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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (17171)	8/10/2009 4:58:10 PM
From: Cage Rattler	1 Recommendation Respond to of 103300

Well considering the total $ amount of heath care we're talking about here, a one-percent savings would be a rather significant dollar value. Also it is a greater savings than the one-percentage figure implies. Why? Because it would cut back on needless, but expenses differential work-ups that are ordered solely to protect physicians from lawyer-generated litigation. Asinine law suits and obscene jury awards were problems that Bush promised to remedy during his first term -- yeah, right. And the trial lawyers were allegedly Obama backers. Who was it, Henry VI from Shakespeare’s pen who said, " The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."? Sounds good to me; after all the world can get along with a few less parasites. :^)

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (17171)	8/11/2009 7:42:19 AM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

HT-KLP Shovel-Ready Health Care By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY \| Posted Monday, August 10, 2009 4:20 PM PT ibdeditorials.com Health Care: There might not be a "death panel," as Sarah Palin described it, but federal bureaucrats will be making end-of-life decisions. That's why state-run medicine is a leading cause of death in Britain and Canada. ________________________________________ IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure ________________________________________ A post on the former Alaska governor's Facebook page has caused a stir by discussing openly what many privately fear and something we have written about. End-of-life counseling and efforts to measure cost-effectiveness of treatment will combine in a perfect storm to ration care in a way that lets the government decide who lives and who dies. "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society' whether they are worthy of health care," Palin wrote. "Such a system is downright evil." Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean's response was, "She made that up." Oregon resident Barbara Wagner might beg to differ — as she begs to stay alive. Last year, the 64-year-old received news that her cancer, which had been in remission, had returned. Her only hope was a life-extending drug that her doctor prescribed for her. The problem was that the drug cost $4,000 a month. The state-run Oregon Health Plan said no, that it was not cost-effective. Oregon's equivalent of a "death panel" sent her a letter saying it would cover drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost only $50 or so. Oregon could afford that. "It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. "But we won't give you the medication to live." The $4,000 could be better spent on someone else. Death panels are already here it seems, just as they have been for some time in Britain and Canada. The concept behind deciding who lives and who dies and how finite resources should be allocated was described by key Obama health care adviser Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. In his paper, "Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions," he expounds on what he calls "The Complete Lives System" for allocating treatments and resources. "When the worse-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly," he says, "allocating to the better-off is often justifiable." These are Dr. Emanuel's words, not Palin's. We're not making this up and neither is she. It is not hard to see this formula for rationing forcing children such as Trig and the elderly such as Barbara Morgan to take a number — a very high number. Big numbers are already a fact of life in the United Kingdom, where the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer. It's no surprise, then, to discover that while breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate, in Britain it's almost double at 46%. Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it. In Britain, it kills 57% of those it strikes. The health care bureaucracy is just as ugly in North America. Sally Pipes, a Canadian who heads the Pacific Research Institute, wrote in these pages on July 2 that in 2008, "the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment." Even the courts are recognizing the system's in trouble. Canadian Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec: "The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lines for public health care." Terrible outcomes from government-run health care, but think of all the money we'll save.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (17171)	8/11/2009 9:11:27 AM
From: JakeStraw	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Shovel-Ready Health Care ibdeditorials.com There might not be a "death panel," as Sarah Palin described it, but federal bureaucrats will be making end-of-life decisions. That's why state-run medicine is a leading cause of death in Britain and Canada.