They had insurance, but their plans got canceled because of the Affordable Care Act, forcing them into ObamaCare. Now they’re discovering that ObamaCare plans aren’t for sick people. They offer “free” mammograms, “free” colonoscopies and “free” contraceptives — meaning you don’t have a copay. But if you have cancer, MS or Parkinson’s, you’re in trouble: Most ObamaCare plans skimp on specialists and life-saving drugs....
Dr. Jeffrey English, a Georgia neurologist who treats patients with advanced MS, worries that such patients forced into exchange plans will deteriorate rapidly. Some plans don’t cover six out of the 10 drugs that can treat MS, including the ones most effective at staving off irreversible paralysis....
Dr. Katherine Albrecht developed stage 3c breast cancer (which had spread to her lymph nodes) in 2011. Doctors at her local hospital in Nashua, NH, told her to get her affairs in order. But her Anthem PPO health insurance allowed her to go to Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston, where she was successfully treated, and afterward to Cornell Breast Cancer Center.Her Anthem policy was canceled late last year, because it didn’t meet ObamaCare mandates such as maternity coverage. Yet ObamaCare-compliant policies in New Hampshire won’t cover care at 10 of the 26 hospitals in the state, and none outside the state — so if she’d been on ObamaCare when she got cancer, she couldn’t have gone to Boston for care. Albrecht says, “Under ObamaCare, I’d be dead.”...
Recently, the president urged Organizing for Action volunteers to enroll as many people as possible in ObamaCare before the March 31 deadline, calling it “God’s work.” Really? Maybe helping the uninsured is God’s work. But not convincing people with health problems to move into plans that won’t provide the care they need to stay alive. In the private sector, that would be fraud. It takes politics to a new low....