Thursday, December 29, 2011

More HHS Misinformation on Preventive Services

As we previously noted, yesterday the Administration released a blog post claiming eight ways in which Obamacare is helping Americans.  One of the eight “benefits” highlighted was “free preventive services” – not “free of cost-sharing,” mind you, but characterized in the blog post as being absolutely “free.”  This claim is clearly false, as the Administration’s own rule regarding preventive services noted; here’s just a small excerpt from that rule:

The Departments calculated an estimate of the average impact using the information from the analyses described above, using estimates of the number of individuals in non-grandfathered health plans in the group and individual markets in 2011.  The Departments estimate that premiums will increase by approximately 1.5 percent on average for enrollees in non-grandfathered plans.

The blog post raises an obvious question: How can “free preventive services” raise premiums by 1.5 percent – or conversely, if they raise premiums by ANY amount, how can the Administration claim they are “free?”

Of course, last year Secretary Sebelius herself sent a very public letter to insurers attacking their supposed “misinformation.”  Given HHS’ own allegations about others’ supposed misinformation, it will be interesting indeed to see whether the Administration makes any attempt to correct what is a clear factual error on its part.