The Health Care Czar speaks – “free” contraception for all!
Yes, Czar Kathleen (Sebelius, Czar Secretary of Health Care HHS and the final arbiter of all things ObamaCare) has declared that your insurer will now, without compensation or charge, do the following:
The Obama administration said Friday that health insurance plans must cover contraceptives for women without charge, and it rejected a broad exemption sought by the Roman Catholic Church for insurance provided to employees of Catholic hospitals, colleges and charities.
You may take a knee in thanks. Said Czar Kathleen:
“This rule will provide women with greater access to contraception by requiring coverage and by prohibiting cost-sharing,” Ms. Sebelius said.
Because, you know, the devices and services are delivered by magic fairies and don’t cost anyone anything.
No wonder Obama chose Disneyland as the venue for his speech yesterday.
The religious question aside, where in the world does this bunch get off deciding I have to pay for someone else’s contraception?
Because that’s what is going to happen … the bill, just like taxes to corporations, is going to find its way into my premium in some form or fashion (TANSTAAFL).
The order is an administration interpretation of this:
The 2010 health care law says insurers must cover “preventive health services” and cannot charge for them.
“Preventive health services”. Wow … how broadly can that be interpreted. Well, broadly enough to include contraception as a “preventive health service” I suppose.
Which means, I assume, that the sky is the limit. Creative interpretation is only limited by … not much, huh?
We have a czar. She has an agenda. She is the final, unaccountable “decider”.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
~McQ
Twitter: @McQandO
HHS Secretary threatens insurers with “exclusion” if they don’t toe the government line
America’s new “Health Care Czar”, aka Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, has issued a letter to the insurance industry telling them not so politely to shut up or pay the consequences.
The letter, sent to Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans — the chief lobbyist for private health insurance companies – makes it clear in no uncertain terms that any complaints that ObamaCare is causing insurance premiums to rise is unacceptable:
"There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases."
But that’s not the real problem, that’s just the warning. Then there’s the threat:
"We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014."
One has to wonder though, whether Sebelius will also track the misinformation put out by the administration and her department. Such as the implication that no such increases are caused by the law or that any such increases are “minimal”, i.e. in the 1 to 2% range.
As Time magazine’s Karen Pickert points out, Sebelius ignores the fact that individual insurance plans cover different types of populations. So that government and "some" industry and academic experts think the new law will justify increases averaging 1 percent or 2 percent, they could justify much larger increases for certain plans.
Or as Ignagni, the recipient of the letter, says, "It’s a basic law of economics that additional benefits incur additional costs."
In other words, mandated coverage – with which the law is loaded – costs money. Whether or not you want it isn’t the point. You’re going to get it and as expected, that means the cost of your insurance premium will go up. If, for instance, you’re carrying a minimal coverage policy with fewer benefits than those mandated by ObamaCare, your insurance coverage is about to change dramatically and so is the cost.
But insurers better shut up about the increased cost or, at least, not blame it on ObamaCare or, per the HHS Secretary’s threat, they’ll be “excluded” from the government takeover underway.
As Michael Barone notes today in his Townhall column:
The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone’s business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration’s transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government.
"The rule of law, or the rule of men (women)?" economist Tyler Cowen asks on his marginalrevolution.com blog. As he notes, "Nowhere is it stated that these rate hikes are against the law (even if you think they should be), nor can this ‘misinformation’ be against the law."
That, however, doesn’t apparently stop an administration with increasingly totalitarian tendencies from threatening insurers with the loss of their business if they don’t comply and keep their explanations to themselves.
This is outright thuggery. As Barone points out, this certainly isn’t the first example we’ve seen, nor is it most likely to be the last. This is pure and blatant intimidation. There’s no place for this sort of nonsense in democratic republic one of whose founding principles is freedom of speech.
Secretary Sebelius should withdraw the letter immediately and apologize for the threat she issued to the industry as a whole. She should also understand that she doesn’t get to decide what is or isn’t “misinformation” or how insurance companies choose to present the inevitable premium increases driven by ObamaCare to their customers.
If she feels there is misinformation out there that is actionable, then she has a court system on which to rely. My guess is she knows she hasn’t a case and thus is reduced to threatening insurers instead, hoping they’ll be cowed into compliance.
Your “hope and change” government at work.
~McQ
Obama Admin’s Messaging Confused
First we have hints by Obama that the public option isn’t critical to health care reform.
“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform,” Obama said at the town hall event in Colorado. “This is just one sliver of it. One aspect of it. And by the way, it’s both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else.”
