Because the Obama administration doesn’t know what else is left to throw money at, it proposed spending almost $350,000 to identify a problem already obvious to everyone else.
According to The New York Times, the Obama administration was “alarmed” by the lack of primary care doctors, so it proposed spying on doctors to see how difficult it is to get appointments.
The proposed “mystery shoppers,” as the Department of Health and Human Services put it, would call doctors’ offices in nine states at least twice, posing once as someone with Medicaid and again as someone with private insurance. Some spies would request an appointment as a new patient, asking about the wait or whether the doctor would accept Medicaid or new patients. Others would fake illnesses requiring immediate medical attention to see if the doctor would see them.
Doctors immediately objected to the plan, and like a child caught misbehaving, the Obama administration responded by saying the Bush administration did the same thing.
Obviously, the Bush administration didn’t spy on doctors. If it did, the mainstream media would have gone nuts.
What the Obama administration referred to was the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services secretly sending CMS officials and private contractors to shop marketing events for Medicare Advantage organizations and Medicare prescription drug plan sponsors. The CMS wanted to verify that the plans complied with marketing guidelines, aka the law. The agency found several plans in violation of the law, and it intervened accordingly.
In the case of the Bush administration, the CMS did exactly what the executive branch is supposed to do — enforce the law. By contrast, the HHS spying on doctors to see whether they accept Medicaid or Medicare has nothing to do with enforcing the law.
After it was flooded with criticism, the HHS responded, “After reviewing feedback … we have determined that now is not the time to move forward to this research project,” which is liberal mumbo jumbo for “we’ll wait awhile for everyone to forget and then send out the