January 30, 2009
HEALTHCARE RATIONING, DANGEROUS, UNHEALTHY AND EMBEDDED IN STIMULUS PLAN
Posted by bydesign001 under Economic Recovery Package, Economic Stimulus Plan, Economy, Medicaid, Medicare, Pay to Play, Recovery Package, healthcare, healthcare rationing, obama
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Rather, if taxpayers and lawmakers actually have the time to digest what’s in the bill, it stands no chance of passing. The measure claims to “to create jobs, restore economic growth, and strengthen America’s middle class,” but it’s really just a collection of giveaways and outlays for favored constituents and programs.
The president and the Democratic Party are counting on the desperate, the poorest and the under served in the nation to force this bill through. The harder he and Pelosi pushes, the deeper Americans should look into this so called stimulus package in order to ascertain its true intentions.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the package’s proposed spending on health care. Billions are earmarked for Medicaid and investments in centrally planned health information technology systems. But the most sinister of the bill’s line items is a relatively tiny $1.1 billion for government-chartered comparative-effectiveness research.
This new effort would investigate various medical treatments and attempt to determine which ones work best. Proponents claim that comparative-effectiveness research (CER) would empower doctors and patients to find out if newer, more expensive treatments are really worth the additional cost.
The federal government, which accounts for about a third of our nation’s healthcare spending, obviously has an interest in the outcome of comparative-effectiveness research. If older, cheaper treatments are found to be just as good as the cutting-edge ones, the feds stand to save a lot of money.
Enter healthcare rationing. I have blogged about Obama’s healthcare platform before which is nothing more than the rationing of healthcare.
The problem with healthcare rationing is that it is all about dollars and cents, not the health of the patient. Many lives are lost under healthcare rationing such as that which the President is proposing.
Insurance companies already implement their brand of rationing and now the government wants to put its seal of approval on healthcare rationing causing more needless pain, suffering, lack of service and loss of life.
In other countries, like the United Kingdom, comparative-effectiveness agencies routinely deny patients new treatments, citing cost-effectiveness. As a result, thousands of Britons afflicted with diseases that are expensive to treat – like cancer – suffer needlessly, unable to get the pricey meds they need.
The CER provision represents a major victory for incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Daschle, who has long championed the research as a way to control healthcare costs.
HOW WOULD THEY DO IT
The CER provision represents a major victory for incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Daschle, who has long championed the research as a way to control healthcare costs.
In his recent book “Critical,” Daschle revealed how he’d marshal CER findings to cut costs – through something he calls a Federal Health Board (FHB).
To understand how the board would operate, it is necessary to understand the overall scheme into which it would fit. Daschle would allow people to keep their current health coverage if they desired, but at the same time he would expand the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program beyond federal employees and allow people to buy into Medicare. He would force everyone to have healthcare coverage by imposing a “play or pay” mandate, which would order people without coverage to pay a tax or fine. The federal government would then subsidize individuals who politicians judged unable to afford to buy into the government plan.
The board would sit atop the entire system – acting, in his words, as “a cost-effectiveness review organization with teeth,” requiring Medicare, Medicaid and health benefits program to follow its guidelines. It would bare its teeth while “reviewing” healthcare practices and setting “guidelines” to hold down the income of medical providers and suppress the price of health care.
In other words, the Board would simply ration health care as it saw fit. And with more Americans on the government dole thanks to the expansion of the benefits program and Medicare, the board would wield near-absolute power in determining how doctors interacted with their patients.
Cost concerns would be paramount, meaning less health care would be available to consumers. Nominally, the Federal Health Board might bring us closer to Daschle’s dream of universal coverage. But everyone subjected to its dictates would find their healthcare experience to be a nightmare.
Hidden In The Stimulus, A Very Unhealthy Provision By Larry Hunter, NY Daily News, 01/30/09, nydailynews.com
During the election the President has said more than once that he would take a scalpel approach to cuts in government programming. He is not lying about that.
In other words, the government will earn revenue from those who buy into Medicare, earn revenue from those who cannot afford healthcare insurance by fining and penalizing them; and then turn around and play God (right up the Messiah’s alley) with American lives.
Healthcare rationing will take more lives than it saves, not necessarily young lives.
The sole purpose of healthcare rationing is to treat those financially feasible to treat. It’s simple and primary function is not to waste precious dollars on the terminally ill and the elderly. Sounds cold and calculating, does not it. It is. Why? Because the terminally ill and the elderly are going to die anyway, therefore, why waste precious dollars in that direction.
Enter cheap, less successful treatment, experimental projects, all of which will be government sanctioned in which the patient will have almost no say in the matter especially if he or she cannot afford better healthcare services.
This is what our President and his party bring to the American people embedded in the stimulus plan.
Be careful what you wish for. God forbid your life should depend on this package.
References: FOR CLARITY SAKES: OBAMA, UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE, WAR ON TERROR
FOR CLARITY SAKES (Part 2): OBAMA, Failure of Universal Healthcare and Price Controls will Make the Poor the Scapegoats
THE HARSH REALITY OF OBAMA’S UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE PLAN
BARACK OBAMA’S HEALTH CARE LIES
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©January 2009, pumabydesign001.
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