WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Pat Roberts today said provisions in the partisan health care reform bill will further ration care, using cost controls to interfere with the doctor/patient relationship. Senator Roberts spoke against the bill on the Senate floor today.

“This bill aims to control the government’s spending on health care by rationing your access to that care,” Senator Roberts said. “Including the provisions in this bill, Americans, and especially senior-citizens, will have four rationing bodies that could interfere with their doctor’s recommendations for treatment.”

One of these new agencies, the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, will conduct Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER). CER is research that compares two or more treatment options for the same condition to see which one works best.

“Unfortunately, when CER is conducted by a government under pressure to meet a budget, it can be manipulated in some very sinister ways, as has been demonstrated by the United Kingdom’s CER institute: the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE),” Senator Roberts said. “NICE is notorious for delaying or outright denying access to health care treatments based on CER that takes into account the cost of the treatment and the government’s appraisal of the worth of the patient’s life or comfort.”

In addition to this Institute, the Democrats’ bill establishes the following rationing bodies:

• The Independent Medicare Advisory Board: an unelected body of 15 “experts” that will decide Medicare payment policy behind closed doors with minimal Congressional input;

• The CMS Innovation Center, to be part of The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): grants CMS broad authority to decide which treatments to ration.

Recent news reports have underscored the work of The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an existing panel of appointed “experts” that makes recommendations on what preventive services patients should receive.

Recently this Task Force decided to reverse its long-standing recommendation that women get regular routine mammograms to detect breast cancer starting at age 40.

Currently, the Task Force’s recommendations are optional. But the Reid bill bequeaths this unelected, unaccountable body with substantial new powers to determine insurance benefit requirements in Medicare, Medicaid and the private market.

“One really has to wonder if the Task Force’s abrupt about-face has anything to do with the fact that the federal government’s financial responsibility for these screenings (and for the health care needs they could potentially reveal) will be greatly expanded if this health care reform bill passes,” Senator Roberts said. “The outcry from oncologists, the American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiology, and breast cancer survivors and families across the country has forced Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to back peddle away from the Task Force’s recommendations, saying that they do not affect government payment policy.

This bill relies on the Task Force’s recommendations some 14 times throughout the legislation to set benefits, determine co-payments, make grant awards, etc.

“So, contrary to Secretary Sebelius’ assertion: if this bill passes, the recommendations of the Task Force will become government policy,” Senator Roberts said. “And not only that– they will be forced onto private insurers as well!”

Senator Roberts referenced the “Complete Lives System,” a health care rationing process advocated by Dr. Ezekial Emmanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, a bio-ethicist and “special advisor” to the President.

“Dr. Emmanuel’s ‘Complete Lives System’– something that sounds like a cure-all elixir sold out of Del Rio, Texas– basically works off of the premise that the older you are, the more you’ve lived, and therefore the less you deserve health care,” Senator Roberts said.

This summer President Obama echoed Dr. Emmanuel’s ideas, saying that as patients get older: “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller” instead.

“All of these policies must be viewed through the prism of these ideas, of this ‘Complete Lives System’,” Roberts said. “This is the goal– to save the government money by rationing care. By basing that rationing on some psuedo-scientific graph like this. At least in the U.K. they are honest about it.”

Roberts concluded, “These are the tools of rationing. These tools will restrict your ability, and your families’ ability to get a knee replacement, or a breakthrough cancer drug, or treatment for Alzheimer’s, or a mammogram.

“They will destroy the American health care system- the best health care system in the world. And they are the main reason why I will vote “NO” on this bill.”

Senator Roberts is a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the Senate Committee on Finance. He is Co-Chairman of the Senate Rural Health Caucus.

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