Posted on 04/25/2010 2:43:14 AM PDT by Daisyjane69
Donald Berwick, President Obama’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), has a history of support for government rationing of health care resources on cost grounds. He has spoken favorably about Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which denies patients access to life-saving treatments the National Health Service (NHS) deems too expensive. The American people should have their eyes open to the ramifications of NICE-style rationing in the United States as part of Democrats’ brave new health care world:
(Excerpt) Read more at ncpa.org ...
You know what?
I never knew I was capable of such political hatred until this bunch came to power.
Ther Federal Government spends 24,000,000,000 dollars a year on kidney dialysis. Now that’s just one thing.....dialysis. Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, Marxist, Socialist, whatever.....there will be rationing. You can’t spend what you don’t have.
I’m guessing if people were more invested in their own health care (perhaps health savings accounts), they would take MUCH better care of themselves.
What these turkeys have done is codify into law the WORST of all worlds: somebody else pays, but not you. You can live however you want and send the bill to your neighbor. Who will be forced to pay via the IRS.
People have no stake in keeping themselves healthy if they can pass the cost of bad health on someone else.
And NO, I don’t want the gov’t dictating lifestyles, diet, etc. Diabetes can be kept at bay and controlled in many cases. There is no incentive for this, in any part of this bill.
Not if you are a congressthing, or can afford exorbitant "supplemental" insurance.
There will just be rationing for the masses, who have to line up at the clinics who will accept the rediculously low payment schedules associated with the gov't regulation.
For the elites, however, there will be higher-priced practices with no waiting, plenty of treatment options, and lots of resources.
The illusion that you'll be sitting in the same waiting room as Gates or Soros is the dream that the libs need to sell the plan.
You can’t spend what you don’t have.
Congress does it every day.
I guess, actually, they are spending what you don't have.
Reducing healthcare spending on the elderly serves several objectives for the progressives:
1) If 1/3 of Medicare expenses are really incurred by seniors in the last 6 months of their lives, it represents real costs savings to the government.
2) Rationing health care expenditures for seniors will lower their life expectancy, reducing not only Medicare expenses but also Social Security expenses as well as expenditures on other social programs benefiting the elderly.
3) Accelerating the death rate of the elderly also helps on the revenue side of government, particularly when high inheritance tax rates are reinstated in 2011. The wealth of the elderly can be taken and redistributed by the government through high inheritance taxes in the name of fairness.
4) Seniors are disproportionately conservative and Republican. Accelerating the demise of the elderly through health care rationing shifts the political balance in this country.
5) For those progressives who disdain the white race, the elderly are disproportionately white. Accelerating the death rate of the elderly hastens the day when whites move into the minority in the US population.
I didn’t want to put it quite that starkly, but you bravely did. There are more things being put in place here, than meets the eye.
After collecting taxes from people for decades (to convince them of “care” in their golden years) I find what they are doing absolutely diabolical.
Not that it will help, but I was so mad when I read this, I shot it over to Levin.
This is why we should never trust the government ever.
“This is why we should never trust the government ever.”
If a government can justify killing its weakest citizens — the unborn and the elderly, it should be easy to justify killing those who oppose it.
Either we are prepared to fund Medicare spending for unlimited services regardless of cost, or we are not.
And if we are not, someone has to decide what services not to fund.
It is hypocritical to call for reining in of entitlements and at the same time decline to face the upcoming Medicare deficits.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2500000/posts
;^)
I can, and it's a big difference.
Do I get a prize?
Toaster?
IPod? (which I couldn’t work, anyway)
Excused from FReepathons?*
*NO. Those are my meager “dues” to be a tiny part of the finest group of peeps on the internet!
heh...
Agreed. Someone else posted that 1/3 of all Medicare spending is in the last 6 months of life. Ending a life with an injection is murder. Expending vast amounts of money on patients with multiple serious medical problems when it means the patient dies in one month instead of one week is a senseless and cruel.
Well, if Medicare institutes draconian rationing and payments below the cost of providing services, providers and even some hospitals will opt out. If the federal government then turns around and demands that hospitals and providers accept Medicare as a condition of providing service and practicing Medicine, the providers will cram Medicare patients into every shrinking time slots and only one or two days per week. The queues will be very long.
