During one of his choreographed "townhall meetings," packed with his slobbering disciples, Ol' Jugears went on and on about all the "disinformation" the stupid public is upset about, and how everything is just fine. Trust me, he says (after all, he IS The One!).
He spoke to Sarah Palin's reference to "death panels":
the intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they’re ready on their own terms. It wasn’t forcing anybody to do anything.
Part of her excellent response:
Check out the whole statement on facebook.
These consultations are authorized whenever a Medicare recipient’s health changes significantly or when they enter a nursing home, and they are part of a bill whose stated purpose is “to reduce the growth in health care spending.” [5] Is it any wonder that senior citizens might view such consultations as attempts to convince them to help reduce health care costs by accepting minimal end-of-life care? As Charles Lane notes in the Washington Post, Section 1233 “addresses compassionate goals in disconcerting proximity to fiscal ones.... If it’s all about obviating suffering, emotional or physical, what’s it doing in a measure to “bend the curve” on health-care costs?” [6]
As Lane also points out:
Though not mandatory, as some on the right have claimed, the consultations envisioned in Section 1233 aren’t quite “purely voluntary,” as Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.) asserts. To me, “purely voluntary” means “not unless the patient requests one.” Section 1233, however, lets doctors initiate the chat and gives them an incentive -- money -- to do so. Indeed, that’s an incentive to insist.
Patients may refuse without penalty, but many will bow to white-coated authority. Once they’re in the meeting, the bill does permit “formulation” of a plug-pulling order right then and there. So when Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) denies that Section 1233 would “place senior citizens in situations where they feel pressured to sign end-of-life directives that they would not otherwise sign,” I don’t think he’s being realistic. [7]
Even columnist Eugene Robinson, a self-described “true believer” who “will almost certainly support” “whatever reform package finally emerges”, agrees that “If the government says it has to control health-care costs and then offers to pay doctors to give advice about hospice care, citizens are not delusional to conclude that the goal is to reduce end-of-life spending.” [8]
So are these usually friendly pundits wrong? Is this all just a “rumor” to be “disposed of”, as President Obama says? Not according to Democratic New York State Senator Ruben Diaz, Chairman of the New York State Senate Aging Committee, who writes:
Section 1233 of House Resolution 3200 puts our senior citizens on a slippery slope and may diminish respect for the inherent dignity of each of their lives.... It is egregious to consider that any senior citizen ... should be placed in a situation where he or she would feel pressured to save the government money by dying a little sooner than he or she otherwise would, be required to be counseled about the supposed benefits of killing oneself, or be encouraged to sign any end of life directives that they would not otherwise sign. [9]
Of course, it’s not just this one provision that presents a problem. My original comments concerned statements made by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy advisor to President Obama and the brother of the President’s chief of staff. Dr. Emanuel has written that some medical services should not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens....An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” [10] Dr. Emanuel has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.” [11]
President Obama can try to gloss over the effects of government authorized end-of-life consultations, but the views of one of his top health care advisors are clear enough. It’s all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing, and more evidence that the top-down plans of government bureaucrats will never result in real health care reform.
American Spectator Magazine has come out in defense of her truthfulness as well:
Congress already enacted, as part of the stimulus package, $20 billion for Health Information Technology, or HIT. This is designed to get every doctor and every patient wired up to a national database of health information. Every disease, diagnosis, prescription, and treatment will be submitted to this national database and made accessible to researchers, payers, and law enforcement. This is not speculation; it’s the law.
Next, the stimulus package also appropriated money to create a “comparative effectiveness research” program. Its proponents claim this will only be “research” to determine what treatments work best for large populations, using the health information database to make their determinations.
This is based on Britain’s “NICE” (National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness) program. NICE determines the dollar value of a “quality adjusted life year” (QALY) and allows payment for drugs and treatments that are lower than that number and disallows those that cost more. NICE has already disallowed cancer drugs and treatments such as hip replacements for elderly people and stopped allowing injections of steroids for people with severe back pain.
Of course, just doing research doesn’t sound threatening. Research is good, isn’t it? We all love research.
This is where the current bills come in. To hold down the costs of Obama’s health care program, the administration has come up with a whole menu of activities—chronic disease management, pay-for-performance, wellness incentives, and so on.
In fact, these are the kind of programs that take benign “comparative effectiveness research” and put some teeth into it. Suddenly it isn’t just research. Suddenly we are using that research to decide how much to pay doctors. That is the whole purpose of pay-for-performance (or P4P among policy wonks.)
Physicians will be paid more if they follow the guidelines established by the yet-to-be-named research group. (My suggestion for a name is Comparative Effectiveness Research Commission of the United States, or CERCUS.) The HIT will be able to alert the CERCUS as soon as any doctor tries to violate the P4P guidelines. Uh-oh! A warning will pop up on the doctor’s computer: YOU ARE TRYING TO VIOLATE THE GUIDELINES! EXPLAIN YOUSELF!!
Your doctor may be able to fill out all the paperwork to get an exception, and appeal any denial, but it will be an uphill slog. More likely, the doctor will go with the flow and accept the higher level of payment for being obedient.
That’s where Mrs. Palin comes in. She would like her son Trig to live. She will need to appeal the decision to . . . whom? Very likely a panel much like what she describes.
Only it won’t be called a Death Panel. It may be called the LIFETIME Panel: “Listening to Irritating Families Explain Their Insistence on a Medical Examination.” (American Spectator)
And don't forget two other inconvenient truths: They ration care and decide who is worthy of continued life already in the Netherlands and the UK. They've had government run medical long enough that they are running out of other people's money to steal and are doing what they need to keep control.
They other things is, HOW THE HELL CAN YOU TRUST ANYTHING THIS MAN SAYS?!
He says you can keep your insurance and doctors, but He's on record saying he WILL get single payer healthcare . When some called Obamacare a trojan horse for intituting government control of your body, the man that is the architect of Obama's plan laughed and said that this bill isn't a Trojan horse, because its leading to completely socialized medicine is right in plain view. He thought it was funny.
Ha ha ha. We'll just slip this one by like the rest of what we got done and the stupid, racist, redneck public won't know what hit 'em until it's too late. Regular laugh riot, that.
The president can't come out and say that he loves this country so much that he's committed to destroying it to rebuild as a Marxist state. He' smarter than that. He and his cronies are doing it bit by bit, with legislation pretending to be for another purpose, and at a pace accelerated enough that they can get it done before too many wake up to the nightmare that he's creating.
But people are starting to wake up now and he is starting to panic. Hope it's not too late.
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