “confusion” about the guidelines, implying that this is just a misunderstanding. Nothing to fear.
But there’s plenty to fear. The reason for the confusion is that, as the Wall Street points out, is that Obamacare backers don’t want you to see figure out what’s going on:
The political duck-and-cover was also on display in that vanguard of ObamaCare known as the New York Times, which ran at least four much-ado-about-nothing items even as it endorsed the reduced screening. On the same day as an editorial and op-ed, a front-page “news analysis” lectured that what the public really needs is “a transformational shift in thinking” about the “evidence-based” medical future that the mammogram decision portends. Yes, and no doubt the Times will tell us what “evidence” to follow.
Even more revealing was Princeton’s Uwe Reinhardt, a leading liberal health-care economist, writing on the New York Times Economix blog. Mr. Reinhardt sees the task force’s handiwork as an exemplar of “rational decision-making” that had nothing to do with cost analysis, even as he claimed that rationing based on cost is inevitable.
You have to admire Mr. Reinhardt’s partisan dexterity. He knows that no government task force is ever going to justify a treatment denial with an overt claim to costs….
What’s really going on here is that the left knows its designs will require political rationing of care, but it doesn’t want the public to figure this out until ObamaCare passes. Then it will begin the campaign to instruct the rest of us that we must follow the guidance of Princeton professors about what medical care we can receive. Americans will simply have to accept that the price of government-run health care in the name of redistributive justice is that patients and their doctors must bow to the superior wisdom of HHS task forces.
Just don’t admit it until after the White House signing ceremony.