Daniel Popeo of the Washington Legal Foundation notes in a new Washington Examiner column a key reason for “Americans’ growing disillusionment with government.”
Government is convinced that it can solve all of our problems, but rarely delivers on its promises. This frustrating contradiction has both fueled government’s drive to expand the nation’s massive health care regulatory structure and guaranteed its failure.
The reigning symbol of government intrusion into our health care choices – the Affordable Care Act (aka “ObamaCare”) – mostly doesn’t take effect for several years. But federal officials and even some states have already started down the irreparable road toward bureaucratized medical decision-making. …
… [I]n the state of Washington, legislators and health regulators have decided to inject themselves into the complex area of pain management. A new law imposing rigid care requirements and prescription limits on the treatment of acute pain will soon take effect.
This inflexible law has already encouraged doctors to stop treating patients for pain and has reduced the availability of opioids, leaving scores of patients with debilitating doubt and few alternative options.
Back at the national level, efforts to lower federal health care expenditures are targeting Medicare for cuts. Instead of making the reductions itself, Congress shifted cost cutting responsibility through an ObamaCare provision to a barely accountable advisory board, the Independent Payments Advisory Board (IPAB). Starting in 2014, the IPAB could effectively cut benefits for millions of seniors.
Even worse, federal officials seem to have just realized that the millions more people ObamaCare has made eligible for Medicaid will need doctors. Two problems complicate this reality: First, America is facing a severe shortage of primary care physicians; second, those still practicing in this area have reportedly become reluctant to see government-insured patients.
Eager to study the shortage and perhaps “encourage” primary care doctors to see Medicaid patients, health bureaucrats designed a plan this past spring to secretly investigate such physicians with “mystery shoppers.” Once The New York Times exposed this truly bad idea, federal officials abandoned the plan, but it shows how far government will go to solve problems of its own creation.
All this is just the beginning of efforts to permanently implant bureaucracy into America’s health care system. Government’s faith in itself may be unshakable, but we just can’t trust it to make life and death medical decisions. The cost of failure – lowered quality of life for all – is far too high.
