hOles And Fiefdoms

The shock continues:

Hot Air � Why ObamaCare has gaping holes: AoSHQ’s Dave In Texas is a bit surprised that the voluminous new healthcare law does not, in fact, define health care:

Wait until the public discovers the government is now literally determining what qualifies as “health care” in America.

That isn’t a typo. ObamaCare mandates that insurers spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on benefits, but Democrats never got around to writing the fine print of what counts as a benefit. So a handful of regulators are now choosing among the tens of thousands of services that doctors, hospitals and insurers offer. Few other government decisions will do more to shape tomorrow’s health market, or what’s left of it.

The WSJ piece just quoted is addressing what will count as medical benefits for insurance “medical loss ratios” under the new law. However, we will see a variation on the same theme when the new Health Choices Czar gets down to the business of deciding minimum levels of benefits for insurance plans to be offered through the government-created Potemkin market known as the Health Exchange.

And successful Potemkinism means perpetuation:

"Indeed, Congress wanted to save those fights for later. Punting any issue likely to cause controversy keeps the Beltway carousel spinning. The interest groups already mentioned, plus those lobbying on everything to breast cancer to AIDS to chiropractic to medical device manufacturers will all be gearing up to lobby the vast new bureaucracies created under Obamacare for favorable consideration of one sort or another. Tossing the law’s hot potatoes to unelected civil servants allows Congresspeople to play the white knights, working the Rube Goldberg-esque machinery on behalf of their constituents and their donors. At the outset, this will be directed to establishing generous minimum benefits. Later, when the spiralling costs of the program produce plans for rationing care, pols will intervene to “save” valuable benefits from the bureaucratic reaper. The pols will also help steer groups to the crucial and costly counsel provided by their former staffers, to be employed at the K Street firm of “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”

In short, this process is how Congress disclaims responsibility for Leviathan it creates, as a way of squeezing money from the public to perpetuate their incumbency and their fiefdoms."

Any questions?