Every health plan, regardless of how and where it’s purchased, is going to be subject to the rules established by these “independent” government groups

Obamacare's Contraception Mandate 

And Its Implications For Regulation

 Of Medical Care

 

by Scott Gottlieb

The mandate that health plans must fully cover any form of contraception is of a piece with the way that Obamacare centralizes judgment about treatments, and tries to establish a universal convention when it comes to the practice of medicine.

Obamacare pushes these decisions into the hands of unaccountable boards, all but ensuring that these considerations will be the stuff of politics indefinitely.

The scheme that created the contraception mandate gets to the very heart of how the law puts Washington in charge of establishing medical standards by erecting a series of largely unaccountable committees to set rules on what medical care we should and shouldn’t have access to. The regulations they establish don’t just apply to Obamacare plans, but any private health insurance that consumers buy.

The benefits they require will be important to some people. The problem is with the way that Washington tries to force consumers to submit to its judgment about what should or shouldn’t be included in your coverage. The mandate that health plans must cover contraception and surgical sterilization falls under this framework.

To decide which benefits Washington will mandate (and those that don’t make the cut) the federal scheme had to anoint some new authority. So out of expediency, Obamacare turns to a group of existing committees and agencies to play this role, even though these government entities were never meant to wield so much power.

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Read more: www.aei.org