Jun 12
Great Britain and Canada are finding that the relentlessly escalating costs of socialized medicine present a financially untenable situation. There is not enough money to meet the needs of the unrestrained demand. Of course, this situation was entirely predictable despite the dissembling and prevarication by liberals.
How are they contemplating addressing this problem? Rationing.
Since they can’t afford to pay for all the services demanded, the governments will selectively limit usage by restricting visits, procedures and other utilizations. In addition, there will be a requisite deterioration in quality of care.
Such an outcome was resolutely predicted and feared by millions of Americans who opposed Obamacare. In spite of this vociferous opposition, Obama and the arrogant elitist Congressional Democrats rammed the legislation through, needing corrupt stratagems in order to bribe some of their fellow ideologues to vote yes.
If Obamacare is not repealed or defunded, what is transpiring in Great Britain, Canada and elsewhere will occur here as well, long after the deconstruction of the world’s best healthcare system. And we will also be tens of trillions of dollars more in debt than necessary … and probably bankrupt.
The Doctor Will See You Later
Investors Business Daily 06/07/2010
Health Care: The British government has decided that it needs to cut millions of operations because the public system cannot afford them. This is coming soon to a hospital or doctor's office near you.
According to the Daily Mail, Britain's National Health Service is "preparing to cut millions of operations" so that it can save $29 billion by 2014. Procedures that will be "decommissioned," if we may borrow a particularly descriptive term used by one doctor, include hip replacements for obese patients, some operations for hernias and gallstones, and treatments for varicose veins, ear and nose problems, and cataract surgery.
Thus is the future of all socialized medicine. Bureaucratic rationing of treatment is inevitable. No system can forever meet the demand of "free" care. Jeff Taylor of the Economic Voice clarified the problem when he wrote last week that "the U.K. is broke."
"Our whole society and way of life is now built on the shaky foundation of debt," he writes in response to the NHS cuts.
"Our hospitals, schools, armed forces, police, prisons and social services are founded on debt. In truth we have not yet paid for the operations that have already taken place."
As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously — and fittingly — said: The problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other people's money to spend. This is a universal truth, more universal than the health care provided in Britain. To trifle with it, ignore it, disrespect it, attempt to repeal it or arrogantly try to bypass it will always lead to trouble.
Yet the political left continually makes those mistakes and operates as if governments will never run out of other people's money. Until it does. And then the government has to make cuts and ration the benefits.
What have the congressional Democrats who rammed through their health care overhaul been watching over the years as both hard and soft socialist governments have either collapsed, continued to bring misery or become unsustainable? Despite ample evidence that a welfare state cannot thrive, these lawmakers have forced on the country a "reform" that will load Americans with a burden they will not long be able to bear.
Though it was sold to the public as a plan that, at $940 billion over the first decade, would bring down the deficit, the real cost for the initial 10 years could be as much as $2.5 trillion, including mandates placed on the private sector, according to an estimate by the Cato Institute.
It's possible that the Cato projection is off. But history shows us that it's more likely to be right than Washington's estimate. Government programs always cost more than the rosy initial projections that are used to drum up public support. It's another lesson that remains unlearned by most of our elected officials and the voters who keep putting them in office despite the problems the lawmakers refuse to stop creating.
Given our lawmakers' inability to learn from the health care policy blunders committed in Britain and Canada — which is reassessing its model because of ruinous costs — no one should be surprised when rationing by bureaucracy becomes a feature of the U.S. public health care system.
There should be no shock when waiting lists for treatment are simply rosters of Americans suffering — and in some cases dying — from a lack of care. No astonishment when those who do get treatment get substandard care, no dismay as a two-tiered system develops in which the more important among us get top-flight medicine while the rest get what the public clinics have to offer.
Our own polling shows that the disapproval of the Democrats' health care legislation is beginning to wane. That's as alarming as the heated opposition to the law had been encouraging. If we surrender ourselves to the soft tyranny of elected officials gone too far, we will be leaving an America that future generations won't want.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/536549/201006071833/The-Doctor-Will-See-You-Later.aspx
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Apr 20
Fresh and ongoing from it initiating, feeding and perpetuating the housing debacle and collapse, the Federal government with its pernicious Obamacare is poised to destroy medicine and medical care as we know it here in the United States. If allowed to take root, gone will be the world’s best and most sophisticated healthcare system, home of most of the most important innovations and discoveries in medical care. In its place will be a near 3rd world level of “quality” of care encumbered by an oppressive and arcane government controlled system. At least in third world countries they don’t have swarms of attorneys pullulating like flies looking for their next jackpot.
It is commonly known that there will be a significant shortage of primary care physicians in the future which Obamacare will tremendously exacerbate for myriad reasons. Of course, neither Obama or Congressional Democrats considered this in their reckless haste to ram the healthcare reform legislation into effect. What a surprise – politicians didn’t anticipate something inherently important?
The end result? You will have the “right” of healthcare but you may not have a doctor to provide it to you. If you are ultimately able to schedule an appointment to see a doctor, you may have to wait an excessively long period of time to finally be seen, or be seen by a physician located far from where you live or work, or be herded through like cattle spending little time with the doctor who is massively overworked and overloaded with patients (and over-regulated).
Does the word “rationing” ring a bell? Or decreased quality of care? These were all important issues that were raised by those who opposed the Democrats’ plans but were ignored or denigrated by them and the press.
What is a “brilliant” solution for this problem that is being considered by the government? Have nurses act like doctors. Add a little more training, change some statutes and voila! Doctorlight. Easy! Just don’t be very sick or you might not make it to a real doctor.
And if the nurse gets a PhD, they can officially be addressed as Dr., adding to confusion but subtracting from quality. This proposal would place millions of Americans at unnecessary risk due to inferior training and as a consequence, inferior care.
Furthermore, given the government’s plan to reimburse these nurses the same or marginally less than real doctors, why would any sane person want to become a doctor? After all, for maybe $5 to $10 more per patient that a doctor would be reimbursed versus a nurse, that person would also have to go to medical school and residency for up to 11 or more years, assume debt to pay for school of $250,000 or more and then pay malpractice rates in practice that can exceed $100,000/ year.
This will surely dissuade many including the best and brightest from seeking a career in medicine and don’t we want our doctors to be smart and competent?
Sounds like another government plan causing unintended consequences.
Doctor shortage? 28 states may expand nurses' role
By Carla K. Johnson (AP) – 4/15/2010
CHICAGO — A nurse may soon be your doctor. With a looming shortage of primary care doctors, 28 states are considering expanding the authority of nurse practitioners. These nurses with advanced degrees want the right to practice without a doctor's watchful eye and to prescribe narcotics. And if they hold a doctorate, they want to be called "Doctor."
For years, nurse practitioners have been playing a bigger role in the nation's health care, especially in regions with few doctors. With 32 million more Americans gaining health insurance within a few years, the health care overhaul is putting more money into nurse-managed clinics.
Those newly insured patients will be looking for doctors and may find nurses instead.
The medical establishment is fighting to protect turf. In some statehouses, doctors have shown up in white coats to testify against nurse practitioner bills. The American Medical Association, which supported the national health care overhaul, says a doctor shortage is no reason to put nurses in charge and endanger patients.
Nurse practitioners argue there's no danger. They say they're highly trained and as skilled as doctors at diagnosing illness during office visits. They know when to refer the sickest patients to doctor specialists. Plus, they spend more time with patients and charge less.
"We're constantly having to prove ourselves," said Chicago nurse practitioner Amanda Cockrell, 32, who tells patients she's just like a doctor "except for the pay."
On top of four years in nursing school, Cockrell spent another three years in a nurse practitioner program, much of it working with patients. Doctors generally spend four years in undergraduate school, four years in medical school and an additional three in primary care residency training.
Medicare, which sets the pace for payments by private insurance, pays nurse practitioners 85 percent of what it pays doctors. An office visit for a Medicare patient in Chicago, for example, pays a doctor about $70 and a nurse practitioner about $60.
The health care overhaul law gave nurse midwives, a type of advanced practice nurse, a Medicare raise to 100 percent of what obstetrician-gynecologists make — and that may be just the beginning.
States regulate nurse practitioners and laws vary on what they are permitted to do:
_ In Florida and Alabama, for instance, nurse practitioners are barred from prescribing controlled substances.
_ In Washington, nurse practitioners can recommend medical marijuana to their patients when a new law takes effect in June.
_ In Montana, nurse practitioners don't need a doctor involved with their practice in any way.
_ Many other states put doctors in charge of nurse practitioners or require collaborative agreements signed by a doctor.
_ In some states, nurse practitioners with a doctorate in nursing practice can't use the title "Dr." Most states allow it.
The AMA argues the title "Dr." creates confusion. Nurse practitioners say patients aren't confused by veterinarians calling themselves "Dr." Or chiropractors. Or dentists. So why, they ask, would patients be confused by a nurse using the title?
The feud over "Dr." is no joke. By 2015, most new nurse practitioners will hold doctorates, or a DNP, in nursing practice, according to a goal set by nursing educators. By then, the doctorate will be the standard for all graduating nurse practitioners, said Polly Bednash, executive director of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
Many with the title use it with pride.
"I don't think patients are ever confused. People are not stupid," said Linda Roemer, a nurse practitioner in Sedona, Ariz., who uses "Dr. Roemer" as part of her e-mail address.
What's the evidence on the quality of care given by nurse practitioners?
The best U.S. study comparing nurse practitioners and doctors randomly assigned more than 1,300 patients to either a nurse practitioner or a doctor. After six months, overall health, diabetes tests, asthma tests and use of medical services like specialists were essentially the same in the two groups.
"The argument that patients' health is put in jeopardy by nurse practitioners? There's no evidence to support that," said Jack Needleman, a health policy expert at the University of California Los Angeles School of Public Health.
Other studies have shown that nurse practitioners are better at listening to patients, Needleman said. And they make good decisions about when to refer patients to doctors for more specialized care.
The nonpartisan Macy Foundation, a New York-based charity that focuses on the education of health professionals, recently called for nurse practitioners to be among the leaders of primary care teams. The foundation also urged the removal of state and federal barriers preventing nurse practitioners from providing primary care.
The American Medical Association is fighting proposals in about 28 states that are considering steps to expand what nurse practitioners can do.
"A shortage of one type of professional is not a reason to change the standards of medical care," said AMA president-elect Dr. Cecil Wilson. "We need to train more physicians."
