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Jewish World Review
June 18, 2009
/ 26 Sivan 5769
Get Sick Immediately
By
Bob Tyrrell
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If you have any sense that you may be getting sick
in the years ahead, I suggest you get sick immediately. If you will be in
need of surgery or any other medical procedure, do it now! If not
immediately, be certain that you hand yourself over to the health care
professionals before Oct. 15 of this year. That is the date on which
President Barack Obama hopes to sign his health care bill once it has gone
through the congressional baloney grinder.
At the heart of President Obama's plan is his stated goal to cut
medical costs. That might sound good to you, but it means cutting services,
nurses, technicians, medical tests and, most prominently, the use of
expensive technology. The president's top medical advisers are quite frank
about this. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel and a health policy
adviser in the Office of Management and Budget, has chided Americans for the
expense of their being "enamored with technology." Dr. David Blumenthal,
another key Obama adviser, charges medical innovations as being responsible
for fully two-thirds of the annual increase in health care spending. Their
solution is to limit expensive innovations. A 2008 Congressional Budget
Office report agrees with their cost analysis but concludes happily that
such innovations "permit the treatment of previously untreatable
conditions." As I shall show, there are more humane ways to cut health care
costs.
Also at the heart of President Obama's plan is the restriction
of services for people 65 and older, who by virtue of modern medicine may
actually be 10 to 15 years younger in terms of good health than they would
have been a generation ago. Alas, they still have higher health risks and
costs than younger people. Thus, they are going to bear the brunt of the
Obama administration's cost cuts, for 27 to 30 percent of Medicaid spending
is spent for caring for people at the ends of their lives. With the
government taking over more of the nation's health care costs under the
Obama regime, it already has been decided that government monies are spent
more economically on younger people than on older people. If a 65-year-old
needs the cost of a hip replacement covered, the government will say it
would better spend that money on a younger person, whose hip will last
longer. Or perhaps the government will decide the money is better spent on
preventive medicine for younger people.
In the federal stimulus legislation that the president signed
Feb. 17, we find funding for a Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative
Effectiveness Research. "Comparative effectiveness research" is a term used
by economists in health care for making health comparisons based often on
age, which leads to limiting care based on a patient's age. In Great
Britain, comparative effectiveness research is actually used to deny
patients treatment for age-related diseases, such as heart disease and
macular degeneration. When the federal stimulus bill was going through
Congress, there were warnings regarding the consequences of comparative
effectiveness research. Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., a heart surgeon, warned
that it would lead to "denying seniors and the disabled lifesaving care."
Yet the policy remained in the bill, along with requirements for
doctors' offices and hospitals to maintain databanks on patients while
creating a national network to monitor patients' care. The good side of that
is that a central database can send out the latest information on
treatments, though doctors who keep up with their medical journals already
know about these treatments. The dark side is that it will allow the federal
government to control how our doctors treat us. The bill speaks of
"appropriate" and "cost-effective" care and provides penalties against
doctors, beginning in 2014. Now there is an Orwellian twist to the Obama
promise of "hope" and "change."
As Betsy McCaughey has written in a groundbreaking analysis of
the Obama health care proposals, Draconian cost-control measures are not the
answer to health care reform, and they are based on erroneous data. Health
care's spending increases over the past five years have been about half what
they were in the recent period before that. Average family spending on food,
energy and health care has remained the same for decades. Moreover, contrary
to myth, there are not 47 million uninsured Americans, but actually about 22
million. Rather than pass a health care reform that mercilessly would limit
health care to older citizens (and to chronically ill citizens) while still
increasing federal expenditures by at least a trillion dollars, she suggests
a modest reform, to wit, debit cards for the uninsured and the needy.
Appearing in a recent installment of Spectator.org, McCaughey
wrote, "Providing sliding scale assistance, based on household income, to
families to purchase . coverage would cost $20 to $25 billion a year." That
is one reform that would deal with our present problems. There are others,
which I shall take up in later columns. What we do not need is Orwell's Big
Brother overseeing the rationing of health care to senior citizens,
particularly senior citizens with years of life ahead of them.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Bob Tyrrell is editor in chief of The American Spectator. Comment by clicking here.
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