Healthcare Radicals Bank on Public Ignorance and Gullibility

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hid a radical health care overhaul bill behind closed doors for weeks, then finally emerged in a news conference on November 18 to proclaim that the bill somehow would cover millions more Americans while simultaneously saving money.

To give you an idea of the kind of math that Reid and his allies employ, they conveniently left out of the projected cost of the bill some $247 billion -- the cost of a 10-year freeze on cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. Reid had proposed that expensive “doctor-fix” plan to buy off the American Medical Association, which dutifully endorsed the overall health care bill in response to the cash inducement. That helps explain why the left-leaning AMA, which once represented nearly four of every five physicians, now claims closer to just one in five physicians on its dwindling rolls.

Say, didn't a certain someone mention 'Death Panels'?

The "U.S. Preventive Services Task Force" -- otherwise known as Palin's "mythical" *Death Panel* which oddly would cease being "mythical" if ObamaPelosiReidCare became law -- is worried that too many American women in their 40s are having their breasts examined.
With precision timing, two weeks after National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the government panel says that women should take their chances and wait until they reach 50 to get a mammogram. And even then only every other year.
Just a few years ago (in '02), the same infallible panel recommended annual mammograms for women in their 40s after a big drop in cancer death rates since the early '90s when routine mammography became standard practice. Now, based on no new evidence, the panel changed its mind.
Breast cancer is still the second leading cause of death in women -- but, relax. You can trust a government panel that changes its positions like Obama changes positions on Afghanistan.
Since many breast cancers are caught in women in their early 40s, the "report" says women in their 40s don't need mammograms. After much study, the government panel concluded that when a women receives a false-positive, it results in feeling anxiety. (In a separate study, the panel concluded that when a deer sees headlights, the deer feels anxiety.) So, by the "report"'s impressive logic, it's better to risk getting more severe cancer by delaying, rather than feeling anxiety for a few days from a false-positive result.
Obama told Congress in September that "routine checkups and preventative care, like mammograms" are good "because there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse" -- unless a government-run ~~Death Panel~~ changes its mind.
Liberals are enraged that the panel's lunatic recommendation is being criticized. On the basis of having no radiologists and oncologists on the panel, the media considers this a panel of "experts".
In order to preserve the media meme that Palin's warning about Death Panels is still "false" despite the evidence, libbies have erected a series of phony defenses.
Phony defense No. 1 is that cost-control wasn't a factor in this bogus "study", yet the "report" mentions costs three times and, as Dr. Elizabeth Vliet (who actually is an expert on women's health) said on Fox News, the 'report' "was not based on new medical data, it was based on combining cost-effective data in the computer modeling to re-evaluate the data that supplied our current recommendations . . . and if (cancer screening for women in their 40s) saves lives, the point was it didn't save enough lives in younger women, so [the panel] felt, 'well, fine, we don't need to do it.' But if you're the woman whose life is saved, then it is important and that is why I think this is so critical for women to understand we're facing the possibility of rationing based on cost rather than women's lives."
Another bogus defense is that these are only 'guidelines', nothing to see here, move along. HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius defended the panel by backing away from it, claiming it's just a recommendation from some 'independent panel' going rogue.
This panel is so rogue, Medicare gloms on to its guidelines "when it makes coverage decisions for seniors, and its judgments also play a large role in the private insurance markets," (WSJ, 11/19), and under Obamacare, "this task force [becomes] an arbiter of the benefits that private insurers will be required to cover as they are converted into government contractors" and "what are now merely recommendations will become de facto rules . . .," (WSJ, 11/19).
Liberals get hysterical when anyone suggests a link between abortion -- a procedure to save a woman from being "punished" with a baby -- and breast cancer, insisting that the "consensus" in the medical community is that no such link exists, yet the consensus in the medical community about the new mammogram recommendation is that it's full of crap, so libbies have worked themselves into a frenzy this week attacking the medical community.
Then, along come "new guidelines" from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists urging women to wait until they reach 21 to have a Pap smear, which can prevent invasive cancer by detecting pre-cancerous changes in the cervix in time.
The ACOG's big flip-flopper-oo and the USPSTF's recommendation to fight cancer awareness because it makes women anxious are both just ObamaCare dress rehearsal, and if more women die that's okay with libbies -- can't make an omelet without eggs and can't build health care utopia without pushing for death panels and rationing. "Guidelines" from Obama's mastectomy-counters proliferate when doctors and patients no longer call the shots. But, don't worry, CBO says this tyranny is 'deficit nuetral'.
And if the timing of the cost-benefit "analysis" by the boobs on the USPSTF was goofy, it's of a piece with the Obumbler administration, which blew a trillion "stimulus" bucks on Congressional Districts which don't exist, can't find its policy on Afghanistan, can't decide if terrorist Hasan is a terrorist, can't govern with huge majorities in Congress, can't find a new home for Gitmo's harmless little darlings and thinks giving KSM a civilian trial will get al-Qaeda to come around while Iran's nuclear mullahs press full steam ahead on a radiology program of their own for Tel Aviv, Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, etc. Gallup yesterday pegged Obama's approval rate at 49 percent but, hold on, he's shooting for 40 percent by Christmas.
Anyway, that's...
My Two Cents...
"JohnHuang2"

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