In Florida, a bill to allow nurse practitioners to prescribe controlled substances is stalled in committee.
One patient, Karen Reid of Balrico, Fla., said she was left in pain over a holiday weekend because her nurse practitioner couldn't prescribe a powerful enough medication and the doctor couldn't be found. Dying hospice patients have been denied morphine in their final hours because a doctor couldn't be reached in the middle of the night, nurses told The Associated Press.
Massachusetts, the model for the federal health care overhaul, passed its law in 2006 expanding health insurance to nearly all residents and creating long waits for primary care. In 2008, the state passed a law requiring health plans to recognize and reimburse nurse practitioners as primary care providers.
That means insurers now list nurse practitioners along with doctors as primary care choices, said Mary Ann Hart, a nurse and public policy expert at Regis College in Weston, Mass. "That greatly opens up the supply of primary care providers," Hart said.
But it hasn't helped much so far. A study last year by the Massachusetts Medical Society found the percentage of primary care practices closed to new patients was higher than ever. And despite the swelling demand, the medical society still believes nurse practitioners should be under doctor supervision.
The group supports more training and incentives for primary care doctors and a team approach to medicine that includes nurse practitioners and physician assistants, whose training is comparable.
"We do not believe, however, that nurse practitioners have the qualifications to be independent primary care practitioners," said Dr. Mario Motta, president of the state medical society.
The new U.S. health care law expands the role of nurses with:
_ $50 million to nurse-managed health clinics that offer primary care to low-income patients.
_ $50 million annually from 2012-15 for hospitals to train nurses with advanced degrees to care for Medicare patients.
_ 10 percent bonuses from Medicare from 2011-16 to primary care providers, including nurse practitioners, who work in areas where doctors are scarce.
_ A boost in the Medicare reimbursement rate for certified nurse midwives to bring their pay to the same level as a doctor's.
The American Nurses Association hopes the 100 percent Medicare parity for nurse midwives will be extended to other nurses with advanced degrees.
"We know we need to get to 100 percent for everybody. This is a crack in the door," said Michelle Artz of ANA. "We're hopeful this sets the tone."
In Chicago, only a few patients balk at seeing a nurse practitioner instead of a doctor, Cockrell said. She gladly sends those patients to her doctor partners.
She believes patients get real advantages by letting her manage their care. Nurse practitioners' uphill battle for respect makes them precise, accurate and careful, she said. She schedules 40 minutes for a physical exam; the doctors in her office book 30 minutes for same appointment.
Joseline Nunez, 26, is a patient of Cockrell's and happy with her care.
"I feel that we get more time with the nurse practitioner," Nunez said. "The doctor always seems to be rushing off somewhere."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jCB6VTbMN12zQSwafnZfBJovMseAD9F2CK880
Posted in Democrat Democrat Doctors Doctors Government Control Healthcare Nurses Nurses ObamaCare Physicians Rationing Socialized Medicine with 1 Comment
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Mar 21
With government control there will be rationing and restriction of care. No matter how bad and evil insurance companies are portrayed, the federal government is much worse and there are many examples to substantiate this point. Furthermore, with some persistence, many insurance companies will cave in. The federal government, on the other hand, will not and moves at glacial speed to arrive at that rejection. Just visualize the compassion, efficiency and organization of the post office – and then add more layers of bureaucracy to it and you get government run healthcare.
The following and not uncommon example from Canada is what we can expect here if Obamacare is passed.
Sick man faces bankruptcy — or death
Cancer patient must pay for drug needed to keep him alive
By MARK BONOKOSKI, QMI Agency March 6, 2010
Kent Pankow and wife Deborah, fought the Alberta government to have his brain-cancer treatment paid by the province.
Kent Pankow lives in Edmonton, in a province and a country that is trying to either kill him or bankrupt him.
No sense mincing words.
Suffering from brain cancer, Kent Pankow was literally forced to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. for lifesaving surgery — at a cost to family and friends of $106,000 — after the health-care system in Alberta left him hanging in bureaucratic limbo for 16 crucial days, his tumour meanwhile migrating to an unreachable part of the brain, while it dithered over his case file, ultimately deciding he was not surgery worthy.
Now, with the Mayo Clinic having done what the Alberta Cancer Board wouldn’t authorize or even explain, but with the tumour unable to be totally removed, the province will now not fund the expensive drug, Avastin, that the Mayo prescribed to keep him alive and keep the remaining tumour from increasing in size — despite the costs of the drug being totally funded by the province for other forms of cancer.
Kent Pankow, as it turns out, has the right disease but he has it in the wrong place.
Had he lung cancer, breast cancer, or colon cancer, then the cost of the drug — $4,555 per treatment, two times a month — would be totally covered by Alberta’s version of OHIP.
But he doesn’t.
And so he is not only a victim of brain cancer, he is also a victim of arbitrary discrimination.
Full disclosure. Kent Pankow, a 40-year-old Red Seal sous chef, is a son of the man who married the spouse of my late brother. And it was while vacationing with them at their winter home in Los Cabos, Mexico, recently that this story began to unfold back in their home province of Alberta.
But do not think, even for a moment, that this could never happen in Toronto or other parts of Ontario.
Our supposedly universal federal health care system, the pride of most Canadians and the political struggle of America, is only as good as the length of the waiting line and whether you have the right disease at the right time.
After writing more than 150 letters to everyone from the prime minister to virtually all health authorities both federal and provincial, and being ignored in return, Kent Pankow’s wife, Deborah Hurford, decided to finally go public.
CTV Edmonton did a major feature on the family’s plight on the 6 o’clock news and, almost before the program ended, Alberta’s health and wellness minister, Gene Zwozdesky, was on the phone to their home — ensuring himself some positive press in the followup that aired later that night.
Then, when he heard the Pankows had filed a human rights complaint against the province, justifiably citing medicare-based discrimination, Zwozdesky suddenly went mute — stating he could no longer discuss the matter publicly.
Ten years ago, when first diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumour (GBM), Kent Pankow was given five years to live.
After beating it down once, however, with his first surgery having been performed in Alberta, he spent nearly seven years in remission until the cancer’s return in 2008.
And he is not prepared to give up.
“He’s a fighter,” says his wife, admitting, however, that the cost of the drug has been a significant drain on friends and family who have not only donated large sums of their own money, but have also organized fundraisers to keep hope alive, including school penny drives.
“When Kent goes for his Avastin IV injection, he sits next to patients who receive the same drug for free because they have another type of cancer — like colon cancer,” Hurford says.
“Brain tumour patients deserve the same rights as other cancer patients, including access to the same lifesaving treatments — and without additional costs.
“I can’t begin to tell you how frustrated, angry, disgusted and appalled I am with both the Alberta health system and the individuals within the system who continue to perpetuate such an archaic and inhumane approach to the treatment of patients.” she says. “It seems like they are doing everything in their power to ensure that Kent succumbs to an early and unnecessary death.”
“The Avastin is working. The size of the remaining tumour has remained static since October,” she says.
“But how can anyone afford almost $10,000 a month for a drug — even if it is saving a loved one’s life?”
When Alberta health minister Gene Zwozdesky called the Pankow home on the night CTV Edmonton aired its story, he purportedly blamed the feds, namely Health Canada, for deciding what drugs are covered, and for what.
Federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, however, in a letter to Deborah Hurford, wrote that “while Health Canada is responsible for the market authorization of drug products, the province and territorial governments are responsible for managing the list of drugs for which public reimbursement from government drug plans is available.”
This, too, is passing the buck.
What Aglukkaq would not explain to Hurford — citing confidentiality — was why Avastin received a notice of compliance from Health Canada for other forms of cancer, but not yet for brain cancer as in the United States.
Nor would she offer any information regarding any application before her department for the use of Avastin in the treatment of brain tumours.
“Based on Kent’s MRI’s and radiology reports, and analysis by his surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, Avastin is playing a key role in stabilizing Kent’s tumour,” says Hurford.
“Without it, Kent’s tumour will grow and he will die.
“So why then,” asks Hurford, “is (everyone) choosing not to help Kent and other brain tumour patients who are forced to go public with their private health issues and fundraise for their lifesaving medical treatments?
“Where is the dignity in that?”
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http://www.calgarysun.com/news/canada/2010/03/06/13138731.html
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Mar 15
Over the last year, we have expressed our resolute opposition to Government controlled healthcare reform independent of the various iterations that have been promulgated. The present behemoth legislation, in excess of 2700 pages, will destroy the best healthcare system in the world and ultimately bankrupt this country with uncontrollable and unsustainable costs.
There are countless reasons to oppose this legislation, many of which have received little exposure in the press or by analysts (privacy issues). Regardless, this bill must be vehemently fought and opposed by all Americans if we want to preserve the world’s best healthcare as well as our rights and freedoms.
Below, is an abbreviated list assembled by Investors Business Daily of some of the reasons why Obamacare should not be implemented.
Why Health Bill Makes No Sense
Investors Business Daily 03/12/2010
Health Reform: So it's come down to this — desperate Democratic leaders strong-arming members on the worst bill ever before they go home to explain to constituents why they decided to commit political suicide.
We've said just about all we've had to say on this issue — actually dating back to 1993-94, when we wrote nearly 100 editorials in opposition to HillaryCare. Since January of last year, we've weighed in 150 more times against the latest version of socialized medicine.
But to review, here are just 15 reasons why a government takeover of the finest medical system in the world makes no sense at all:
1. The people don't want it! This, we would think, should have some bearing on decision-making. Yet the Democrats forge ahead without consent of the governed. In the latest Rasmussen poll, 53% opposed the Democrats' reform while 42% were in favor. More than four in 10 "strongly" opposed; just two in 10 "strongly" favored. This jibes with other surveys, including our own IBD/TIPP Poll, taken since last year.
2. Doctors don't want it! A survey we took last summer of 1,376 practicing physicians found that 45% would consider leaving their practices or taking early retirements if the Democrats' reform became law. In December, the results were validated by a Medicus poll in which 25% of doctors said they'd retire early if a public option is implemented and another 21% would stop practicing even though they were far from their retirement years. Even if the bill doesn't have a "public option," nearly 30% said they'd quit the profession under the plans being considered.
3. Half the Congress doesn't want it! Not a single Republican backed the health care bill that cleared the Senate on Christmas Eve 60-39. House passage was by a slim 220 to 215, and the lone Republican "aye" has since switched to "no."
