House Republicans plan to cut $360 million in Obamacare funding
in this year’s budget. That’s a good start, enough to slow
implementation of the health care law but not stop it. But not good
enough to stop the administration from spending $100 million to run
an ad campaign and hire a sales team to push Obamacare to thousands
of doctors. That’s right. Obamacare will use a sales force (with
cars and expense accounts) to convince doctors that government
health guidelines are the way to go.
The home of this marketing machine is Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Its budget of nearly $1
billion a year (starting in 2014 it will be more) is scheduled to
be cut by only $25 million this fiscal year. Perhaps Republicans
don’t know that AHRQ is the operating system for Obamacare as well
as its campaign manager.
AHRQ is mentioned in the Obamacare law 12 times. The
agency and its consultants — most of them true Obamacare believers
— are responsible for determining what preventive services we get,
what health care “quality” is, what should be cut from Medicare and
what new technologies should be paid for.
AHRQ was behind the decision to restrict breast exams to
women over 50. It supplied the “evidence” for annual end of life
counseling for the same seniors it decided shouldn’t get screened
for depression or hip fractures. Meanwhile, it’s funding radical
organizations pushing for sex change operations and the
autism-vaccine link.
And it has big plans for the rest of that money. The Obama
administration is not content to control what doctors do. It wants
to control what they know as well. Carolyn Clancy, AHRQ’s director,
talks about “embedding” directives, guidelines, and reminders into
the electronic health records of every American. AHRQ is spending
millions to insert clinical decision support tools for a variety of
purposes. One of the most prominently mentioned: end of life care
counseling.
But AHRQ is not just content to “embed” Obamacontent into
the lives of every American. It is also spending $50 million to
“build a marketing campaign around comparative effectiveness
research. (CER).” CER is promoted as information about what are the
most medically and cost-effective treatments, drugs, and medical
devices. But what works and what doesn’t can change almost daily
and varies by individual. Simple blood tests and iPad-equipped
sensors will be able to monitor many illnesses before they spread
as well as individualize treatment of a disease.
AHRQ is not only spending hundreds of millions of dollars
on studies claiming there’s insufficient evidence to either use or
pay for such technologies.
AHRQ is spending millions to insure that its information
is found more quickly and more often on the Internet. Over 70
percent of all Americans use the Web to seek out medical
information. AHRQ plans to crowd out other sources of advice by
making sure Obamacontent is embedded in as many websites as
possible and using search engine tools to drive doctors and
patients to government friendly or supported sites.
AHRQ is spending $34 million for an ad campaign to get
doctors to adopt comparative effectiveness research. Here too, the
campaign is heavy on Web-based tools with the goal of trying to get
AHRQ and its consultants positioned as “experts” on Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube, and search engines. It is buying up ad space in
medical journals, which AHRQ is also flooding with its studies
claiming most new technologies are more effective than old
ones.
In case doctors don’t get the message “embedded” in health
records and the Internet, AHRQ is hiring hundreds of Obamacare
sales reps to convince physicians that Obamacare medicine is the
way to go. AHRQ’s Obamareps will be paid $20 million to sell
doctors AHRQ prescriptions. For instance, AHRQ reps will tell
doctors that that all diabetes, hypertension, and prostate cancer
treatments are more or less the same, often using data a decade
old.
Medical science is way ahead of AHRQ. Doctors are able to
tailor treatments to the race, gender, age, family history of a
patient, as well as the pathways many forms of cancer takes. Today
new imaging technologies and genetic tests can help predict cancer
risk. But AHRQ’s sales reps will tell doctors there’s no evidence
they save lives.
Obamacare ‘s overlords want to monopolize medical
decisions and medical information while marginalizing everything
else. That goal is central to setting up the health exchanges and
limiting choice. AHRQ’s multi-million marketing campaign is
critical to both. Unless Congress cuts it budget to nearly nothing,
it will be impossible to repeal the law and replace it with
something better.
