Earlier this week, The Foundry’s Conn Carroll wrote that under the Senate’s version of Obamacare, insurers and employers would have justification to refuse coverage for annual mammograms as a cost-cutting rationing measure, pursuant to the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.
On Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” the debate on mammogram rationing grew heated when Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) explained that the Task Force’s guidelines on mammograms “become the law” under the Senate bill, meaning that rationing would occur. In response, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) accused Republicans of politicizing the issue of breast cancer.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) noted that while a “cost” argument for the guidelines could be made, “from a patient standpoint, they’re atrocious. And that’s the problem with a bureaucracy stepping between a physician and their patient.”
As Caroll wrote:
[W]hen the Obamacare health experts conclude that the “medical science” dictates that your mammograms must be cut to meet “the goal of … lowering costs,” then you’ll be out of luck.
[A]s a Senate vote on health-care legislation nears, those negotiations are occurring in a setting that is anything but revolutionary in Washington: Three senators are working on the bill behind closed doors. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (R-Nev.) sits at the head of a wooden table at his office as he and Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) work to merge two competing versions of health-care legislation into one bill. The three men will be joined by top aides as well as by members of President Obama’s health-care team, led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The sessions started on Wednesday and could be completed this week.
It is shocking that this Administration’s promise to have the “most open and transparent in history” is not as important as getting this bill to the President’s desk by the end of the year. Instead liberals in Congress are crafting Obamacare in secret, so they can railroad a bill through before the American people can raise objections to an Obamacare bill written in this secretive and closed proceeding.
Democracy does not begin and end on Election Day for the American people. Whether you are for or against Obamacare, we the people deserve an opportunity to read, digest and understand the most important health care legislation to be debated in the United States Senate in our lifetime. The American people relied upon the promise of the Obama Administration and the leadership in Congress to be open and transparent, therefore it is time to stop the closed door negotiations and allow the American people to participate in the democratic process.