Columnist Michael Barone says other changes would put the House vote today at 216-215 in favor, and he has doubts Democrats can even muster 216.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her job of securing yes votes even more difficult last week when she told a meeting of county officials that "we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it." Members of Congress aren't waiting: They've already exempted themselves from whatever they inflict on us.
4. People are happy with the health care they've got! Polls show that 84% of Americans have health insurance and that few are displeased with what they've got. Last month, the St. Petersburg Times looked at eight polls and reported that satisfaction rates averaged 87%.
5. It doesn't even cover the people they set out to cover! Supporters of government-run health care say there are as many as 47 million Americans — 9 million to 10 million of them illegal aliens — without medical insurance. The Democrats' plans, however, will put only 31 million of the uninsured under coverage.
6. Costs will go up, not down! Democrats say their plans will cost less than $1 trillion over the first decade. But analyst Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute puts the cost at $2.5 trillion over the first 10 years. Even if we go with the government's lower estimates, the cost is already on the rise. A new estimate by the Congressional Budget Office puts the cost of the Senate bill at $875 billion over 10 years, $4 billion more than its original projection. Imagine how fast costs would soar if one of the bills became public policy.
7. Real cost controls are nowhere to be found! The Democrats are offering no meaningful tort reform that will help push down the high malpractice insurance premiums that are a burden to doctors and their patients. Nor are they considering any other cost-saving provisions, such as allowing the sale of individual health plans across state lines or easing health insurance mandates.
8. Insurance premiums will rise, not fall! One goal of nationalizing health care is to lower costs, to bend the spending curve downward. Yet, as Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin acknowledged Wednesday, that won't be the case.
"Anyone who would stand before you and say, 'Well, if you pass health care reform, next year's health care premiums are going down,' I don't think is telling the truth," he said from the Senate floor. "I think it is likely they would go up."
An analysis completed by the CBO at the request of Sen. Evan Bayh confirms Durbin's suspicions. Insurance coverage in the individual market will "be about 10% to 13% higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law," it concluded.
9. Medicare is already bankrupting us! The Medicare trust fund, which has unfunded obligations of $37.8 trillion, will be insolvent in 2017. How can lawmakers justify another entitlement that will cost trillions when they can't pay for existing liabilities?
10. There aren't enough doctors now! Last month, 26% of physicians responding to a Web poll on Sermo.com, which calls itself "the largest online physician community," said they had been forced to close, or were considering closing, their solo practices. Providing coverage for an additional 31 million Americans when the number of doctors is shrinking won't improve our health care.
11. The doctor-patient relationship will be wrecked! The latest IBD/TIPP Poll, taken just last week, found that Americans, by a wide 48%-26% margin, believe the doctor-patient relationship will decline if the Democrats' plan is passed.
12. Medical care will also deteriorate! IBD/TIPP has also found that 51% of Americans believe care would get worse under government control. Only 10.5% said they felt it would improve. In our doctor poll, 72% disagreed with administration claims that the government could cover 47 million more people with better-quality care at lower cost.
13. Rationing of care is inevitable! Health care is not an unlimited resource and must be rationed, either by the individual, providers or government. In Britain and Canada, where the government does the rationing, medical treatment waiting lists are sometimes deadly and quite often excessively long.
For instance, late cancer diagnoses in an overcrowded public health care system cause up to 10,000 needless deaths a year in Britain. The reasons cited for the late diagnoses include doctor delay, delay in primary care, system delay and delay in secondary care.
14. Private health insurers will be destroyed! Added mandates and price controls will force many insurers to simply get out of the health plan business because it will no longer be profitable.
15. It's probably unconstitutional! One way to help bring down the number of uninsured is to demand that those without coverage buy health plans. But the government has never passed a law requiring Americans to buy any good or service.
Constitutional scholars say any such mandate would likely draw a legal challenge.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=527217
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Mar 14
Obama and the Congressional Democrats are trying to seize control of and transform healthcare in America which parallels their Marxist doctrine. By doing so, they will ultimately dismantle the best healthcare system in the world, precipitate a mass exodus of physicians from the practice of medicine and drive our country to bankruptcy in shorter order.
There already is a physician shortage in this country partially based on rational personal decisions made by those who might have contemplated careers in medicine. With implementation of Obamacare, there will be many reasons for doctors to either work less or flee medical practice altogether. This combined with an inevitable precipitous increase in consumption of medical care by previously “uninsured” Americans and illegal aliens will result in a supply and demand imbalance, fostered by unwise government intervention.
The result: healthcare rationing, poor quality care and long waits to receive care.
The Doctor Shortage
Investors Business Daily 03/04/2010
Health Reform: Democrats promise their plan will improve care at lower cost while thinning the ranks of the uninsured. How will they do this with fewer doctors?
America's population is 305 million. If the Democrats are correct about the number of uninsured, roughly 260 million are covered by a health care plan. When the insured — and the uninsured who use the traditional method of paying out of pocket — are sick, they are treated by 800,000 physicians.
It would be foolish to believe that today's already stretched doctor-patient ratio will remain stable. In the near future we will have fewer doctors treating a growing population.
Physician search firm Merritt, Hawkins & Associates estimates that by 2020 we'll need 90,000 to 200,000 more doctors than we'll have then. As alarming as that estimate is, it could be low.
Last August, our IBD/TIPP Poll found that 45% of doctors would consider leaving their practices or taking early retirement if the Democrats' version of reform were to become law.
Last month, 26% of physicians responding to a Web poll on Sermo.com, which calls itself "the largest online physician community," said they had been forced to close, or were considering closing, their solo practices.
Reasons include "low and delayed reimbursements, problems with management companies, and a lack of business/practice management education," as well as high malpractice insurance costs.
Not every doctor who told these polls that he or she would consider leaving the field will do so. Some will go into group practices and others move on to positions at hospitals and in the military. Another group will change nothing.
Even if half followed through with their threats, our care will suffer. If the Democrats' plans become law, fewer than 700,000 physicians would be available to treat a patient population growing in size, aging in years, shunning medical education and receiving "free" health care or insurance coverage from the government in increasing numbers.
The result will be longer wait times to see a doctor and a decline in the high quality of care Americans are accustomed to as overworked physicians try to keep up.
To see how this works in reality, look at the Canadian and British government health systems that encourage unnecessary doctor visits with the illusion of free care. Both have long, and sometimes deadly, wait times. Neither provides treatment as high in quality as what's found in the U.S, where the system is supposedly broken.
With demand for doctors already outstripping supply, the last thing we need is to aggravate the situation with poorly thought-out public policy.
Washington has meddled in health care too much already.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522956
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Jan 1
Instead of having options to tailor your health insurance plan to you specific needs, under the Obamanocare legislation it will be essentially one plan fits all. You are a 62 year old man but guess what? You will be forced to pay for maternity coverage.
No need for mental health coverage or physical therapy? Too bad! Once again you will be unnecessarily paying for it - and subsidizing the benefits of others.
Your rights to choose regarding your healthcare will be severely restricted. You will ultimately be paying far more in insurance premiums and taxes yet receiving fewer benefits, limited choices for treatments, and have to wait longer and not necessarily see the doctor of your choice.
And these are just a few of the myriad disastrous issues that we will be facing.
ObamaCare: No exit
By Scott Gottlieb December 21, 2009
Perhaps the most common question I'm asked about ObamaCare is: "Will I be able to buy my way out of it?" The answer is: "Not unless you're very rich."
The plan before the Senate creates a set of 50 state-based insurance "exchanges" that are established as markets for health plans. Consumers must buy policies from their employers or through the exchanges — but, either way, their choice of coverage is limited to one of four basic insurance plans that the government sanctions.
Private insurers will still compete to offer policies but must model their coverage on one of these four templates. In short, the Senate bill explicitly standardizes health benefits and then establishes elaborate mechanisms (including subsidies and penalties) to pay for them.
Here's the rub: While these four plans vary from low- to high-cost options, the benefits offered under them are pretty much the same. The difference between the cheaper and pricier plans is mostly the amount of cost sharing (e.g., you pay less for insurance if your co-pays are higher).
In effect, the plan creates a single national health-insurance policy. Consumers' only real option is to trade higher co-pays for lower premiums. But we'll all get the same package of benefits established by a series of new agencies and an "insurance czar" seated in Washington.
Once the exchanges are in place, the individual market — the ability to go directly to an insurer and buy a health-care policy — will disappear. You'll have only two places to buy insurance, in the exchanges or through your workplace.
As for health plans offered by employers, "no health-insurance policies could be issued (other than grandfathered plans) that don't meet the actuarial standards set for these plans" sold in the exchanges. The government will "define the essential health benefits" that all plans must eventually offer, not only those sold in the exchanges but also plans offered by employers. But like other elements of today's private coverage, the grandfathered plans also disappear in short time. While the bill allows some employer plans to continue as they are today, that's only so long as the policy doesn't change — and natural market forces will ensure that most such policies must change within a few years after the bill becomes law.
All of which brings us to the question of whether you'll be able to spend extra money to add benefits that exceed the government's basic package or opt out of that plan entirely. The bill doesn't address this question directly — yet I can say with great confidence that it will be costly and in some cases impossible.
The bill leaves these issues in the hands of the bureaucracies that will write the law's enabling regulations. And it's clear both what the spirit of the Obama plan and the habits of these bureaucracies will produce.
The overriding goal of this reform is to turn health insurance into a more "egalitarian" benefit that's the same for everyone, regardless of income, personal preference or need. So rules written under President Obama to implement the Obama plan are a sure bet to intentionally curtail anyone's ability to wrap around this national coverage with a supplemental policy or to contract privately with doctors to pay your way out of its limitations.
This is exactly what the bureaucracy's done with Medicare. Doctors accepting Medicare can't contract privately with Medicare patients to bill for services that Medicare doesn't cover. Nor can patients buy added coverage to help plug Medicare's gaps. (The "Medigap" that many seniors now buy are tightly regulated by the government to limit how much they expand on Medicare's basic benefits; they mostly just help defray co-pays.)
In short, beneficiaries are trapped inside the Medicare insurance scheme, just as they'll soon be trapped inside the ObamaCare exchanges. Doctors can't offer benefits not covered by the government plans, and patients can't buy extra insurance to make up for many gaps.
These restrictions were designed into Medicare for a reason: Progressives don't want it to be easy for rich seniors to buy their out; they fear that if the well-off can leave the federal plan, it will become a lower-end benefit. That is, it will wind up like Medicaid, whose enormous problems are largely ignored by politicians because poor Americans don't have the political power to force improvements.
