Below The Beltway

Here’s what President Obama and Congressional Democrats aren’t telling you:

NEW YORK (Fortune) — In promoting his health-care agenda, President Obama has repeatedly reassured Americans that they can keep their existing health plans — and that the benefits and access they prize will be enhanced through reform.

A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Health committee, contradict the President’s assurances. To be sure, it isn’t easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.

Michael Laprarie at Wizbang summaries the list:

1. Freedom to choose what’s in your plan. Under ObamaCare, the government will mandate “standard benefits packages” that all health care plans must offer in order to be “qualified” by ObamaCare. Will this really make health care less expensive? Don’t count on it. “Every group, from chiropractors to alcohol-abuse counselors, do lobbying to get included. Connecticut, for example, requires reimbursement for hair transplants, hearing aids, and in vitro fertilization.”

2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or to pay your own costs. Under ObamaCare, all qualified plans must conform to a yet-to-be-developed “community rating” scheme, whereby all insureds pay roughly the same premium, regardless of age or health. Giving a break to people who suffer from chronic or hereditary conditions like diabetes or cancer is not a bad idea, but community rating is like “car insurers [having] to charge the same rates to safe drivers as to chronic speeders with a history of accidents.”

3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage. The mandatory low-deductible, full-coverage benefits packages in qualified ObamaCare programs will end the ability of consumers to buy cheaper, catastrophic care health policies and use the resulting premium savings to pay for occasional doctor visits and prescriptions out of pocket. For young, healthy Americans who do not need monthly prescription medications, this is an attractive and affordable option for health coverage. (This was the type of coverage I bought until I got married and had kids. It cost me $110 a month in the mid-1990’s.)

4. Freedom to keep your existing plan. This has been discussed at length here at WizBang. And frankly, it’s the biggest lie currently being told by the Obama Administration. Draconian restrictions that will be placed on private health insurance plans by ObamaCare guarantee that almost everyone who is currently covered by private insurance will be forced out of those plans and into the public ObamaCare insurance exchange within 12 months.

5. Freedom to choose your doctors. Under ObamaCare, you’ll be “assigned a primary care doctor, and the doctor controls your access to specialists. The primary care physicians will decide which services, like MRIs and other diagnostic scans, are best for you, and will decide when you really need to see a cardiologists or orthopedist … The danger is that doctors will be financially rewarded for denying care, as were HMO physicians more than a decade ago.” If the fees paid by the government to primary care physicians are going to be based on efficiency or cost-saving ratings by government bureaucrats, then doctors can also easily be punished if they make too many specialist referrals. Is this really the way to sustain quality health care for Americans? Remember, one of President Obama’s goals is to level the playing field with respect to how much money primary care physicians and specialists earn.

This isn’t just health care “reform,” it’s a fundamental restructuring of one of the largest segments of the economy in a manner that will have clear long-term implications for the economy as a whole.

More attention needs to be paid.