This piece from the American Eneterprise Institute could also be titled, “You can have any health insurance plan you want, as long as it’s black Communist Red.”:
All of which brings us to the question of whether you’ll be able to spend extra money to add benefits that exceed the government’s basic package or opt out of that plan entirely. The bill doesn’t address this question directly–yet I can say with great confidence that it will be costly and in some cases impossible.
The bill leaves these issues in the hands of the bureaucracies that will write the law’s enabling regulations. And it’s clear both what the spirit of the Obama plan and the habits of these bureaucracies will produce.
I’ll temporarily stop the quote to remind you that under the current version of PlaceboCare, anything that the bureaucrats write will essentially not be reviewable by Congress. Let’s continue.
The overriding goal of this reform is to turn health insurance into a more “egalitarian” benefit that’s the same for everyone, regardless of income, personal preference or need. So rules written under President Obama to implement the Obama plan are a sure bet to intentionally curtail anyone’s ability to wrap around this national coverage with a supplemental policy or to contract privately with doctors to pay your way out of its limitations.
This is exactly what the bureaucracy’s done with Medicare. Doctors accepting Medicare can’t contract privately with Medicare patients to bill for services that Medicare doesn’t cover. Nor can patients buy added coverage to help plug Medicare’s gaps. (The “Medigap” that many seniors now buy are tightly regulated by the government to limit how much they expand on Medicare’s basic benefits; they mostly just help defray co-pays.)
In short, beneficiaries are trapped inside the Medicare insurance scheme, just as they’ll soon be trapped inside the ObamaCare exchanges. Doctors can’t offer benefits not covered by the government plans, and patients can’t buy extra insurance to make up for many gaps….
The very rich, of course, will be able to buy their way out of ObamaCare. Many of the best doctors will go cash only, opting entirely out of the Obama program, to cater to a wealthy clientele. But only the truly affluent will have the cash to escape.
