How Obamacare will harm cancer patients

"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free." ~ P.J. O’Rourke

Here's precisely how Obama was able to say with a straight face that Obamacare would make it against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition. Though you may maintain some semblance of an insurance policy, there's no guarantee you'll ever obtain the adequate specialists or affordable medicines necessary to treat your illness...say for instance, cancer. 

Forbes: Obamacare is going to degrade medicine but its ill effects will fall disproportionately on patients with serious conditions, especially those diagnosed with cancer.

The legislation contains provisions that directly target patients with cancer because their care is perceived as costly. These policies couldn’t be more badly timed.

We’re at a turning point in battling cancer. Doctors are finally able to reliably tailor treatments to the unique genetic composition of each patient’s tumor rather than by its location in the body alone. Other new drugs are able to prime our own immune cells to attack cancers. But Obamacare puts access to this progress at risk.

First, Obamacare is going to block the ability of patients to seek out the specialist doctors who are most likely to prescribe these cutting edge treatments. Obamacare coaxes health plans to reduce spending and healthcare utilization by limiting the choices patients will have of doctors. This is the primary way that health plans are being cheapened enough to meet Obamacare’s strict guidelines on the low value of the coverage that the plans can offer.

Next, Obamacare tries to coerce doctors to cut down on their use of costlier drugs and tests by changing the way that they’re paid. The law uses “bundled” payments, where doctors get lump sums of money to care for patients with particular medical problems. The idea is to pit the cost of the treatments doctors prescribe directly against their earnings and give doctors a potent incentive to use cheaper remedies. But these schemes will slow adoption of new technology.

Finally, Obamacare targets cancer drugs directly, by expanding a program called 340B, which siphons money away from drug developers in order to subsidize hospitals. The Obama Administration sees the program as a way to prop up the hospitals (a favored constituency) on the dime of less popular drug makers. But the oblique way the money is extracted from drug companies spawns a lot of harmful consequences that are increasing the cost of cancer care, and lowering its quality.

None of the Obamacare policies lower the actual cost of the drugs. We should be addressing the high expense of developing these medicines, where enrolling a single cancer patient into a clinical trial can top $90,000 owing to FDA regulations. Instead, Obamacare limits access to specialist doctors in order to cheapen insurance products, uses financial schemes that pay doctors more to do less, and targets the drugs that represent so much of our recent progress against cancer.

So compassionate, huh? And this is but yet another example of how those who didn't read the bill before it's passage disregarded Americans' central concerns about rising costs when the actual debate began so many years ago. This addresses none of that, but simply shifts control of your health care, and thus your life, over to the powers that be in Washington.