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“Bad Medicine”: A White Paper for Patients

July 27, 2010

Are your patients looking for answers about health care reform? Suggest they read the CATO Institute’s new white paper: “Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the Health Care Bill”

In it, the non-profit organization discusses the ways in which ObamaCare will “fundamentally change nearly every aspect of health care”
Author Michael Tanner analyzes the ways in which the Democrats’ legislation succeeds in “moving this country closer to European-style social democracy” including the regulations it puts in place to limit doctors.

Tanner discusses all aspects of the bill including:

  • Individual and Employer Insurance Mandates and how they will result in employees losing their coverage or seeing major changes to the plans they have.
  • The Medicare cuts in the bill and the ways they will “impact on the quality and availability of care.”
  • A 2.9% federal tax on medical devices which hospitals and doctors will either be forced to absorb or pass on to their patients. A family of four could expect to see “an additional $1,000 a year in higher premiums.”
  • A provision to establish a private, nonprofit institute to conduct comparative effectiveness research that could be used to restrict doctors from using certain types of treatment.

“Bad Medicine” concludes “the law would not directly ration care or allow the government to dictate how doctors practice medicine...Even so, by setting in place a structure of increased utilization and rising costs, the new law makes government rationing far more likely in the future.” (Emphasis Added) The paper also includes a helpful timeline of implementation (see table 3) indicating when the bill’s measures will take effect.

“Bad Medicine” is an excellent resource for anyone who is looking to find out how ObamaCare will impact him/her or trying to understand how devastating this legislation truly is.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/BadMedicineWP.pdf

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