AAHCA 2009 - 1st Objection: You Have to Pay for What You Don't Need

You can peruse the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 at your own convenience. Other than the fact that this legislation is utterly without any constitutional authority, I have been looking it over and here is my first objection:

Section 122 defines the "Essential Benefits Package." At subsection (b), we find:

(b) Minimum Services To Be Covered- The items and services described in this subsection are the following:

(1) Hospitalization.

(2) Outpatient hospital and outpatient clinic services, including emergency department services.

(3) Professional services of physicians and other health professionals.

(4) Such services, equipment, and supplies incident to the services of a physician's or a health professional's delivery of care in institutional settings, physician offices, patients' homes or place of residence, or other settings, as appropriate.

(5) Prescription drugs.

(6) Rehabilitative and habilitative services.

(7) Mental health and substance use disorder services.

(8) Preventive services, including those services recommended with a grade of A or B by the Task Force on Clinical Preventive Services and those vaccines recommended for use by the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

(9) Maternity care.

(10) Well baby and well child care and oral health, vision, and hearing services, equipment, and supplies at least for children under 21 years of age.

Mandating specific benefits only raises the prices for everyone. I object to paying for other peoples' substance abuse. If they abuse substances, let them pay for it. Subsection (8) is so nebulous as to be void for vagueness. I object to being forced to pay for services that are not defined, or could change at the whim of some bureaucrat. Vaccines are a clear danger to those who are duped into taking them and if I do not want any vaccinations for me or mine, that is my own business. Bachelors and women over the age of 50 have no need for maternity care or well-baby and well-child care. Only those people needing those services should be billed for it.

That is why we have private policies, so that you can choose the type of coverage you want and pay for just the coverage you need. While inclusion of these services in an "essential benefits package" may reduce the costs for those that would use these services, it most certainly will raise the costs for people who don't need them. This is not what Obama or the Democratic majority promised me.

Frankly, health insurance policies should be like term life insurance policies: A fixed rate over a twenty or thirty year period that covers only catastrophic losses. Add to this a deductible limit schedule and I can choose whether I want to be liable for up to $1k, $2k, or $5k in medical expenses. Peter Schiff's father sold such policies for $25 per year. Now, that's affordable health insurance.

In final analysis, the petitioners' sole reliance is the thesis that efficiency depends upon morale, and morale in turn upon assurance of security for the worker's old age. Thus pensions are sought to be related to efficiency of transportation, and brought within the commerce power. In supporting the act the petitioners constantly recur to such phrases as 'old age security,' 'assurance of old age security,' 'improvement of employee morale and efficiency through providing definite assurance of old age security,' 'assurance of old age support,' 'mind at ease,' and 'fear of old age dependency.' These expressions are frequently connected with assertions that the removal of the fear of old age dependency will tend to create a better morale throughout the ranks of employees. [295 U.S. 330, 368] The theory is that one who has an assurance against future dependency will do his work more cheerfully, and therefore more efficiently. The question at once presents itself whether the fostering of a contented mind on the part of an employee by legislation of this type is in any just sense a regulation of interstate transportation. If that question be answered in the affirmative, obviously there is no limit to the field of so-called regulation. The catalogue of means and actions which might be imposed upon an employer in any business, tending to the satisfaction and comfort of his employees, seems endless. Provision for free medical attendance and nursing, for clothing, for food, for housing, for the education of children, and a hundred other matters, might with equal propriety be proposed as tending to relieve the employee of mental strain and worry. Can it fairly be said that the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce extends to the prescription of any or all of these things? Is it not apparent that they are really and essentially related solely to the social welfare of the worker, and therefore remote from any regulation of commerce as such? We think the answer is plain. These matters obviously lie outside the orbit of congressional power.

- Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton R.R. Co., 295 U.S. 330 (1935)

Forcing me to pay for something that I don't need is patently unconstitutional.