Since the President is not going to sign a bill repealing his
health-care law any time soon, those of us who oppose the law are
trying to blunt the measure's impact.
The Senate, for example, has voted to repeal the so-called 1099
requirement, which requires businesses to report every purchase of
$600 or more to the Internal Revenue Service (ostensibly to raise
$17 billion). And, in order to prevent rationing of care, Senators
Coburn, Barrasso, Roberts, Crapo and I introduced the Preserving
Access to Targeted, Individualized, and Effective New Treatments and
Services (PATIENTS) Act, a pro-patient firewall that protects
patients' access to high-quality care by prohibiting the federal
government from using comparative effectiveness research (CER) to
delay or deny care.
CER weighs the effectiveness of two or more health-care services or
treatments. It can provide patients and doctors with better information
regarding the risks and benefits of a drug versus a surgery, for
example; but in the hands of government it also could be used to
determine if a certain treatment is an effective use of government
resources.
Section 6301 of the health-care law actually empowers the Secretary
of Health and Human Services to use CER when making coverage
determinations.
Moreover, Donald Berwick, whom President Obama installed as
administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services-the
agency that will be implementing much of ObamaCare-supports rationing of
health care. The decision is not whether or not we will ration care --
"the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open," he said in
a 2009 interview.The Obama administration, insists that it will not
ration care, but it is unavoidable in a government-run health-care
system. In Britain, for example, the National Institute for Health and
Clinical Excellence (NICE) routinely uses CER to make cost-benefit
calculations.In August 2008, NICE recommended against coverage of four
expensive drugs for advanced kidney cancer. NICE considered the drugs
clinically beneficial in specific situations, but concluded that they
were not cost-effective. Health care in Britain is also routinely
delayed. Several years ago, the country's National Health Service (NHS)
launched an "end waiting, change lives campaign." The campaign's goal
was to reduce patients' wait time to 18 weeks from referral to
treatment-that's 4 1/2 months! And that's an improvement.
Government-run healthcare systems that ration care are the reason
that many Europeans and Canadians come to the United States each year to
get the treatments denied to them in their own countries. In some case,
treatments are simply forbidden; in others, the delays in getting
appointments result in denial of timely care.
Access to the highest quality care and the sacred doctor-patient
relationship are the cornerstones of U.S. health care-the very things
Americans value most and that ObamaCare jeopardizes. All Americans
deserve personalized treatment and should be able to get the care that
they and their doctors decide is best. No Washington bureaucrat should
interfere with that right by substituting the government's judgment for
that of a physician.
Sen. Jon Kyl is the Senate Republican Whip and serves on the Senate
Finance and Judiciary committees.