In the Wall Street Journal Betsy McCaughey has written about Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s views on reducing and determining patients’ medical care. The Journal refers to Dr. Emanuel as “Obama’s Rationer-in-Chief.” His official positions are as health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research:
“In the next decade every country will face very hard choices about how to allocate scarce medical resources. There is no consensus about what substantive principles should be used to establish priorities for allocations,” he wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, Sept. 19, 2002. Yet Dr. Emanuel writes at length about who should set the rules, who should get care, and who should be at the back of the line.
From what McCaughey says, Emanuel never mentions the patient‘s role in this. It’s all about insurance companies and government making decisions. But what about the patient? If the patient would paying for the procedure, or at least part of it (some health plans cover a percentage after reaching the deductible), then certainly the patient has a role in determining whether a specific form of medical care is worth it.
Yet, House Resolution 3200, would make illegal many health plans that empower patients to make more of their own choices (see also “Feds Decide What’s Covered in “Acceptable” Health Plans” and this amusing video on Obama Care). That is, catastrophic plans with high deductibles that qualify for Health Savings Accounts. Yet,such high-deductible HSA-qualified insurance plans that have been successful in keeping costs down and patients satisfied, as cited in my posts about HSAs.
