Enzi: No Washington Bureaucrat Should Deny or Delay Care for You and Your Family

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Ranking Member of the SenateHealth, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, today proposed changes to theKennedy health care bill that would protect patients by specifically prohibiting Washingtonbureaucrats from denying or limiting access to health care services.

“The Kennedy bill would give Washington bureaucrats the power to deny you and yourfamily the care you need,” Enzi said. “This partisan bill contains no provisions to protect youfrom health care rationing and would allow Washington bureaucrats to decide what care youreceive based on your age, life expectancy, disability or quality of life.

“No Washington bureaucrat should be able to deny or delay your care. That breaks thePresident’s promise, that if you like the care you have, you can keep it. My amendments willensure that no bureaucrat can stand between you and your doctor.”

As written, the Kennedy bill creates a new bureaucracy to dictate which treatments to payfor. Enzi compared the new Washington bureaucracy to the United Kingdom’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a government agency that decides which treatmentspatients can and cannot receive. NICE forces many patients to wait months and even years for the care they need, a practice known as “rationing by delay.”

In the last several years, NICE has:

• Blocked breast cancer patients from receiving break?through drugs;• Prevented patients with Alzheimer’s disease from receiving medication;• Forced patients with multiple sclerosis to wait years to receive innovative new treatments; and,• Allowed only a small percentage of patients with osteoporosis to receive new medicine.

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