Democrats love to hand supposed experts sweeping regulatory power, but then they object when Republicans are in charge and appoint experts they don’t like. A revealing new case in point is the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

ObamaCare empowered the quasi-independent panel to mandate screenings that insurers must cover at no cost to patients. Democrats said this would guarantee access to life-saving care. But their dyspepsia over the recent appointment of medical specialists to the panel betrays how they want to use the panel to restrict care they deem too costly.

[audio] Sen. Bill Cassidy on Social Security Reform and Donald Trump’s ‘Majority of One’ “We are greatly concerned about the potentially outsized impact these members could have in pushing for services within their specialty,” 17 Democratic Senators wrote last week to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Democrats can’t credibly take issue with the qualifications of the new appointees. The new task force chair is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic. Another appointee runs a gastroenterology research center in Texas. Other new members include a cardiologist at UCLA medical school and a University of Michigan professor of preventive cardiology who leads a lab that trains AI to detect cardiovascular disease.

What Democrats worry about is that the specialists might recommend more preventive disease screenings. The HHS secretary has traditionally appointed primary-care practitioners to the panel based in part on recommendations from public-health groups.

The Biden appointees were mainly generalists without disease-area expertise. Their online résumés suggest they mainly specialized in diversity, equity and inclusion. Primary care doctors are less familiar with new research on diseases and screenings than specialists, which is one reason the panel is often behind the medical curve.

The task force recommended against prostate-specific antigen tests in 2012—on the theory that it could turn up false positives and that slow-growing tumors are unlikely to kill patients. The incidence of advanced prostate cancer surged. The panel then modified its recommendation in 2018 to suggest physicians discuss risks and benefits of screenings with patients ages 55 to 69.

But the panel retained its recommendation against PSA tests for men 70 and older. Why? Who knows, but some on the left argue that screening older men could result in unnecessary treatment since they may die of something else before cancer kills them.

The panel overall recommends few preventive screenings. It doesn’t endorse screenings for skin cancer or recommend that physicians counsel patients on how to look for suspicious moles and growths on their bodies. Do the experts worry patients will rush to the dermatologist if they detect one?

Not long ago, liberals claimed that the U.S. needed to focus more on preventing disease. Now they want to restrict tests they claim are too costly. This comes as artificial intelligence is enabling tests that can better detect diseases in early stages and predict risk factors. A recent study found that a blood test in development could accurately detect stage 1 and 2 pancreatic cancers roughly 87% of the time, with a low rate of false positives.

Insurers can cover screenings not recommended by the task force, but Medicaid and Medicare generally don’t. The real reason Democrats want a “Medicare for All” single-payer system is so they and their experts can decide for the rest of us what care we can get.