Cancer, the most feared disease in America, just got scarier thanks to Obamacare. Despite the barrage of propganada claiming our health care system is in “crisis,” the fact is that if you are diagnosed with cancer, the best country in the world to receive treatment is the United States, by a fairly substantial margin. Our technology and our physicians are the best in the world. Period, as the president so often says.
But from now on, if you are covered by Obamacare, your options for cancer treatment are diminishing.
Robert Goldberg, writing in the New York Post:
ObamaCare is supposed to be a huge boon for anyone with a pre-existing condition. Count that another promise broken: It’s actually denying care because of pre-existing conditions.
Millions of Americans with cancer and other chronic illnesses will wind up paying more for lifesaving care, if they can get it all.
To keep costs down, the White House designed ObamaCare plans as cut-rate HMOs. The low profit margins have forced insurers to downsize the number of doctors and hospitals in their networks – and to slash what they cover for out-of-network treatment.
So most ObamaCare plans don’t include the vast majority of the best cancer doctors and cancer centers. That’s a huge problem for these patients. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former Medicare official, writes: “Cancer patients often need the help of specialized doctors and cancer institutions that won’t make it into many of these cheapened networks.”
All across the country, leading cancer centers – including New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering – are excluded by the largest plans. In Washington state, the largest exchange plans exclude world-class cancer care for kids such as the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. California’s state-of-the-art Cedars-Sinai cancer center isn’t in any ObamaCare plan. Only a few plans include the Mayo Clinic.
And if you want a doctor outside such networks, you’ll generally have to pay the full cost of care.
Edie Littlefield Sundby last week became the face of Obamacare’s cruelty to cancer patients by writing an op-ed in the nation’s largest newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, on how Obamacare has forced her out of the “substandard” health care plan that was paying for her visits to renowned cancer centers like the M.D. Anderson in Houston, and the University of California, San Diego. Instead, her new Obamacare plan only covers a limited list of providers in her home county in California.
Mrs. Lundby is going to have a lot of company, people implicitly sentenced to death because they will not have access to the best treatment. That will be reserved for rich people, and for politically connected members of the ruling class. That’s always the way with socialist schemes, of course. The misery is spread evenly, except for the nomenklatura, who are always exempted from the rules they impose on others in the name of fairness.
Written by Thomas Lifson for the American Thinker, November 12, 2013.
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