Health Care Reform's Rationing Provisions

Do you know what President Barack Obama said earlier in the speech where he is quoted as saying: "I don't want the folks who created the mess do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking?" He actually said, "We want to make sure that we listen to other people's ideas. We're going to bring labor and business together," he said.

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Congressman John Dingell has now said: "Well, the last time I had to confront something like this was when I voted for the civil rights bill and my opponent voted against it. At that time, we had a lot of Ku Klux Klan folks and white supremacists and folks in white sheets and other things running around causing trouble.

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Mort Zuckerman of MSNBC stated on tv recently: "you start to wonder whether in fact the word socialist is becoming a code word, whether or not socialist is becoming the new N-word for frankly for some angry upset birthers and others."

Cynthia Tucker’s guesstimate that 45-65 percent of town hall protesters are probably racist just shows how out of touch she is with main stream America, for this has not one thing to do with the skin color of anyone. It shows me that she is actually the racist.

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President Obama, without his teleprompter, actually made our case for us during a recent speech on health insurance reform by saying, "I mean, if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It's the post office that's always having problems." That comment provoked laughter from the audience. Exactly, Mr. President.

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Susan Ferrechio
Chief Congressional Correspondent

Regarding the section of the health care reform bill pertaining to a collection of personal data for the common good, she says: "I have spent 35 years in information technology," one woman in the audience said to Arlen Specter. "I read this bill very closely. You are about to concentrate more information about more Pennsylvanians and Americans in this bill in one place in the computers of Washington that has ever occurred."

Specter elicited laughs and boos when he responded, "With respect to privacy, we'll do everything we can to stop people from breaking into the files." Following the meeting, Specter said Wednesday he thinks people who have been angrily disrupting town hall meetings on overhauling the health care system are "not necessarily representative of America," but should be heard. Yes, Mr. Specter, it IS representative of the majority of us in America - just read the polls......

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said the provision in the House bill that calls for an ID card actually goes much further and would allow the government access to a patient's bank account, in order to determine ability to pay.

"What I see as being problematic is that the government can get into your bank account and see how much is in there," Furchtgott-Roth said.

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From Rich Lowry: Billy Tauzin cut a deal with the White House that is keeping his drug industry trade group PhRMA out of its customary place in the pantheon of Democratic hate groups — for now. Pres. Barack Obama goes out of his way to praise the drug industry. Tauzin has visited the White House half a dozen times and has committed to a $150 million advertising campaign on behalf of Obamacare. He’s become the “good German” of the health-care debate — that is, the good $2 million-a-year drug-industry lobbyist.

Tauzin agreed to pass along [an Obama promised limit of ] $80 billion in savings over ten years. It wasn’t clear what exactly PhRMA had gotten in return until congressional Democrats began to run afoul of the unacknowledged provisions of the deal. It turns out the White House had committed not to not to do three things: impose more than $80 billion in savings, have the government set prices in the Medicare prescription-drug program, and import cheaper drugs from Canada. In other words, Obama has bought off the drug companies in order to make them tout his reforms. The Chicago Machine has sent a good soldier to the White House.

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Kelly Anderson Wright of American Thinker: excerpted

Last year, when Michelle Obama declared, "America is a mean country," I disagreed. As the white mom of multi-racial children, I knew our country had its share of race problems, but I never would have called America "mean."

Apparently, Michelle's "mean America" comment was simply premonitory. Last year, I was a sweet, naïve, middle class, white Italian-American businesswoman and single mother.

And now, as I, my friends, and even my elderly mother speak loudly at town hall meetings to tell our elected representatives we don't want government-run health care, we are being called Nazis, racists, political terrorists, rabid mobsters and angry, right-wing wackos, just because we are exercising our God-given right to freedom of speech.

Michelle, you are right, America is mean. The Obamanation is the meanest America I have ever known.
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Let's quote Dr. Ekzekiel Emanuel, Obama's pick to be health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts [in health care] will not be pain-free. "Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change," he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008). "A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognosis."

When fully implemented, Dr. Emanuel's system, in his words, "produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated."
"Chances that are attenuated" , states Newt Gingrich, is a nice way of saying the young and the old are considered less worthy of health care and, under this system, will get less.
In our country, the road to dehumanizing, bureaucratic health care rationing begins with something called comparative effectiveness research (CER). It sounds completely innocent. In practice, CER means comparing different treatments for diseases to see which works best. And what doctor or patient would object to that, right?

The problem is that, in the context of a government-run health care system, comparative effectiveness research becomes a way to find a cheaper, one-size-fits-all approach to medicine that will limit health care choices for patients.

But don't just take my word for it. Congressional Democrats included $1.1 billion in the Stimulus Bill for CER. Report language explaining the bill noted that the treatments found to be "more expensive" as result of the research "will no longer be prescribed" and that "guidelines" should be developed to manage doctors.

Congressional Democrats also killed several amendments to the current health care bill that would have prevented CER from being used to ration care.
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From Mary Laney of the Chicago Daily Observer: England cannot get rid of its public healthcare now because bureaucrats running its public health system are now the third largest block of employees in the world. The protesters [here in America] know this. They also know that the numbers being given on those without insurance are wildly inflated as 40 million. Take out the 10 to 20 million illegal aliens, remove the 8 to 10 million who can afford insurance but choose not to get it, and the number shrinks considerably. It would be cheaper for the government to simply pay to cover those who can’t afford insurance than to spend 17% of the nation’s economy to rip up the best health care system in the world.
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