Ever since Obamacare became law, my colleagues and I have been writing about a race to the bottom in the exchanges – where health plans try to attract the healthy and avoid the sick. The result: people with serious health problems are being denied access to the doctors and hospitals they desperately need.
Most of the evidence of harm to patients comes from newspaper accounts and word of mouth. The reason: Congress has never done its own investigation or held hearings on the problem. Both parties are guilty.
However, when Democrats held a hearing the other day on Single Payer Health Insurance, the Republicans produced a witness with a tragic story. His daughter has a rare form of cancer and in the six-week open enrollment period the family found only one health plan in the exchange that had the clinic she needed in its network. However, after open enrollment ended, the plan removed that clinic from its network – leaving the child without access to the very doctors she most needed for her care.
Here is my interview with Christopher Briggs, the father.
And here is his congressional testimony.
Obamacare took away the Briggs family’s good health plan, just like it took away my wife’s company plan. In return, Chris and his family got an inferior Obamacare plan that was expensive with fewer benefits and less choice of doctors and hospitals. Because insurers have no other way to charge for risk, Obamacare plans in the marketplace don’t want Chris and his family in their risk pools. They will lose money. The race to the bottom, where Obamacare insurers have narrow networks that exclude the best doctors and the best hospitals, is a rationing technique.