Do we really want government to go there?
Dennis Byrne -- Chicago Tribune - September 8, 2009

While the hawker in chief chilled on Martha's Vineyard, we enjoyed a week of peace and quiet, but now President Barack Obama has accelerated back to full voice as he speaks to America's schoolchildren Tuesday and to a joint session of Congress Wednesday.

While the supposedly non-partisan speech to children is controversial enough, the speech to Congress should be a doozy. In it, opponents of Obama's health-care vision will finally find out what his health-care vision is. Despite the president having given nearly 30 speeches on health-care reform, Americans still don't know exactly what he wants. Truth is, Obama set up Congress for a fall by letting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her liberal allies front his radical re-creation of America's health-care system in the form of the proposed America's Affordable Health Choices Act. As Americans have come to better understand the legislation, its popularity has dropped, along with the public approval rating of Pelosi and her congressional allies.

They no longer will let Obama sit comfortably on the sidelines. He'll have to come up with something, and considering the political opportunism that permeates the Obama White House, it will be no surprise if the president scuttles the Pelosi vision and proposes something that the Obama/Emanuel/Axelrod trinity thinks is more palatable.

Beware.

No matter how good it first sounds, if it contains a Health Choices Administration or something like it, Obama's "compromise" will just be a wolf in sheep's clothing. If you don't know what a Health Choices Administration is, you haven't studied the legislation. It would be an "independent" (oh, sure) agency created in the executive branch, headed by a "Health Choices commissioner." Its job would be the "establishment of qualified health benefits plan standards ..." Even if Obama drops the controversial "public option" that puts government in the insurance business. And retention of an HCA-style agency still would represent a nationalization of health care.

The agency wouldn't be some kind of advisory panel; it effectively would define what falls within "generally accepted standards of medical or other appropriate clinical or professional practice" worthy of being insured (or not insured). What amounts to a health czar backed by a big, new bureaucracy would set national health standards, root out "non-compliance" and enforce its own codes with the power to impose fines and boot out insurers that don't meet those standards. If this is not an overly broad grant of power to a brawny new federal agency, then nothing is. No wonder people are scared into thinking the Health Choices Act provides for "death panels."

Dr. James Rosenberg, a north suburban gastroenterologist, told me he was especially troubled by the combination of such powers with the mandated creation of a national electronic health record database under federal auspices. He showed me how my complete health record already can be called up on a computer screen by participating health-care providers. It's a wonderfully comprehensive system that clearly gives me better health care than can be provided by the old pen-and-paper system.

But what happens when this information is fed into a nationalized data bank under the control of a new federal agency that sets and enforces standards of care? Rosenberg said he envisions a federal system that will monitor and regulate procedures he deems necessary for his patients. Enter the patient's name and the procedure into the computer, and the course of care could then be theoretically bumped against what the Health Choices Administration has defined as appropriate for a patient of that age, state of health and other demographics. To put it bluntly, a patient could possibly be denied a colonoscopy because she is too old to meet the cost-benefit standards or whatever tests the new agency sets for "standards of medical practice."

Here it should become apparent that the use of the word "choices" in naming the new law and the new federal agency is a public relations sham. The choices wouldn't be in the hands of the patient and her doctor, but (as the cliche goes, as true as it is) of a distant bureaucrat.

Yes, such decisions now can be made by bureaucrats sitting in distant offices of large health insurance companies. When disagreements arise over what should or shouldn't be covered, the patient and the physician squabble with the insurance company for the best outcome. But I'd rather take my chances with Rosenberg going after my insurance company than taking on the federal government.