The very rich, of course, will be able to buy their way out of ObamaCare. Many of the best doctors will go cash only, opting entirely out of the Obama program, to cater to a wealthy clientele. But only the truly affluent will have the cash to escape.
The vast rest of us will be locked inside the new system — stuck with the same collection of government-decreed medical benefits.
URL http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/obamacare_no_exit_l9njng7Izk9KYNuzdvOeOP
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Dec 28
The following article enumerates 10 immensely important issues related to the healthcare legislation in its present iteration. This is not what America needs or wants but instead, what Congressional Democrats and Obama insist on imposing on us. Meanwhile, Obama and Congress will still have their own gold plated healthcare plan with innumerable choices all subsidized at the taxpayers’ expense.
As we have iterated myriad times, this is not about healthcare. This is about increased government power, control and regulation of our lives and restrictions of our rights and freedoms. If we don’t become more vociferous, passionate and actively fight this legislation in a united fashion, the government will relentless continue to further diminish and suppress our rights, freedoms and choices.
We must do whatever it takes to reclaim our country!
10 Lumps Of Coal In The Health Care Bill
By Betsy McCaughey
For most Americans, the health reform bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is pushing to pass will be worse than coal in their stockings. Herewith, the Top 10 List of Things You Don't Want From Health Care Reform This Christmas — But Will Get Anyway From Congress.
1. Higher premiums: If you pay for your own insurance, your premiums will cost 10% to 13% more than if the bill didn't pass, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Insurance won't be more affordable. Sixty percent of the newly insured are being enrolled in Medicaid, the public program for the poor.
2. A cost you can't afford and can't avoid: Though moderate-income families will get subsidies, buying insurance is mandatory. A family earning $54,000 will be expected to pay $9,000 (17% of pre-tax income) for the premium, co-pays and deductibles, according to the CBO. If you don't enroll, the IRS will find you and penalize you (Senate bill, p. 345).
3. A one-size-fits-all health plan: Your benefit package will be prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Whether you choose basic, silver or gold, and whether you pay for it yourself or qualify for a subsidy, your benefits are the same.
Gold plans simply collect more up front and give you a lower co-pay or deductible. It's unclear how possible it will be to buy supplemental insurance. The goal is to discourage health consumption and differences based on ability to pay.
4. A sin tax on your generous plan at work: This is another equalizer to discourage some people from getting more than others. The Senate bill puts a 40% tax on Cadillac plans (p. 1,980). About one-fifth of employer-provided plans fall into that "luxury" category. The CBO predicts that employers will downgrade your coverage to avoid the tax or reduce your take home pay.
5. Government controls on your doctors' decisions: The Senate bill bars doctors from participating in the private insurance system unless they implement whatever regulations the secretary of health and human services chooses to impose to "improve health care quality" (p. 149). That broad phrase encompasses everything in medicine.
This would be the first time in history that the federal government is given power over how doctors treat privately insured patients
6. Hospitals closed to seniors: The House and Senate bills slash payments to hospitals and other institutions that care for seniors. The chief actuary for Medicare, Richard Foster, warns that cuts in the House bill are so severe that some institutions may face severe losses or end their participation in Medicare (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 11/13/09 report). Some seniors won't know where to go.
7. Bare-bones hospital care: Patients of all ages (and all incomes) will suffer when hospitals are in financial distress. Hospital budget cuts will mean shortages of nurses, equipment and cleaning staff. The president's chief health advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, argues that hospitals in the U.S. offer more privacy and comfort than hospitals in Europe, and this "abundance of amenities" drives up costs (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).
8. Future Medicare cuts: Look out baby boomers, the Senate bill establishes an Independent Medicare Advisory Commission to make automatic spending reductions in future years while insulating Congress from the political fallout. You won't get as much care as people in Medicare currently get.
9. A new social agenda: Money is allocated for adult preparation activities, including lessons on positive self-esteem and relationship dynamics, friendships, dating (and) romantic involvement (Senate bill, p.612). There are also giveaways to immigrants. The Senate bill hands low-income legal immigrants government subsidies as soon as they get here, instead of waiting the five years Medicaid requires (Senate bill, p. 274).
10. A tell-all relationship with every doctor you see: What happens in your doctor's office must be recorded in an electronic data base that can send the information to insurers and other medical offices (Senate bill, p. 62-66). Every doctor you see will have access to your medical history. See a psychiatrist? Your foot doctor will know about it.
These congressional tidings bring no comfort or joy. We must save ourselves from Congress' power now that it has gone astray.
• McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York state and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=516146
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Dec 15
We have stated many times in previous posts that Obama and the Democrats in Congress want to impose a healthcare system on an unwilling American public that is the polar opposite of what these politicians speciously claim it to be. There will be severe restrictions on choices and availability of care with governmental rationing. Waiting times will be longer while the quality of care will plummet yet the total cost borne by each individual will significantly increase both through more expensive premiums and usurious taxation.
Congressional Democrats and Obama claim that their healthcare legislation establishes a great system for the American people. If it really is so fantastic then why are they refusing to agree to amendments that would force them to use the same healthcare system as they want to impose on us? The answer is because they know this system will be disastrous – limiting choice, rationing and restricting care, creating prolonged waiting times before receiving care and being far more costly for significantly inferior quality. Why should they have to give up their privileged premium care that is subsidized by the American taxpayer and provides them with myriad choices?
This whole healthcare reform is all about government control and nothing more. As Investors Business Daily put it:
“… health reform's purposes were advertised as cost containment and near-universal coverage. But what Democrats are set to enact will spend trillions dramatically increasing insurance premiums, and leave millions still without insurance.
In other words, their push for health reform has been based on lies. The real purpose: to gain control of America's health system.
And on top of the lies is the hypocrisy the American people have come to expect from their politicians: continuation of the nearly 50-year-old loophole providing senators and House members with a wide choice of private health plans.”
We need to continue fighting to stop this legislation as well as vigorously work at ousting these arrogant, imperious members of Congress who are ruling us rather than representing us!
Reform For You, But Not Congress
Investors Business Daily 12/04/2009
Hypocrisy: If the $2-trillion-plus government health care plan that Congress has come up with is so great, why do lawmakers refuse to live under it themselves? Their designs have been based on lies from the start.
The left thinks Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and David Vitter, R-La., have shot themselves in their feet. After unveiling last week their amendment that would force Senate and House members to cover themselves with any government health plan that passes into law, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a champion of the public option, proceeded to ask if he could sign on as a co-sponsor. Liberal Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he might want to, as well.
"Coburn and Vitter weren't counting on that kind of support," gloated Nation magazine Washington correspondent John Nichols. "If they're smart, the rest of the Democratic caucus will follow Brown's lead and sign on for the public option."
Well, when it comes to feathering their own nests, congressional Democrats are smart. And they're not about to subject themselves to anything less than the taxpayer-subsidized, gold-plated array of private coverage choices they've enjoyed for nearly a half century in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
Coburn and Vitter's idea of politicians living under a government plan "was opposed unanimously by Democrats during interviews on Thursday," the Hill newspaper reports. The paper also noted opposition from senior Republican senators such as National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn of Texas and Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona, who asked: "Why would I want to put my family in that, let alone anybody else's family?"
Senators and representatives from both sides of the aisle know how good they have it under the FEHBP, the world's largest group health program. The reason Congress' own health care works so well is that it's based on consumer choice and market competition — the opposite of what it's trying to impose on everybody else.
Members of Congress and millions of federal workers may choose from hundreds of private fee-for-service plans, HMOs or preferred provider organizations, with no federal worker living anywhere enjoying fewer than a dozen options.
FEHBP members can easily switch plans if they become dissatisfied; that puts competitive pressure on insurers to provide quality and value. Surveys show that members love their coverage, which is why almost all federal employees join the program.
The FEHBP is shielded from state regulation and Uncle Sam subsidizes premiums by more than 70%. Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Dr. David Gratzer, whose opposition to government-run health care comes from first-hand experience, observes that "the federal government's role in the FEHBP is to pay the bills," unlike the fiscally doomed Medicare program, of which "Washington is the designer of benefits."
Today, instead of the federal takeover Democrats are rushing to enact, lawmakers could give Americans the kind of high-quality health care choices they enjoy. A simple system of vouchers would allow recipients to choose any health plan on the market. The system could be means-tested, with Medicare giving "larger vouchers to poorer and sicker seniors and smaller vouchers to healthy and wealthy seniors, using current health-risk-adjustment mechanisms and Social Security data on lifetime earnings," says Michael F. Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute.
Vouchers "would contain Medicare spending, and are the only way to protect seniors from government rationing," according to Cannon.
"The FEHBP is an excellent model for designing a system based on broad personal choice," argues Robert Moffit, the Heritage Foundation's director of health policy studies. "There is no reason," he adds, "why a reform of Medicare could not establish a similar structure for national plan options," including integrating private retiree health insurance into the system.
But instead of such common-sense reform, Americans are staring at thousands of pages of new regulations on their personal medical treatment, including a government-run option that will devastate the private coverage most Americans have and like. The inevitable result, as independent studies warn, is thousands of dollars more to pay in health premiums.
In last year's presidential campaign, health reform's purposes were advertised as cost containment and near-universal coverage. But what Democrats are set to enact will spend trillions dramatically increasing insurance premiums, and leave millions still without insurance.
In other words, their push for health reform has been based on lies. The real purpose: to gain control of America's health system.
And on top of the lies is the hypocrisy the American people have come to expect from their politicians: continuation of the nearly 50-year-old loophole providing senators and House members with a wide choice of private health plans.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=514427
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Dec 3
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has issued new recommendations regarding obtaining mammograms that are irresponsible, shocking and not evidenced based but are concordant with requisite rationing for Obamanocare. The following editorial assesses this morally corrupt pronouncement.
Rationing's First Step
Investors Business Daily 11/18/2009
Health Care: A government task force has decided that women need fewer mammograms and later in life. Shouldn't that be between patient and physician? We have seen the future of health care, and it doesn't work.
We have warned repeatedly that the net results of health care bills before Congress will be higher demand, fewer doctors, more cost control, all leading to rationing. New recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) regarding breast cancer and the necessity for early and frequent mammograms do not convince us otherwise.
