The President’s New Lie

“Substandard” and “cut- rate” is what President Obama calls the health plans that millions of Americans have lost, even though they wanted to keep them. Backpedaling on his promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Obama is now telling Americans another whopper. The president claims the insurance Americans can get on Obamacare exchanges is a better deal.

Don’t believe him. On the exchanges, you may no longer be able to use the doctors and hospitals you prefer. Many exchange plans exclude the top drawer academic hospitals like Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and New York Presbyterian in New York City. Instead, the law says that exchange plans must cover care at “essential community providers … that serve predominantly low-income, medically underserved individuals.” (Sec. 1311c(1)C) That means clinics, public hospitals and hospitals largely serving the Medicaid community.

The law’s authors reasoned that exchange plan customers should be able to shift back and forth between their plans and Medicaid, as their earnings fluctuate, without changing doctors and hospitals. That’s reasonable, but it’s bad news for consumers who had access to esteemed hospitals and doctors under their old plans and then got pushed into the exchanges.

Medicaid level care is, sadly, “substandard” to use the president’s word. A review of the experiences of nearly 900,000 patients undergoing eight different surgical procedures found that Medicaid patients were 50 percent more likely to die in the hospital after surgery than patients with private coverage. This review, by researchers at the University of Virginia, is one of several studies proving that Medicaid patients get worse care than patients with private insurance.

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