Dr. Stephen Berman is the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a a professor with the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado. His commentary in the Denver Post (Sept. 23) so misrepresents Amendment 63 that I wonder if he’s even read it. Amendment 63 would protect your right to pay cash for medical care. It would prohibit Colorado politicians from forcing you to participate in or buy a government-approved health plan. It would also keep the feds from pressuring Colorado to enforce mandatory health coverage should legal challenges to the national mandate succeed. That’s it.
But Dr. Berman’s article does not even mention these issues. Instead, he says Amendment 63 would “exempt Colorado” from federal health care “reforms.” It does no such thing. The Amendment’s text clearly applies only to “the state of Colorado, its departments and agencies.”
As a doctor, Dr. Berman could have expressed how mandatory insurance entrenches excessive insurance policies, which makes doctors even more accountable to insurers instead of patients. Sadly, his carelessness misleads voters about Amendment 63.
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I submitted a version of the above to the Denver Post as a letter to the editor. In the comments section under the on-line article I wrote a more detailed critique:
Dr. Berman says “Amendment 63 ballot initiative to exempt Colorado from” various provisions of HR 3590. Dr. Berman, am I misunderstanding the text of the Amendment? Here’s the first part of Amendment 63:
No statute, regulation, resolution, or policy adopted or enforced by the state of Colorado, its departments and agencies, independently or at the instance of the United States shall: (a) require any person directly or indirectly to participate in any public or private health insurance plan, health coverage plan, health benefit plan, or similar plan; or (b) deny, restrict, or penalize the right or ability of any person to make or receive direct payments for lawful health care services.
The rest is more-or-less legal boilerplate.
Amendment 63 is about mandatory insurance and the ability to pay directly for medical care. As far as I can tell, it says nothing about what Dr. Berman refers to in paragraphs 2 and 3 of his article: mandating that all plans cover preventive care. It says nothing about mandating that kids can remain on their parents’ policy until they are 26, which increases insurance premiums. It says nothing about requiring insurers to sell child-only policies to kids with pre-existing conditions, mind you, at the same price as lower risks. (Insurers have responded by not selling these plans at all.)
BTW, such insurance price controls (same premiums for all, regardless of their health risk) encourage insurers to design policies to attract the healthy and drive away the sick.
Dr. Berman also says that the health control legislation (HR 3590) ” prevents health plans from dropping coverage when a child or adult becomes ill.” But this is not likely a violation f contract, it’s been explicitly against the law since 1997.
Dr. Berman, where does Amendment 63 refer to the above provisions not related to mandatory insurance or the freedom to pay directly for medical care?
Also, the Amendment is a limit on what the state government can do, not the federal government. Should legal challenges to mandatory insurance succeed. If this happens, the feds might try to pressure states to enforce mandatory insurance to qualify for federal tax dollars.
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See also my refutation of the most common argument against Amendment 63 (and for mandatory government-designed insurance).