Just six months ago, the panel, which works under the Health and Human Services Department as a "best practices" study group, was shouting its concern about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showing a 1% drop in the number of women regularly undergoing such screening and prevention.
The task force was saying that women older than 40 should get a mammogram every one to two years. It found that frequent screening lowered death rates from breast cancer mostly for women ages 50 to 69. But that was then, and this is now.
"We're not saying women shouldn't get screened. Screening does save lives," Diana Petiti, task force vice chairman, said of the recommendations published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. "But we are recommending against routine screening."
Now the panel recommends that women in their 40s stop having routine annual mammograms and that older women should cut back to every two years. The concern allegedly is that too frequent testing can result in increased anxiety, false positives, unneeded follow-up tests and possibly disfiguring biopsies. Preventing breast cancer and saving lives almost get lost in the new analysis.
"I have a particular concern in this case about who was involved in this task force," says Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., who was a heart surgeon in private life. "There are no surgeons or oncologists who deal directly with breast cancer or even radiologists. ... I've seen far too many young women develop late-stage breast cancer because they didn't have adequate screening."
Little, if anything, has happened medically in the last six months to cause such a shift. A lot, however, has happened politically as a health care overhaul has limped forward on life support. The Congressional Budget Office has been busy pricing these various bills, a process that includes screening and prevention.
As we have warned, the growing emphasis seems to be on cost containment rather than quality of care. About 39 million women undergo mammograms each year in America, costing the health care system more than $5 billion.
"The American Cancer Society continues to recommend annual screening using mammography and clinical breast examination for all women beginning at age 40," says Otis Brawley, its chief medical officer. "Our experts make this recommendation having reviewed virtually all the same data reviewed by the USPSTF, but also additional data that the USPSTF did not consider."
Daniel Kopans, a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School, says: "Tens of thousands of lives are being saved by mammography screening, and those idiots want to do away with it. It's crazy — unethical, really."
This, sadly, appears to be the future of medicine under government-run health care. Aside from taxes on insurers, providers and device manufacturers, we'll be up to our eyeballs in cost-effectiveness boards that will decide who gets what tests and treatments, when and if. These are only recommendations for now, but they are the shape of things to come.
URL http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=512837
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Nov 21
Despite inexorable denials by Obama, Pelosi and Congressional Democrats, the basic fiscal tenet of Obamanocare is rationing of healthcare. Plain and simple. Ignore the prevarications about rationing, cost savings, compassionate care, keeping your own doctor who will make the healthcare decisions along with you, etc. These are all part of the nefarious scheming intended to deceive the public about their ultimate goal of government control of healthcare, transfer of wealth and further aggrandizement of government power.
The following editorial from The Wall Street Journal, delineates some of the inimical dictates of the legislation.
The Rationing Commission
Meet the unelected body that will dictate future medical decisions.
As usual, the most dangerous parts of ObamaCare aren't receiving the scrutiny they deserve—and one of the least examined is a new commission to tell Congress how to control health spending. Democrats are quietly attempting to impose a "global budget" on Medicare, with radical implications for U.S. medicine.
Like most of Europe, the various health bills stipulate that Congress will arbitrarily decide how much to spend on health care for seniors every year—and then invest an unelected board with extraordinary powers to dictate what is covered and how it will be paid for. White House budget director Peter Orszag calls this Medicare commission "critical to our fiscal future" and "one of the most potent reforms."
On that last score, he's right. Prominent health economist Alain Enthoven has likened a global budget to "bombing from 35,000 feet, where you don't see the faces of the people you kill."
As envisioned by the Senate Finance Committee, the commission—all 15 members appointed by the President—would have to meet certain budget targets each year. Starting in 2015, Medicare could not grow more rapidly on a per capita basis than by a measure of inflation. After 2019, it could only grow at the same rate as GDP, plus one percentage point.
The theory is to let technocrats set Medicare payments free from political pressure, as with the military base closing commissions. But that process presented recommendations to Congress for an up-or-down vote. Here, the commission's decisions would go into effect automatically if Congress couldn't agree within six months on different cuts that met the same target. The board's decisions would not be subject to ordinary notice-and-comment rule-making, or even judicial review.
Yet if the goal really is political insulation, then the Medicare Commission is off to a bad start. To avoid a senior revolt, Finance Chairman Max Baucus decided to bar his creation from reducing benefits or raising the eligibility age, which meant that it could only cut costs by tightening Medicare price controls on doctors and hospitals. Doctors and hospitals, naturally, were furious.
So the Montana Democrat bowed and carved out exemptions for such providers, along with hospices and suppliers of medical equipment. Until 2019 the commission will thus only be allowed to attack Medicare Advantage, the program that gives 10 million seniors private insurance choices, and to raise premiums for Medicare prescription drug coverage, which is run by private contractors. Notice a political pattern?
But a decade from now, such limits are off—which also happens to be roughly the time when ObamaCare's spending explodes. The hard budget cap means there is only so much money to be divvied up for care, with no account for demographic changes, such as longer life spans, or for the increasing incidence of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions.
Worse, it makes little room for medical innovations. The commission is mandated to go after "sources of excess cost growth," meaning treatments that are too expensive or whose coverage will boost spending. If researchers find a pricey treatment for Alzheimer's in 2020, that might be banned because it would add new costs and bust the global budget. Or it might decide that "Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller," as President Obama put it in June.
In other words, the Medicare commission would come to function much like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which rations care in England. Or a similar Washington state board created in 2003 to control costs. Its handiwork isn't pretty.
The Washington commission, called the Health Technology Assessment, is manned by 11 bureaucrats, including a chiropractor and a "naturopath" who focuses on alternative, er, remedies like herbs and massage therapy. They consider the clinical effectiveness but above all the cost of medical procedures and technologies. If they decide something isn't worth the money, then Olympia won't cover it for some 750,000 Medicaid patients, public employees and prisoners.
So far, the commission has banned knee arthroscopy for osteoarthritis, discography for chronic back pain, and implantable infusion pumps for pain not related to cancer. This year, it is targeting such frivolous luxuries as knee replacements, spinal cord stimulation, a specialized autism therapy and MRIs of the abdomen, pelvis or breasts for cancer. It will also rule on routine ultrasounds for pregnancy, which have a "high" efficacy but also a "high" cost.
Currently, the commission is pushing through the most restrictive payment policy in the nation for drug-eluting cardiac stents—simply because bare metal stents are cheaper, even as they result in worse outcomes. If a patient is wheeled into the operating room with chest pains in an emergency, doctors will first have to determine if he's covered by a state plan, then the diameter of his blood vessels and his diabetic condition to decide on the appropriate stent. If they don't, Washington will not reimburse them for "inappropriate care."
If Democrats impose such a commission nationwide, it would constitute a radical change in U.S. health care. The reason that physician discretion—not Washington's cost-minded judgments—is at the core of medicine is that usually there are no "right" answers. The data from large clinical trials produce generic conclusions that rarely apply to individual patients, who have vastly different biologies, response rates to treatments, and often multiple conditions. A breakthrough drug like Herceptin, which is designed for a certain genetic subset of breast-cancer patients, might well be ruled out under such a standardized approach.
It's possible this global budget could become an accounting fiction, like the automatic Medicare cuts Congress currently pretends it will impose on doctors. But health care's fiscal pressures will be even stronger than they are today if ObamaCare passes in anything like its current form. And that is when politicians will want this remote, impersonal and unaccountable central committee to do the inevitable dirty work of denying care.
The only way to take the politics out of health care is to give individuals more power to control medical dollars. And the first step should be not to create even more government spending commitments. The core problem with government-run health care is that it doesn't make decisions in the best interests of patients, but in the best interests of government.
URL http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703792304574504020025055040.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
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Oct 20
We vehemently oppose the Democrats’ actions on healthcare reform and even more egregiously, their contemptuous and dismissive responses to an angry American public strongly against the legislation. Obama and Congressional Democrats have stated in no uncertain terms that they will impose this healthcare reform on us no matter what.
We have dissected this reform in previous editorials. This bill is ostensibly about healthcare but in actuality IT IS NOT. It will not lower costs, increase quality, or provide universal coverage which is the Democrat’s mantra. Instead, it will result in skyrocketing insurance costs far in excess of what would occur if nothing were done at all as well as massive increases in taxes. It will also lead to rationing, long waits, poorer quality of care, loss of confidentiality or our healthcare records, withholding of care and therapeutic options, increased morbidity and mortality of Americans, etc. Shall we go on?
In its essence, this bill is a naked, corrupt power grab by the Federal government, comprising an additional 17% of our economy under its control for a sum total of 43%. Its covert intentions are to steal additional freedoms and rights from us and make us more subservient and under greater government control. If you have scrutinized what legislation is available for public examination, read fact supported commentary and parsed the Democrats’ ideology, you will realize unequivocally that these conclusions are not paranoid rants. THEY ARE FACT BASED REALITY.
WE MUST RELENTLESS FIGHT AGAINST PASSAGE OF THIS LEGISLATION!!
The following is an extremely important and trenchant editorial posted in the October 19th edition of Investors Business Daily that sums up the current dire situation:
Dems Go Nuclear
Health Care: Democrats seem set to use the "nuclear option" to ram their government health takeover into law. Bipartisanship already looked dead; now it looks extinct.
The health care revolution the Democratic Congress has planned — with its inevitable medical rationing, thousands of dollars in increased insurance premiums, and coverage of illegal aliens — may get placed on the familiar fast track used to spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars this year.
Instead of the 60 votes needed in the Senate if proper parliamentary rules were followed, passing this reshaping of the medical system as a "budget reconciliation" measure would mean only a simple majority was needed.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., accused of cheating on his taxes, last week held a hearing to let the House version of the health reform bill be passed this way. As the Washington weekly Human Events reports, Democratic leaders "have apparently invoked the 'nuclear option' to shut out Republicans and ensure the bill is passed before the end of the year."
So all those "town hells" during the summer, where senators and congressmen were given an earful about passing secretly written thousand-page bills without reading them, will be ignored.
In the age of the Internet, Congress refuses to post for computer access the most consequential legislation in history, as far as its effect on human lives (and deaths) is concerned, before voting on it.
The people will have to wait until it's all signed, sealed and delivered before finding out exactly how this government-imposed monster will devour health care as Americans have known it for all their lives.
And why? Because both congressional Democrats and the White House are afraid of the power of the people. Just as they are both afraid to give the opposing party a seat at the negotiating table.