That’s followed up by Kathleen Sebelius, HHS Secretary, and Robert Gibbs, White House Press secretary, dropping the same sort of hint. First Sebelius:
Sebelius said that what the president sees as essential is to set up competition to private insurers in the healthcare system. But she said that doesn’t have to come from a public health insurance option.
“Well, I think there will be a competitor to private insurers,” she said on CNN. “That’s really the essential part, is you don’t turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing. We need some choices, we need some competition.”
Then Gibbs:
“What the president has said is in order to inject choice and competition. . . people ought to be able to have some competition in that market,” Gibbs said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Asked if he was hedging on support for a public plan, Gibbs said, “The president has thus far sided with the notion that that can best be done with a public option.”
Gibbs and Sebelius both leave their sentences unfinished – “but it doesn’t have to be the public option which introduces that competition”.
Like 1200 insurance companies wouldn’t compete in a real open market and not the rigged market the government has established – but that’s a post for another time.
You can’t help but draw the conclusion that the administration is backing away from support for the public option if their nebulous goal, “competition”, is still the final result of the bill.
That flies right in the face of the House’s liberal caucus, 77 liberal lawmakers who have said the public option is a must. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) told CNN on Sunday it would be “very difficult” for her and other liberals to support legislation that does not include a public option.
“The only way we can be sure that very low-income people and persons who work for companies that don’t offer insurance have access to it, is through an option that would give the private insurance companies a little competition,” she said.
Johnson added that House liberals have already told Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that she should insist on White House support for a public option.
In fact, the liberal caucus has stated in the past that it won’t vote for a health care bill without a public option.
An administration official said tonight that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “misspoke” when she told CNN this morning that a government run health insurance option “is not an essential part” of reform. This official asked not to be identified in exchange for providing clarity about the intentions of the President. The official said that the White House did not intend to change its messaging and that Sebelius simply meant to echo the president, who has acknowledged that the public option is a tough sell in the Senate and is, at the same time, a must-pass for House Democrats, and is not, in the president’s view, the most important element of the reform package.
A second official, Linda Douglass, director of health reform communications for the administration, said that President Obama believed that a public option was the best way to reduce costs and promote competition among insurance companies, that he had not backed away from that belief, and that he still wanted to see a public option in the final bill.
“Nothing has changed.,” she said. “The President has always said that what is essential that health insurance reform lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes that the public option is the best way to achieve these goals.”
Confusion reigns. Any reasonable person listening to the president in Grand Junction might have taken his remarks to mean exactly what has been reported – that the public option isn’t critical to the final bill as long as something is in there to increase “competition”. That something, of course, could be the co-op plan (or the trigger plan) being pushed in the Senate.
I bring all this up to point out that what was considered a media savvy group during the election campaign seems to have either forgotten how to impose message discipline or, if that’s not the case, hasn’t yet realized that scrutiny of every word, phrase and nuance and the comparison of what is said by various players in the administration and Congress is standard operating procedure among the old and new media.
Their world changed in a way on January 20th that I still don’t think they quite understand. Then they were able to get away with glib nonsense and glittering generalities then. But now they’re forced to deal with warring factions (many times within their own party) who aren’t going to be satisfied with anything but specifics. Every word uttered is going to be analyzed and spun. And situations like this make the administration seem confused, defensive and not on top of their game. It also gives the public even less reason to feel confident about giving them the power over their health care for which they’re asking.
All in all, not a stellar performance by the administration thus far.
~McQ
Health Care: It Is Getting Hostile Out There
An interesting video here – you could entitle it “What The Hell Is The Rush?!”
It is Arlen Specter at a healthcare townhall meeting being given whatfor when he says that they have to rush on the health care bill. Also speaking is Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. It would be hard to characterize the crowd as “warm and welcoming”.
The one thing I think politicans will hear almost universally is the public demands they read and understand the bill they’re voting on – not their staffers. And until they do and can discuss it rationally and actually bring it to the floor and debate it – giving debate all the time it needs – they don’t want them voting on it.
Now, that’s not to say that some of those making this demand don’t want to see health care reform passed as a result. But I think even they understand that there is no crisis and their is no rush to pass such legislation quickly. That’s a self-imposed political desire – passing it quickly – because Democrats understand that not doing so risks getting nothing passed at all.
We’ll see if politicians heed this message or, when they head back into the atmosphere prevalent inside the beltway, again fall into line with party leadership and try to rush this turkey through.
If the video is any indication, doing so could end up being a very big electoral mistake.
~McQ