In a Dec. 19 op/ed for The Washington Times, Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC) warns Americans that Obamacare — via the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — has a nasty surprise for us on Christmas Day.
Rep. Meadows writes:
In an ongoing effort to keep Obamacare numbers elevated, CMS has embarked on the next step of its government takeover of healthcare.
[…] rather than allowing the “stupid” masses to make a decision on their own health plan, CMS has proposed a new rule that includes an overly reaching provision allowing CMS to re-enroll anyone who has not made the annual trek back to healthcare.gov in a cheaper plan of CMS’ choosing.
That’s right, the government will choose your plan, perhaps limit access to your doctor, and ultimately make the decision on what is “best” for you.
[…] CMS will use a blindfold to pick your plan. The agency will select your plan without knowing your medical history. They will do so without knowing if you are currently undergoing treatment or working with a specific doctor. They will do so without knowing your financial status. Despite the fact that the millions of people who already enrolled chose the plan that they believed was best for them.
CMS has laid the perfect trap: Sign up at healthcare.gov one time in your life and we will never let you go. If you don’t continually re-enroll each and every year, CMS will keep you on the plan that it chooses because, after all, CMS knows what’s best and they always make the best decision. […]
To be clear, a citizen will sign up once for a private plan with a healthcare provider, only to have that plan changed by the federal government. Moreover, CMS will change your plan after the open enrollment period ends, leaving you and your family stuck with a potentially unwanted plan for the year.
[…] The basic Constitutional question argued at the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was; Can the government force American citizens to purchase a product? Now the question has become: can the government change an individual’s private healthcare provider — without consent — just because that individual is silent and doesn’t opt-in to a new policy? The sound of silence is deafening and frightening.
Speaking of silence, CMS quietly opened a comment period on the new rule that extends until next week–ending on Christmas day.
[…] I sent a letter to CMS demanding they immediately strip this provision from the pending rule and abandon any future attempts to single-handedly choose Americans’ healthcare plans.
If not, the Republican House and Senate stands ready to take the action necessary to ensure CMS doesn’t further erode consumer choice in healthcare — as if the ACA already didn’t go far enough in doing so.
Put simply by Rick Moran in American Thinker:
New rules being proposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will give that agency enormous new powers over consumers who use the healthcare.gov website to purchase their insurance.
The proposed rules would allow CMS to automatically renew consumers’ policies every year if they don’t visit the website to do it themselves. Without any knowledge of an individual’s health care situation, their financials, or anything else that might affect what kind of policy they may need, the government will choose and force you to pay for a policy that they think works best for you.
Mark Meadows has been a House member only since January 2013. On Dec. 16, 2014, he was appointed Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations,
I went on CMS’s website to try to find the actual language of what Rep. Meadows is asserting.
What I found was written in mind-numbing bureaucratese that is calculated to obscure instead of illuminate — that if you don’t renew your medical insurance policy yourself every year, you’ll be automatically re-enrolled but it may be a policy chosen for you by your insurance carrier. I could not find language that says the government would pick the policy for you. But I’m not sure about this because Rep. Meadows did not provide us with a source — a CMS memorandum or notification.
Regardless of whether it’s the federal government (CMS) or an insurance carrier that’ll pick a policy for you, the point is that someone other than you — who doesn’t know your needs or preferences — would select your policy for you.
Tell your representative or senator(s) that you object to this new CMS rule!
H/t FOTM’s maziel
~Eowyn