Rangel didn't allow Republicans to offer amendments in committee. Why not? Fear that Democrats might be embarrassed by having to reject a Republican amendment to protect Medicare, for one thing. And fear in general that the people might catch wind of a few bipartisan ideas that sound more sensible than their big government solutions.
The magnitude of what Congress is about to do is staggering. The federal government is about to begin dictating Americans' behavior regarding the most intimate and vital area of life — health.
You play ball with Uncle Sam and pay thousands and thousands of dollars for far more expensive insurance than what you're now used to, or you get slapped with fines. And as yet we don't know how heavy those fines will be — or if noncooperation with the new system will mean more than fines.
Doesn't Congress owe it to us to provide time to mull this over before it takes force?
Shouldn't the exact wording of this radical transformation of our medical system be available on the Internet for weeks before a floor vote takes place?
And shouldn't medical experts, health care providers and legal analysts get the opportunity to read every word of such a bill carefully, then give their well-considered analysis to concerned Americans?
Apparently not, according to those now running Washington.
To them, this is a rare opportunity to take a giant step toward single-payer, European-style socialized medicine. And they have no intention of letting the people stop them.
URL: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=509361
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Oct 19
The following op-ed was written by well respected physician, Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D. In it, Dr. Vliet delineates her vehement opposition to the present healthcare reform.
In the 2008 campaign, we heard healthcare in this country is “broken” and must be “reformed.” We heard “healthcare reform” would be the signature piece of an Obama Presidency. We were promised no new taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 per year. We heard promises of transparency in government. We heard promises of a White House that would listen to all. Now that President Obama and a Democratic majority are in office, what have we gotten?
The healthcare proposals have become a massive power grab to control your money, your health options, your businesses, your liberty, and ultimately your life. It is not about insuring the poor.We already have Medicaid to cover the poor.
What the Democratic majority is doing to healthcare in this country is a crime. Punishment won’t fall on Congress and the President, who are excluded from the healthcare proposals. Punishment falls on the American people, especially the elderly.
Word of a new “stealth” strategy to ram healthcare “reform” through the Senate raises even more cause for alarm and adds to the crime of this massive power grab. The plan appears to be for Senator Majority Leader Reid to merge the two Senate bills that have passed out of committee, and attach them as an amendment to a House TARP bill, already passed by the House but curiously gathering dust in the Senate. Once the Senate votes on this “TARP” bill with the healthcare amendment tucked neatly inside, the healthcare punishment is a “done deal” without further debate. Such an abuse of power and due process would be an unforgiveable crime against the American people, perpetrated by the very people elected to represent us.
Instead of “health insurance for all,” the House and Senate healthcare bills have become punishment for all. Here is the list of Americans who face the healthcare “reform” punishment:
- Punishment for the sick. Those who have medical expenses each year will no longer beable to deduct those expenses on taxes until the expenses reach 10% of adjusted gross income (AGI). The current deduction is set at expenses above 7.5% of AGI, so the Senate plan now ADDS a 2.5% tax on those who are already paying out of pocket for medical expenses. Clearly, if someone is spending more than 7.5% on medical costs,that person is ill. The Senate bill makes the sick even sicker from the stress of having to pay more taxes!
- Punishment for the elderly. Medicare cuts of 404 BILLION is the latest figure released by the Senate; earlier the White House budget office said $500 Billion – more than a full year’s Medicare budget – would have to be cut from Medicare. How can anyone begin to think these cuts will not penalize the elderly by delaying, rationing, or denying treatment?
- Punishment for young people. Young healthy people who do not buy government mandated insurance will be punished with the form of a excise tax – reported amounts have been from $1900 to $3800 per person.
- Punishment for anyone not paying the excise tax. The IRS fine for non-payment of tax can be $25,000 and a year in jail. So those who are punished by the new tax risk being accused of a tax crime if they don’t buy government-mandated insurance and who don’t pay the penalty tax.
- Punishment for insurance companies. Companies providing “generous health insurance plans” will be hit with a 35% tax.
- Punishment for consumers who buy “generous” health insurance policies, as the tax on insurance companies is passed on to purchasers.
- Punishment for those who buy their own health insurance…a new 40% tax. Does it really make sense to punish the responsible people who take care of their own healthcare bills?
- Punishment for low income seniors, Hispanics, and Blacks who will lose their Medicare Advantage program under the new proposals.
- Punishment for those with Health Savings Accounts – HSAs will be extinct.
- Punishment for specialists who serve mainly elderly patients, such as cardiologists and oncologists. Such specialists are slated to have their reimbursements for services slashed by 44% under the Senate bill.
- Punishment for medical device makers in the form of new taxes (a tax that will be passed on to consumers).
- Punishment for all doctors, who are required to purchase expensive new computersystems and software to convert to Electronic Medical Records to meet the 2014 mandates in the Stimulus Bill.
- Punishment for those who value their medical privacy. The Stimulus Bill requires all physicians, beginning in 2014, to send patients’ medical records directly to the federal health czar without further permission from patients.
- Punishment for all 50 State governments. Already running at a deficit with the recession, State governments face catastrophic increases in costs with Medicaid costs being shifted to them by the Federal government under the new proposals.
- Punishment for everyone, due to Speaker Pelosi’s proposal for a National Sales Tax (also called a VAT) to pay for healthcare reform. This new tax would hit everyone hard in a recession, and would be on TOP of existing state and local sales taxes.
- Punishments for all. All, that is, except the exempted elite: members of Congress, the President and his family, trial lawyers, and Unions (SEIU, AFL-CIO, and others). The exempted elite retain their private care while becoming the very ones who force more taxes, penalties, higher costs as punishment on the rest of us.
This reminds me of the Soviet Union when I visited there in 1974 and 1975. The Soviet ruling elite were the only ones with cars, comfortable apartments…and access to the best healthcare.
I understand at a personal and professional level the perils of government-run healthcare. I have patients in my practice who have come many countries with government run healthcare that doesn’t address women’s unique health needs. I live in a state with a large Native American population, whose healthcare under the Indian Health Service, run by the federal government, has been abysmal. I have personally had an emergency hospitalization in England. I am walking today because I had the best spine surgery care in the world at Johns Hopkins. If I had lived in Britain, or Canada, or Europe and had to wait for MRIs and surgery, I would paralyzed from the neck down.
I will never agree that nationalized healthcare anywhere provides better quality of care than we have in the United States. I am not alone. Recent polls by different organizations have found that 80-90% of M.D.’s and D.O.’s oppose government-controlled healthcare.
Don’t be fooled by the American Medical Associations endorsement of Obamacare. Only 17% of practicing physicians actually belong to the AMA. Last week’s “white coat” photo op at the White House was a carefully selected group of 2008 campaign donors “Doctors for Obama.” They were NOT anymore representative of practicing physicians across this country than the AMA.
The American people should be even more alarmed by a recent Investors Business Daily poll: 45% of doctors who responded said they would retire or resign from medicine rather than practice medicine under government control. Who will take care of patients then?
The proposed healthcare plans are the most massive transfer of power to the executive branch of government that has ever occurred or has even been contemplated. This concentration of power in the executive branch violates the Constitutional requirement for balance of power, and for separation of powers among the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government.
This crime against the American people is far worse than the Stamp Act levied by King George.
That was the final straw that set off the first American Revolution.
©Elizabeth Lee Vliet M.D. 10-12-2009
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Oct 13
The America's Health Insurance Plans released a study assessing the costs and impact of the Obamanocare legislation. The findings were that if this bill were passed, increased healthcare costs would shift to privately insured individuals. The amount of increase would be quite substantial and probably still significantly in excess of even this predicted amount. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the concomitant increased tax burden nor does it address access, rationing and quality of care issues.
The White House and the Office Of Health Reform have claimed that this is all unfounded politics without any basis in reality. Ironically, it has been Obama and the Congressional Democrats who have relentlessly and unabashedly lied to the American public claiming that this legislation will provide healthcare for all, allow you to keep your own doctor, not lead to rationing of care, will not result in inferior medical care, and will not add even one more dime to the deficit.
Read: White House Tries to Strike Down Insurance Industry Criticism Ahead of Key Vote
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Oct 12
Canadians are fed up with their government controlled healthcare system and are seeking a return to privately run one. They are fed up with interminable waits to be evaluated by a physician or receive treatment, restrictions on care received as well as inability to obtain the care, difficulty in extrication from waiting lists and illegality of obtaining private self-paid care. Despite this and worldwide evidence of abysmal failure of socialized on multiple levels, Obama and the Democrats in Congress are relentlessly seeking to impose such a system on the unwilling and outraged American people.
Read: The Revolt Up North
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Sep 16
Obama’s healthcare speech delivered before Congress and to millions of Americans watching failed at its attempt to increase public support for the healthcare reform bill. It was, in our opinion, an uninspired rehashing of previous deceptions, lies and impossibilities that are not supported by reality and which contradict the provisions of the bill.
As we have fervently stated before, this legislation just boils down to the liberal ideology that the government knows best and should have complete control of the healthcare sector including unfettered access to medical, tax and financial information. It is not about lowering the total cost of healthcare or making it more affordable.
Anyone with even the most elementary knowledge of economics can tell you that as the price of a service facing an individual decreases, the demand increases. Without getting into the complexities of the differences of the price from the real cost of the service, the bottom line is that overall expenditures will increase disproportionately. To this equation add millions of more patients now desiring to use/overuse healthcare services and you end up with massively increased costs, staggering budget deficits, oppressive taxes to help pay the skyrocketing costs, rationing and poor quality healthcare (just to name a few problems).
Unfortunately, there are countless more dangerous provisions contained within the Obamanocare bill. The article below parses Obama’s address and enumerates several areas where he overtly, irrefutably and intentionally lied.
Read: Speaking Of Misinformation
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Sep 15
A Masterpiece Of Charlatanry For The Naïve
By Thomas Sowell
…the charlatan-in-chief, Barack Obama, … speech to a joint session of Congress was both a masterpiece of rhetoric and a shameless fraud.
To tell us, with a straight face, that he can insure millions more people without adding to the already skyrocketing deficit, is world-class chutzpah and an insult to anyone's intelligence.
America's Dim Bulbs
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Europe's ban on the incandescent light bulb began phasing in this month, and the U.S. will soon follow. Is Thomas Edison to blame for global warming? And why are we exporting green jobs?
