The fact that our doctors are all walking around from one examining room to another with laptops, rather than “charts,” lets us know that regulations for those in the healthcare field have already been in place for awhile, and that all that personal health information about us, that is being collected electronically, will likely be finding its way to the federal government soon.

Bill McCollum, former Attorney General of Florida, who led the multi-state lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, wrote an editorial in Politico, in which he urges Congress to pass a bill, brought forward by Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas), which would essentially “freeze” the implementation of the law in its tracks, a critical move since Obamacare’s costs, including economic, quality of care, and personal privacy aspects, are catastrophic to the nation. Knowing that, even if Congress passed a “freeze,” the president would not sign it, Attorney General McCollum recommends that the new Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, or “supercommittee,” take it up as a realistic, and relatively expedient, way to cut the deficit.

In light of the fact that there will still be some time before the Supreme Court will hear the case against Obamacare, the joint committee must consider the multitude of evidence that now exists about the costs of this program. According to Attorney General McCollum, in just 2012-2013 alone, for example, Obamacare owns $50 billion in tax increases, including $20 billion in payroll tax hikes on small businesses. The law institutes 159 new federal programs, costing $19 billion, and the controversial Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which will have never-before-seen power- no Congress needed- to make cuts to Medicare.

The fact is the Obama administration, under the direction of Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), is rolling out Obamacare in spades now in order to make it much more difficult to scale it back. We can just hear the Obama administration now: You want to stop it…now? You mean you want to waste all the money and time we’ve already spent to insure millions of people?

The Associated Press (AP) reports that DHHS has announced that the federal government is now designing a basic benefits package for millions of privately insured Americans. The package is part of guidelines recommended by the Institute of Medicine, a group of “experts” which describes itself as “independent,” but has been found to be otherwise. The article states that, until now, designing benefits has been the domain of insurers, employers and states. Obamacare, however, requires insurance companies to provide at least the federally approved package if they want to sell to small businesses, families, and individuals through new state markets set to open in 2014. Indeed, this is a pivotal move, and raises the question of whether the government should base health coverage for millions of patients on how much health services cost.

As seems to be often the case, the Obama administration says one thing and does another. Secretary Sebelius is apparently out there, attempting to calm conservatives that this is not a government takeover of healthcare, and that she will invite more time for the American people to “speak.” Yet, as she herself speaks, AP is reporting that work on the benefits package is already well under way within DHHS, and a major lobbying campaign to shape the final package is about to be initiated.

In order to ensure no one is “costing” too much in healthcare dollars, the federal government will need information about all of us. That’s where those laptops our doctors are carrying around will come in handy. Just one click, and all our private health information is off to the feds, so they can do their job of “overseeing” our healthcare.

To meet that end, a new rule proposed by the Obama administration demonstrates that concerns about privacy are well-founded. In a recent Washington Examiner op-ed, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R- Kansas) warns that Secretary Sebelius is demanding insurance companies submit detailed health care information about their patients. The congressman states that so well constructed is the secretary’s plan to obtain our private healthcare information, that three possible means of obtaining it are mapped out: 1) health insurers’ information about patients can go directly to the federal government; 2) the states may collect the healthcare information about their respective citizens; 3) health insurers’ “crunch the numbers” according to the law as provided in Obamacare.

The implications for this takeover of private health information are mind-boggling. What if you or a family member seek mental health care? Does the federal government need to know that you have had an addiction to drugs or alcohol? Does it need to know you had an affair? Does it need to know that your teen made a suicide attempt? If you are involved in any forensic matter, will the courts be more easily able to obtain your personal health information, for a case against you, now that the federal government already owns it, and it is no longer your private information? Is the federal government capable of keeping anything private? There are already many instances which reflect that it is not.

Attorney General McCollum is right on the money. Our nation cannot wait to hear the Supreme Court’s decision. We cannot even be sure of the nature of that decision. According to the Constitution, Congress is the body of elected representatives of the American people. Obamacare needs to be stopped by our elected representatives- dead in its tracks.

When opponents claim that Obamacare will lead to rationing of medical services, defenders counter with an irrelevant but true retort that care is already rationed by insurance companies.  By this logic, everything is rationed by economics.  Housing is rationed by the availability of capital to invest in housing which is a collective market choice.  Cars are rationed in that you can’t just walk into a dealer and drive off the lot.  So, yes, currently the health care market, mostly in the form of third-party payers (insurers and public programs), rations care in that there are finite resources to pay for treatments and everyone cannot have everything any time they wish.

The reason that argument is irrelevant is that the debate here is about government rationing of care, which represents an entire new level of restrictions on individuals.  When the government sets up panels of “experts” to make recommendations of what kind of care is appropriate under what circumstances and those recommendations are implemented in the form of regulations over what care will and will not be paid for by both private and public insurance, it limits the rights of patients to control their care in consultation with their physicians.  It also destroys the market for those excluded treatments which then become either prohibitively expensive or entirely unavailable.

Under Obamacare, new cost effectiveness panels will join the advisory panels like the Preventive Services Task Force.  Instead of just making clinical recommendations primarily intended to improve the quality of patient care, they will make recommendations intended to also contain the cost of care.  So when the cost effectiveness folks decide that mammograms are only indicated every two years and only for women over 50, that will become the reimbursement policy for Medicare and Medicaid, and the mandate for private insurance that must comport with coverage standards.  Sure, you could pay higher premiums for more coverage or pay out of pocket if your and your doctor think it wise to have annual mammograms at age 40, but wait, we were told Obamacare would save us money and wouldn’t decrease our coverage.

So we have a federal panel of “experts” setting policies for medical treatment.  That will hopefully prevent people from consuming unnecessary care that drives up the total cost of health care.  (Never mind that defensive medicine caused by liability concerns are strictly off the table.)  But we have just seen the knee jerk reaction of Congress and the White House to what is only a non-binding recommendation, where they instantly caved to public opinion and special interests (in the form of radiologists and the American Cancer Society) and disavowed the recommendations and assured American women that they could go right ahead and keep getting all the mammograms they want.

What will Congress do when the cost effectiveness folks decide that expensive colonoscopies should be denied to all but a limited group of patients?  Is it possible that when voters start calling their offices that Congress will step in to protect access to limitless colonoscopies?  Every time Congress or future administrations bow to pressure cost containment becomes more and more impossible.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sibelius made the farcical excuse that the Preventive Services Task Force doesn’t make policy or coverage decisions so all the controversy is a political ploy.  But that is not the point.  The entire purpose of the various new panels created under Obamacare (and already created in the stimulus bill) is precisely to make policy and coverage decisions.  In fact, the Preventive Services Task Force will play just such a role in the new world order.  So if everyone is reacting this way to a mere recommendation, how will they react to an actual policy dictate that meets opposition from some constituencies?  And when they create political pressure and the politicians give in, what happens to cost containment?

Health care professionals who agree with the Task Force recommendations to reduce the use of mammograms recognize this for exactly what it is—politicization of health care.  Under Obamacare, the most effective lobbying efforts will have more impact on the care you can get than the opinion of your physician.

The White House has launched its usual ad hominem attacks against those who have pointed to this instance as a taste of things to come.  They accuse opponents of lying and being disingenuous. They even try to imply some sinister motive to the Task Force by pointing out that its members were appointed by the Bush administration.  Since they have reduced this debate to the level of a playground back-and-forth, the “rubber and glue” principle applies and these charges are beginning to bounce right back on to the administration.