From the New Republic.
Critics of the Affordable Care Act keep saying health care reform will kill people. Perhaps they should talk to Dallas Wiens.
Wiens, 25, lost most of his face in a freak work accident. Earlier this week, doctors in Boston performed an experimental face transplant. The Defense Department and the hospital underwrote the surgery. (The Pentagon hopes the know-how can someday help wounded soldiers.) But Wiens will depend on expensive immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his life.
The Affordable Care Act will allow Wiens to pay for those drugs. For now, it allows him to enroll in his father’s plan, because he is under 26. Later, when the law is fully in place, it will guarantee him access to a comprehensive insurance policy, regardless of his pre-existing condition. And it’s the ability to finance these treatments that enabled Wiens to get the surgery in the first place, according to Brian Beutler:
Critic after critic from potential Republican Candidates such as Sarah Palin to Mike Huckabee have trotted out the draconian "Death Panels" claim.
Huckabee: Tucked away in the $787 billion stimulus was the establishment of the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness, which will become our version of Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the ironically and Orwellian-named NICE. NICE decides who lives and who dies based on age and the cost of treatment. So the stimulus didn't just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.
Yet Britain's NICE does nothing of the kind. The age of the patient and the cost of treatment does not factor into their recommendations, what they do is ddetermine whether a particular drug is too expensive, and too ineffective to be provided for free by Britain's National Health Service.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (happily called NICE by critics and supporters alike) decides whether medicines are cost-effective. If NICE says a drug provides too few benefits at too high a price, the National Health Service in England and Wales generally won't provide the drug.
So the argument is that expensive drugs have to actually get the job done or else alternatives are made available. There have been some complaints that NICE hasn't made some of the latest cancer fighting drugs available as their effectiveness has remained unconfirmed - but that's isn't a "denial of treatment" - just certain highly expensive and potentially wasteful treatment.
A broader and more important point is the Council of Comparative Effectiveness is specifically prohibited from looking exclusively at costs by the Affordable Care Act.
`Sec. 1181. (a) Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research Established-`
(1) IN GENERAL- The Secretary shall establish within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality a Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research (in this section referred to as the `Center') to conduct, support, and synthesize research (including research conducted or supported under section 1013 of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003) with respect to the outcomes, effectiveness, and appropriateness of health care services and procedures in order to identify the manner in which diseases, disorders, and other health conditions can most effectively and appropriately be prevented, diagnosed, treated, and managed clinically.
Their jobs is to look at what works best, not simply what works "cheapest". They may provide a recommendation to HHS and Congress, but neither of them are required to implement or follow that suggestion.
Contrast all of that with how Health Insurance Companies would behave without Health Care Reform in place.
Given the substantial evidence that thousands of people die every year because they don't have health insurance, the conversation about “death panels” has it exactly backwards.
Repealing the Affordable Care Act, as the law’s critics advocate, would likely mean more people die. And among those could be people who have gotten medical procedures that require them to take expensive medications for the rest of their lives--and suddenly find themselves with no way to pay for them.
Without Health Reform hundreds of thousands of young people like Weins wouldn't be able to remain on their parents Health Care Plan until they were 26. They would have to find a job that provides Health Care at a time when we are having about 8-9% unemployment (which for young people increased by 1.8 Million during 2010 for youths between 16 and 24.
Without Health Reform, if Weins got a job with a small business, it wouldn't be able to get at 35%-50% tax credit for the cost of it's insurance as many companies are right now, and have began to offer insurance to their employees for the first time ever.
Without Health Reform, a person like Weins - even if he did manage to get a job that provided care - might find himself blocked by the Insurance Company from being able to purchase that care due to his "pre-existing condition" - which is their "Death Panel".
Without Health Reform there wouldn't be an expedited appeals process if his insurance company refused to provide treatment because of it's cost - the way that 17-year-old Nataline Sarkysian was refused a kidney transplant by Cigna and died.
Without Health Reform, insurance companies could re-impose Life-Time Caps for Care on individuals who care is exceedingly expensive such as the immunity-suppression drugs that Weins will have to take for the rest of his life.
Without Health Reform the estimated 45,000 people per year who were previously dying due to lack of health care - would have no options what-so-ever. Now, at least some of them have better options and the potential - increasing greatly in 2014 - to gain access to some type of care through subsidies and/or the Health Care Exchanges.
It's not perfect - yes, there is the issue of Health Insurers continuing to jack up prices - but it's much better than what we had before.
Vyan