British Death Panel
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Single Payer: In Britain, where the public option is about all most patients get, a newborn has died because national guidelines recommend that the baby not be treated. Yet again, government care produces tragedy.
The mother, Sarah Capewell, reportedly begged doctors to save the baby, who was born 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy. But guidelines used by Britain's National Health Service say that babies born fewer than 22 weeks into a pregnancy should not be treated.
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Sep 10
The phone rings and the lady of the house answers, "Hello?"
"Mrs. Sanders, please."
"Speaking."
"Mrs. Sanders, this is Dr. Jones at St. Agnes Laboratory. When your
husband's doctor sent his biopsy to the lab last week, a biopsy from
another Mr. Sanders arrived as well. We are now uncertain which one
belongs to your husband. Frankly, either way the results are not too good."
"What do you mean?" Mrs. Sanders asks nervously.
"Well, one of the specimens tested positive for Alzheimer's and the
other one tested positive for HIV. We can't tell which is which."
"That's dreadful! Can you do the test again?" questioned Mrs. Sanders.
"Normally we can, but the new health care system will only pay for
these expensive tests just one time."
"Well, what am I supposed to do now?"
"The folks at Obama health care recommend that you drop your husband
off somewhere in the middle of town. If he finds his way home, don't
sleep with him.
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Sep 1
The following video is of Congressman Mike Rogers (Rep – Michigan) testifying on healthcare reform in the House. Though the numbers may not be entirely accurate, he presents a very compelling argument against the legislation and some of the dangerous provisions that are contained within it but denied by Obama and the Democrats so as to deceive the American public yet again. He also comments on the severely flawed process by which this legislation is being considered.
This is a very informative, easily understandable assessment of this pernicious healthcare bill.
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Aug 30
The following article, written by a practicing physician, provides his perspectives on dealing with the government now and how this can provide insight into how severely healthcare will deteriorate in the future with the more restrictive and global Obamanocare. He cites several personal examples from his practice and applies these experiences to the broader picture.
What we also see is that government mandates and control create “unintended consequences”. He cites an interesting example where the federal government seeks gender parity for individuals being accepted to medical schools (independent of whether or not there is parity in desiring in becoming a physician) so that there are relatively equal numbers of men and women training to become doctors. Because women work far fewer hours and retire years earlier than men, the result is a relative shortage of physician services for a given number of physicians trained.
We can extrapolate consequences like this using many of the mandates and provisos of the proposed healthcare legislation and realize that we are in deep trouble if this gets enacted.
Read: ObamaCare and me
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Aug 16
The overall healthcare system in the United States is probably the best in the world though it is not without areas that can be improved. If you just listened to the shrill demagogues of the far left wing of the Democratic Party, one would think that we have a "healthcare crisis" in America. However, closer great scrutiny reveals not only do we have the best healthcare delivery system in the world but we also have premier healthcare technologies, cutting edge surgical procedures, and pharmaceutical innovations. What we have in America is a "health insurance catastrophe" largely caused by Congressional mandates over the years, a malignant unfettered tort system wasting tens of billions of dollars of resources annually, and unreimbursed healthcare due to illegal immigration and related issues.
Approximately 1/6th of our population does not have any medical insurance coverage either because of a lifestyle choice, they are temporarily between jobs, have not applied for federal coverage for which they are eligible, or are not a legal citizen of the United States. All of these people, however, do have access to medical care. If they show up in an emergency room , they must be treated. That is a Federal law. They can not be turned away! The rest of us who have employer provided heath insurance plans or have purchased private insurance on our own are paying for these estimated 47 million uninsured.
Let's repeat this again: EVERYONE in America has access to the healthcare system even if they are unable or unwilling to pay for services rendered and even if they have no insurance.
So what is all the fuss about at Town Hall meetings set up to discuss President Obama's obsession with healthcare reform?
Obama and Congressional Democrats claim that this reform is all about increasing the quality of care, increasing affordability and making healthcare available to all Americans. Unfortunately, these reasons are all fallacious and are pretenses for the real goal: Government run and controlled healthcare with social engineering and wealth transfer. Everything else is an intentional LIE! What, for example, does affirmative action in medical school admissions have to do with quality of health care? There are many more affirmative action provisos like this one in the legislation.
All across the United States innumerable Americans - most of whom have never protested anything in their lives - are doing so also because they do not trust the Federal Government. Period. One only need to look at the abysmal track records of Social Security (going broke), Medicare and Medicaid (grossly underfunded and going broke) and the United States Postal Service (posted a $7 billion loss in 2007 and 2008) to see the typical inefficiencies, incompetence and wretched mismanagement characteristic of the Federal government.In the end, we the TAXPAYERS, will be paying the price and ending up with less and rationed care, higher taxes, fewer choices, inferior quality of care and fewer innovations.
Then we have privacy issues, bureaucratic interference in an individuals' medical care, rationing, etc...
Posted in Affirmative action Congress Democrat Government Control Healthcare Healthcare Reform Illegal Immigration Socialized Medicine Taxes Tea Parties Tort Reform Videos with 1 Comment
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Aug 12
As part of Obama’s aggressive plan to pass healthcare legislation, the White House has created a website that will it claims will set the record straight on the real truths. Entitled the "Health Insurance Reform Reality Check", it is essentially more of the same: a politically correct racially balanced website that makes specious, unsupportable and partisan claims with the unequivocal intent of continuing the pattern of trying to dupe the American public.
At the very top of the home page is a quote attributed to Obama:
“Whether or not you have health insurance right now, the reforms we seek will bring stability and security that you don’t have today."
"This isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives. This is about people’s businesses. This is about our future.”
Get real, Arrogance in Chief! This legislation is all about politics. Did you inconveniently forget to mention the affirmative action mandates stealthly contained within the bill? How about the wealth transfers and class warfare intimations. And if it is about people's lives, businesses and our future, why did you attempt to ram this legislation through Congress before the public and probably all members of Congress had a chance to read this gargantuan over one thousand page legislation? Could it be that if they had time to read it they would realize that it would actually be severely harmful to their health?
Speaker of the House Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress have also played gutter politics with Obamanocare. Instead of allowing for constructive discourse and bipartisan input, Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress have prohibited Republican input and have viciously attacked those who are unhappy with the legislation. Those who disagree are called “un-American”, not patriotic, part of a mob, and even Astroturf.
And if this healthcare legislation were truly about people’s lives and businesses it wouldn’t tax individuals to destitution and businesses to oblivion nor would it allow the healthcare that would eventuate to be restricted, rationed and inferior to what is available today.
The one truth in Obama’s statement is that it "is about our future" – a very bleak one health wise and economically, indeed.
Read: White House Launches Web Site to Battle Health Care 'Rumors'
The following describes the intolerant rhetoric of Pelosi regarding those who disagree with the healthcare bill. We live in a Democracy which allows for discourse but Pelosi, Reid, Obama and other Democrats are acting as if they are the Imperial rulers of the underling American people.
Read: In a Tight Spot, Pelosi Calls Health Care Critics 'Un-American'
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Aug 7
The United States has the best healthcare system in the world. Period! There is no other country where the composites of overall care, outcomes and effects on the economy are better. Most Americans are in agreement with this assessment. A poll taken in 2006 by ABC News, the Kaiser Family Foundation and USA Today found that 89% of Americans were quite happy with their healthcare.
Does this overwhelmingly positive sentiment by Americans provide a reason to totally dismantle and destroy the best system in the world and replace it with a government controlled one? Of course not! Can improvements be made to our healthcare system? Of course! What we don’t need is an excuse by the Federal government to take full control of our healthcare thereby abridging our freedoms and liberties to make choices regarding our health and the ability to obtain the appropriate care.
You and every other American have the right to know the facts regarding the proposed Federal government healthcare reform. Unfortunately, what has been sold to the public is a Trojan Horse – it is not what it appears to be and what many politicians want you to believe (so they can garner public support for its passage). The Federal government wants to impose socialized medicine on us, a system which has failed everywhere else that it has been implemented. That is why, for example, tens of thousands of Canadians come to the United States each year to have routine and not so routine procedures performed. They were either told either that they would not be eligible for treatment or would have to wait months or even more than a year to be able to be treated. If you have a brain tumor, breast cancer or advanced heart disease, this is a death sentence.
You may also want to know that if this plan of socialized medical care were so superior, how come Congress is exempting itself from it and will have its own gold-plated plan? When President Obama was asked a theoretical question that if the need arose for his family to obtain care which it couldn’t obtain through this government run system, he indicated that he would look elsewhere for their care. These are definitely not ringing endorsements of the government run plan from those who should know its design best!
Politicians may point to the AMA’s (American Medical Association) and ANA’s (American Nurses Association) endorsement of a government run one-payer system as a selling point for the plan. After all, these are the professionals who are intimately involved in our medical care. This is an unfortunate misconception. Although the AMA has been in existence for over 160 years, it is not the true, representative political voice of or for American doctors. As a matter of fact, only around 20 percent of physicians belong to the organization and most of these are not doing so for political reasons. The overwhelming consensus of physicians and nurses nationwide is that this plan is very bad for Americans and for America.
The following are just some of the issues that you need to consider regarding the proposed government takeover of the healthcare system:
It will:
- Result in the rationing of care. Many individuals for a variety of reasons (such as age or cost) will be unable to obtain medical care despite having the government coverage
- Decrease the quality of medical care
- Cause prolonged waiting times to see your physicians
- Increase the death rate both due to inability to obtain medical care in a reasonable period of time as well as a result of inability to receive certain treatments because government bureaucrats deems them too expensive
- Increase morbidity/ suffering because of prolonged waits to see a physician and inability to receive certain treatments because government bureaucrats deems them too expensive
- Place layers of bureaucracy between what your doctor recommends for you and what you can actually receive
- Allow for full government access to your medical records and privacy and make protecting your private medical information nearly impossible
- Result in massive tax increases that will affect all Americans directly and indirectly
- Cause a permanently higher unemployment rate (see European countries) due to the exorbitant costs of mandated coverage on businesses
- Result in lower salaries and hourly rates of employees to compensate for the high cost of employee mandated insurance – whether or not the employee wants or needs the insurance
- Massively increase the budget deficit by trillions of dollars or more – and still not be able to be fully funded
- Will be far more expensive than our present system of healthcare – which was a major selling point of this plan.
- Be extremely complex and convoluted with the creation of many new government agencies and oversight groups. Think of the Post Office inefficiencies and poor customer service on steroids.