The Marxists are aware that they cannot be drastic in implementing their dastardly rationing regimes. We are already seeing push-back from the States. The end game with the States may not favor the federal government. As the federal government implements price controls below the cost of providing the service for Medicare and Medicaid patients (or simply dis-allows services), the threat or consequences of the federal government withholding money from the States diminishes. If providers opt out or go out of business, States will realize that the Medicaid money does not actually translate into services provided. In effect, the federal government will have lost their entitlement seeking constituency and trump card against the States. Conceivably, States could retaliate by allowing citizens to withhold federal taxes if the federal government withholds Medicaid payments and other federal payments.
The frog in boiling water analogy is apropos. The frog will jump out of the water if it senses a rapid rise in temperature. My bet is that these Marxists do not understand cooking.
Yes I can see a difference.
With respect to #2 I do not have a clear picture as to how decisions will be made. Essentially everyone over age 65 in the US is covered by Medicare which is heavily subsidized. From that perspective most health care for the elderly is funded by “everyone else” as the medicare insurance payments made by current recipients was not “saved’ by the government to pay for their needs but was spent at the time it was collected.
Six years ago my mother had a massive heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. Dead on arrival in the emergency room her heart was restarted she spent that night and several days in cardiac intensive care, monitored around the clock. Once she was recovered sufficiently she had an operation and a pacemaker implant. She had several setbacks along the way spending 53 days in the hospital before she was released. She had a number of setbacks along the way and could have expired a number of times during that 53 days had her level of care been reduced or if some of the medical procedures been denied due for cost reasons. In the end she pulled through and is still, at age 78, living a very full life.
The taxpayers spent several hundred thousand dollars on her treatment and she continues to receive tens of thousands of dollars of treatment per year. My mother and father both worked and payed taxes for decades before retiring. Are they owed anything by current generations of taxpayers? If they were productive citizens and paid into the system under the rules at the time are they not entitled to the services they were promised when they paid those Medicare taxes. If they are entitled to only limited services, to what level of services are they entitled and who gets to decide? If someone decides they are entitled to only limited services, should that be communicated to them and should they be able to supplement those services from their own savings if they so choose?
Unless we are willing to end Medicare (I do not see the political support existing in this country to do so), the taxpayers will be funding some level of medical care for the elderly. If we are to limit that care, it will be a political decision. Will that decision be handled on a case by case basis by physicians or a bureaucrat, or will there be government mandated guidelines (i.e. a person over age 70 is allowed only 10 days on a respirator even if the doctor believes 15 days will allow the patient to survive; or people over age 70 are not entitled to heart transplants and over age 80 are not entitled to bypass operations)? If there are government guidelines, can the family or the individual choose to pay for extra care above the guidelines? Will the government allow people to purchase supplemental insurance?
I fear a situation where the government allows only limited care for the elderly masses and will not allow the elderly masses to pay for additional care services or buy private insurance to pay for additional services beyond those allowed by the government. If this is the case, I see no difference between #2 and #1, particularly if there is a different care system for the governing elites.
Stephen Hawking is one of the longest surviving ALS patients in the world. His life has no doubt been sustained at considerable expense to the UK taxpayers through measures that are unlikely to be provided to the average citizen. Ted Kennedy went to extraordinary measures to battle his brain cancer. His care was paid for by the taxpayers as he was a member of Congress. Should the government decide some should receive exotic expensive treatment paid for by the taxpayers while others do not? If so, the government is essentially practicing euthenasia on some.
At the point at which health care becomes practially unattainable . . .
A major crime will place the elderly patient securely in the hands of the correctional system, where incarcerated people have much quicker access to health care than some irrelevant non-parasitic citizen.
Which is why fronting Ted Kennedy as the poster corpse for the health care bill is incredibly hypocritical.
In the bill, the only appeal to denial of heath care services is directly controlled by congress.
So only those who have connections to congress will get anything beyond a sympathetic form letter run off by a staffer and signed by a machine.
are they not entitled to the services they were promised when they paid those Medicare taxes.
Medicare has never been this sort of system. No one gets benefits from Medicare that are even remotely connected to what they paid in (in contrast to SocSec, which has always had the facade of individual accounts).
Medicare has always been a transfer payment ("welfare") which takes from today's workers and gives to today's retirees.
And the real problem with "promised services" is that such a concept totally fails to recognize the increased post retirement lifespan and the orders-of-magnitude cost increases in today's medical technology.
If they are entitled to only limited services, to what level of services are they entitled and who gets to decide?
They are entitled to the level of services under which the Medicare trust fund can maintain solvency (income = outlays).
should they be able to supplement those services from their own savings if they so choose?
Of course they should. A conservative model for the future of Medicare should specify what services can be provided by Medicare itself (and by 2030, these will be significantly trimmed back) with individual responsibility to pay for non covered services.
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