Republicans haven’t wasted any time in accusing Democrats of putting faceless bureaucrats in between patients and their doctors, attacking Barbara's Mikulski amendment for relying on government entities to create coverage guidelines. Under the amendment, an HHS agency—the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)—would determine what women’s services would be exempt from co-pays, and the US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) would help determine other types of preventative coverage. “Instead of letting doctors and their patients make the decision about when a woman needs a mammogram we now have not one government task force but two,” Kay Bailey Hutchison thundered yesterday on the Senate floor.
But though the GOP says that doctors should be the ones to decide what their patients need, who’s actually calling the shots in the proposals they’ve put forward? Judging by their first amendments to the health-care bill, the answer is obvious: private insurance companies.
Today, Lisa Murkowski offered an amendment on women’s preventative services as an alternative to Mikulski’s—one that would rely on private insurers to set the standards for preventive coverage. The Alaska Republican’s amendment would cover preventative care as delineated by “the 2 largest plans (by enrollment) participating in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program,” which covers members of Congress. As such, private insurers—not medical doctors—would have free reign to determine what preventative services should be offered without patient co-pays. And as a for-profit industry, insurers naturally have the incentive to offer less generous benefit packages that would require customers to shoulder more out-of-pockets expenses like co-pays.
In the first amendment offered on the opening day of the Senate health-care debate, Senator Barbara Mikulski proposed to restore a provision for women’s preventative services that had originally been in the Senate HELP bill.
