President Obama leads Mitt Romney among wo🍬men — for now. That will change if voters focus on what the Ob☂amaCare law does to their health care.
Simply put, the president broke a host of promises about an issue of particular concern to female voter🍸s. Unless the law is entirely junked by the Supreme Court, it will drastically limit the choices of millions of Americans, while reducing the quality of🧔 our care.
The law fundamentally shifts control over medical decisions from p💃atients and their doctors to the federal government. And its reams of mandates endanger Americans’ ability to select the health in♋surance they want — or to keep the policies they already have.
Estimates vary as to just ho♋w many people will l🦂ose the coverage they now get through their employers once ObamaCare fully kicks in after next year. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects up to 20 million people; former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin estimates nearly twice as many — 35 million. Many of those folks will find themselves on Medicaid in swift order.
And even the people whose employers continue to provide insurance will find their policies changing: In the name of “efficiency,” the ObamaCare law largely dictates the coverage that i♕nsurers can offe🥃r.
Here, the law’s defenders insist that wome🌄n will love the mandate that all organizations — including religiously affiliated ones — must buy insurance that coverꦇs contraception without any copay.
In any case, a recent New York Times/CBS poll found that a majority of women believe that religious organizations should not have to cover the full cost of birth control. A plurality of women even said that no employer — secular or reওligious — should be forced to supply contraceptives.
These women recognize that a government powerful enough to mandate birth-control coverage is also powerful enough to someday tak😼e it — or any other medical service — away.
In fact, the Ob꧃amaCare law has already set up the architecture for denying coverage for procedures that the government finds to be too expensive — no matter what your doctor (or actual med🌼ical science) recommends.
The new Patient-Centered Ouಌtcomes Research Institute specializes in comparing the effectiveness of various treatment methods. Such research has been used for years in Britain to limit which 𝕴treatments the government will pay for. A new drug or procedure must be deemed to provide sufficient bang for its buck.
Britain’s nationalized health-care system uses this excuse to deny coverage for medically effective treatments. For instance, it refuses to cover the breast-cancer drug Lapatinib — denying thousands of terminally ill women access to a treatment that can halve the speed at which their breast cancer grows.
The Obama administration says that its own “outcomes research” won’t take cost into consideration — but with government now paying for half of all health care consumed in this country, tha🦹t promise will be hard to keep.
Such research was behind the 2009 reco💞mmendation by a Health and Human Services panel that women in their 40s not receive regular mammograms. The panel said mammograms don’t save enough lives to be worth the cost — even though breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for women aged 40 to 49, and early detection vastly improves the chance of survival.
The financial pressures to find savings will be extreme — ওsince the president’s claim that ObamaCare will save the government money is already proving false.
The White House sold the law as a way to reduce the deficit by $140 billion over the next 10 years. In fact, a recent report by Dr. Charles Blahous, a public trustee for Social Security and Medicare, shows that the new health-care law will add $346 bꦺillion to $527 billion to the deficit over the next decade.
That’s money that future generations will have to she🧜ll out in the form of higher taxes and reduced services from the federal government. ObamaCare, in other words, gives mothers yet one more worry about their kids’ futures.
If keeping one’s family healthy and preserving🌼 a strong economy for future generations aren’t women’s issues, then what are?
Sally C. Pipes is president and CEO at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is “The Pipes Plan: The Top 10 Ways To Dismantle and Replace ObamaCare.”