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Medicare's New Rule: Your Money or Your Life
By Scott Holleran
If you are enrolled in Medicare—and every individual over age 65 is enrolled, like it or not—you have the right to choose your physician, right? Wrong. An obscure provision of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which went into effect in January, explicitly restricts the right to choose one’s physician.
The new rule forbids a Medicare patient to pay for services covered by Medicare unless the physician quits Medicare for two years. This may sound like an arcane edict from Big Brother, but it’s not. It is an exact application of Medicare’s underlying philosophy. Under Medicare, you are entitled to health care; health care is regarded as a right. But, because government provides your health care, government decides your health care, too. You, the individual, have no choice. The so-called right to health care, in effect, strips you of your right to choose a physician and pay for health care.
How? When government began subsidizing health care for seniors in 1965, patients and doctors—perceiving that someone else paid the bills—used medicine more than necessary, driving costs up. Today, Medicare is going broke and government is attempting to control costs by dictating the terms of your health care. Thus, the notion that health care is a right—and its result, the Medicare law—robs you of your real individual rights.
At least one patient is suffering under the new rule. The 65 year-old patient has glaucoma, an eye condition. Because she is allergic to medications, she sought advanced treatment from an ophthalmologist with her own money—but the physician had to refuse her payment or dump Medicare patients for two years. Today, the woman is going blind.
Houston Rep. Bill Archer and Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl have proposed legislation to restore seniors' the right to pay for their own health care.
Defenders of the Medicare rule claim that government is protecting seniors. One congressional staffer argued that doctors will take advantage of seniors—and seniors won’t know it. In other words, government should wipe out individual rights because seniors are incapable of exercising their rights. The idea that government bureaucrats know better than the dim-witted masses is the premise of every totalitarian regime in modern history.
There is an effort to restore the patient’s individual rights, but it will take an act of Congress to do it—and the possibility is increasingly remote. Congress is considering the proposal by Kyl and Texas Rep. Bill Archer to restore the right to contract for private medicine. But proponents of national health care, including the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), have denounced an individual’s right to pay for health care and terrified thin-skinned politicians.
The new law offers the ethics of a street thug. If the Medicare rule could speak, it would say: “Your money or your life.” Medicare patients—and any advocate of liberty—ought to reject the government’s hideous inversion of individual rights and proclaim: “It’s my money and it’s my life.”
Scott Holleran ()
is a health care correspondent and commentator. Holleran was a
campaign aide and congressional assistant to House Labor, Health
and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee
Chairman Rep. John Porter, (R, IL,). Holleran’s articles have
been published in the Wall Street Journal, Silicon
Valley Business Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and
the Los Angeles Times.
Copyright © 1993 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved.
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