- Result in the stifling of medical innovations and implementation of new technologies
It will not:
- Result in universal medical coverage for all Americans
- Lower the total cost of healthcare
- Increase the quality of medical care delivered
- Make it painless to obtain medical care
- Increase the efficiency of healthcare
- Allow you to maintain your private insurance long term for a variety of reasons
- Address tort reform in any meaningful way. In order to protect themselves from frivolous lawsuits, doctors are forced to practice “defensive medicine”. This translates into subjecting patients to costly unnecessary tests and procedures (many of which the patients demand and the doctors don’t feel would otherwise be warranted) adding up to billions of dollars wasted every year.
If you are strongly opposed to this legislation, I urge you to contact your Senators and Representatives and let them know your sentiment.
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Aug 6
Buried within the more than one thousand page Congressional healthcare legislation is a provision for end of life counseling of seniors. The intent, of course, is to reduce expenditures for healthcare for those that may have a poor prognosis for survival. Depending on whether it is you, your relative or someone else’s family member, this proviso is in essence a form of rationing.
According to Betsy McCaughey, an expert on this legislation, a "troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (and more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care (House bill, Pages 425-430)."
Read: How House Bill Runs Over Grandma
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Jul 29
Has Congress become an imperial political entity that imposes mandates on its citizens but exempts itself? Yes, unfortunately, but this is not even a recent phenomena. This furtive practice which is dishonest, morally corrupt, and reflects an abuse of power and disdainful attitude of many politicians, must end. They are supposed to be our representatives who serve for the American people and not for their own aggrandizement of power, wealth and perks.
This leads to Obamanocare and the government takeover of the healthcare system. Congress wants to impose this draconian system on the American public, one that will result in rationing of medical care, long waits, significant restrictions and generally inferior quality care. They, however, will keep their separate gold-plated healthcare plan funded by the taxpayer and which has none of these issues. Very few Americans are aware of their exemption and Congress and Obama will surely not advertise it. Congressional Democrats and Obama also have not only been dishonest regarding much of this program but have overtly lied about provisos buried deeply within this mammoth labyrinthine bill. Let the imperial politicians feast on wine and caviar while the average American is stuck with bread and water … and the oppressive taxes!
Read: Politicians, Heal Thyselves!
Posted in Arrogance Congress Democrat Government Control Healthcare Healthcare Reform Obama Taxes with 1 Comment
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Jul 27
Most doctors vehemently oppose socialized medicine and therefore are strongly against the Government's plan to takeover of the healthcare system. The myriad longstanding quality of care issues, fiscal irresponsibility, financial drain and impending insolvency, mismanagement and convoluted bureaucracies involving the much smaller Medicare and Veterans Administrations Systems patently underscore why the Federal government should not and must not manage and control healthcare.
The following video provides a candid and insightful view from the perspective of a practicing physician.
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Jul 24
During his press conference on July 22nd, Obama made the following statement regarding physicians, reimbursement and decision making:
“So if they're looking and you come in and you've got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid's tonsils out.”
Though this statement might have been expressed for political reasons in order to reacquire public support for his government takeover of the healthcare system, it once again demonstrates him to be uninformed, irresponsible, incompetent, biased and arrogant. This together with Obama’s stalwart support of trial attorneys who are among his largest benefactors and his unwillingness to explore meaningful tort reform, are just more evidence why he and the government can’t and shouldn’t be trusted in controlling the healthcare system for more than 300 million Americans.
Republican Tom Price, M.D. (R-GA), who had practiced medicine for over twenty years, was incensed by Obama’s comment and the implication that doctors may be more interested in money than in helping patients. He issued the followed response:
“It’s obvious President Obama has absolutely no idea what motivates someone to enter the field of medicine,” said Chairman Price. “Medicine is about service and helping one’s fellow man. By insinuating that doctors make treatment decisions based on how much they will be paid, the President displays an astounding disregard for that service and insults every single medical practitioner.
“The only possible explanation for such a comment is his failure to understand the root problems and challenges of our health care system. If the President is sincerely interested in reducing unnecessary procedures, he should speak to his friends in the trial bar about medical malpractice reform. Instead, the President would rather attack those who are responsible for providing the highest quality healthcare in the world.”
Who do you want managing your healthcare, Doctors or politicians and attorneys? We thought so!
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Jul 22
It appears ironic that the group which probably has the most to lose with Obama’s healthcare reform plan, doesn’t generally appear not too concerned with its passage. As Dick Morris noted in his assessment:
“Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access. Indeed, the principal impact of the Obama health care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.”
Why aren’t the elderly and elderly to be not in a state of panic about this? The reason, as we have discussed countless times, is that Obama and the Congressional Democrats have intentionally used disingenuous rhetoric in order to hide the real truths from all but the most perceptive and informed individuals. The elderly are expecting one thing including much better care than they have right now with Medicare and in fact will be facing far worse prospects including ineligibility for care.
Read: Obama Will Repeal Medicare
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Jul 21
Congress is using inscrutable terminology to confuse and mislead the public in order to pass and institute government controlled healthcare before the public realizes that they have been more than duped. In essence, what would be implemented is a rationing of healthcare, restriction of therapeutic options, government intrusion throughout the process, disruption of the doctor-patient bonds, severe impersonalization, and a convoluted bureaucratic nightmare. It may be akin to your worst Post Office nightmare – on steroids except that your health and life are at risk.
Using this comparative effectiveness research, whole treatment options may be unavailable not due to ineffectiveness but because of cost. Because for myriad medical problems one approach, medication or treatment will not work on everyone, it will mean that some Americans will not be treated or treated effectively and, therefore, will be out of luck (and possibly life). Of course, in this one size fits all approach, they will still be paying for healthcare one way or another.
Some important questions to consider for just this issue include: 1) how many treatment options will be available or allowed for a particular diagnosis? 2.) what criteria are used to determine what cost differential makes a potential treatment option too costly and therefore unavailable? Is it a dollar amount? A percentage amount? 3.) Will government bureaucrats determine the treatment choice based on costs or will your doctor make the final decision? 4.) We know that some diseases have been determined to be very expensive to treat and therefore will not be covered in a government run plan. Will these patients have any options? Will there be legal coverage for this problem outside of the system and if so, will the government defray some of the costs?
We definitively know that many Americans will be refused healthcare treatments based on such factors as age, their medical condition, and the particular problem that they are afflicted with. This and the limitation of treatment options are unequivocally rationing of care, plain and simple. Both Obama and Congress deny this but THEY ARE LYING!
For some further discussion of this comparative effectiveness research, read: Rationing Wolves in Public Servants’ Clothing
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Jul 7
Obama continually prevaricates regarding the proposed government controlled healthcare system whether it is about choices, control, costs, rationing, quality or even mandates. We have covered many of these issues in previous posts. The following article is from the perspective of a one-time Canadian who had to deal with their version of a one payer system which Obama is trying to emulate. It was and is a disaster!
Read: Coming Soon: The Nightmare From Up There
Posted in Government Control Healthcare Reform Socialized Medicine with No Comments
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Jul 3
There is no high quality, inexpensive successful single payer government directed healthcare system in the world. Period! It has been an expensive failure wherever it has been implemented. Inevitably, there is rationing of care, long waiting times to be able to receive care, increased mortality and morbidity, and stifling of medical innovations and implementation of state of the art treatments and diagnostic methods. And wouldn’t you know it, this is exactly the healthcare system that Obama and his fellow Democrats want to impose on the American people! Of course, they will be able to keep their special Rolls-Royce healthcare benefits. Like other similar legislative edicts by Congress, it applies to everyone else but them.
Read: Canada's Single-Prayer Health Care
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Jun 30
In the healthcare reform package, there will be mechanisms by which care will be rationed. This can be based on cost, age, disease, pathology or even severity of the disease or person’s health. Bureaucrats may hold more sway over decisions than healthcare providers. For example, if you are 75 years old, physically active and in good health but just fractured your hip, the Government may refuse to authorize surgery to repair it because you are above the arbitrary cut-off age of 72 years. Instead, they may say just use a walker and take pain killers which could permanently disable you or limit your ability to walk. This is definitely not what most Americans want!
Read: Obama Wants to Let Those Pesky Geezers Die
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Jun 25
The Medicare program is just a fraction of the size of what the federal government would be creating with it proposed healthcare reform yet it has failed at running the former. It is pure government logic then to propose an entity that can be a gargantuan failure costing trillions of dollars more per year yet require rationing and resulting in inferior quality of care.
Do a majority of the members of Congress have brains? (Sorry, that evaluation is not a covered service!) Little known by the public is that Congressional members have their own healthcare system (Rolls-Royce quality) and therefore will not be forced to deal with socialized medicine personally. It is not good enough for them but it is good enough for everyone else!
Read: Public Option To Cut Health Costs? Medicare's Record Says Dream On
Posted in Congress Democrat Government Control Healthcare Healthcare Reform Socialized Medicine with No Comments
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25
Socialized medicine wherever it has been instituted or even tried on a limited basis has been an abject failure. Costs far exceed the specious numbers that governments claim. Then to remedy this problem, rationing of care is instituted. There are long waits which can become months or a year or more, that is, if you are allowed to receive that particular service. Many services are denied because they are too costly for the system, the individual is over a certain age, too many of those services have already been delivered for the year, or a bureaucrat has arbitrarily decided that it just won’t be available.
Read: Dead Wait
Posted in Healthcare Reform Socialized Medicine with No Comments
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Jun 17
Most of the American public is totally clueless when it comes to the radical healthcare changes proposed by Obama and the Democrats. They are under the assumption that the results will be excellent but affordable healthcare for all. Instead, the plans based on radical and failed ideologies are far more nefarious, dangerous and necessitate massive tax increases in addition to insurance premiums. Some of these proposals include or will result in arbitrary restrictions of care with rationing, plummeting quality, extraordinarily delays in obtaining treatments that can be deadly, labyrinthine bureaucracies, overworked and less qualified healthcare providers and ancillary personnel with bureaucratic demeanors, and removal of much or your rights to make and pursue healthcare decisions. Think… Post Office of Healthcare!
The following article is a brilliant, thorough, well thought out and substantiated assessment and refutation of Obamacare. It is a classic and must read.
Read: Downgrading American Medical Care
The following video is this same author, Dr. Betsy McCaughey, giving a presentation on these pivotal healthcare issues
Don't Let Washington Bureaucrats Tell Your Doctor What To Do
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