Spreading Scary Stories

About Health Care Rationing

To the Editor:

A writer to The Bee last week [Letter Hive, 4/27/12, “Why Obama Should Be ‘Dethroned”] repeated some scary predictions about how Obamacare will affect health care and Medicare in particular. I turned to the actual law on the house.gov website (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Public Law 111-148, as amended through May 1, 2010) to check on one claim that an “Independent Payment Advisory Board…appointed by Obama, will spring into action to save money by mandating prices and limiting surgeries, procedures, devices, medications, and other treatments. They answer to no one and appeals are not allowed. It is nothing more than a Rationing Board.”

The law is quite different. Subtitle E – Ensuring Medicare Sustainability, Section 3403 does call for the creation of an Independent Payment Advisory Board, but its purpose is to each year propose recommendations to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and Congress to keep Medicare costs in line with the per capita growth rate and the Consumer Price Index, primarily by monitoring provider administrative costs. And directly to the point, in subsection (c)(2)(A)(ii), “The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria.”

Why do these stories about health care rationing keep circulating when they so clearly misrepresent the law passed by both houses and signed by the President?

Dick Zang

2 Camelot Crest, Sandy Hook                                        April 30, 2012