Free Republic

Medicine: The administration's nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid is a fan of Britain's National Health Service and rationing services. He believes in less discretion for your doctor, more power for your government. 'The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open" is what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, said in an interview published in Biotechnology Healthcare in June 2009. The question is whether the Senate will confirm Berwick with open eyes. Berwick says: "NICE is...

With the presidential ink not quite dry on the health overhaul legislation, Republicans and their conservative allies promise to repeal it. That could prove a long battle, one that could stretch out for years. But opponents of the administration's plan should take heart. One of its main proposals is on the cusp of being repealed. Not here in America, but across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom. With health costs spiraling, one of the core ideas of the White House's health takeover is the creation of an independent body of experts to steer clinical decisions. IPAB, the Independent Payments Advisory...

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:

Thirty-four of 39 school budgets in the county were defeated. School districts spending plans were massacred at the polls during the annual school elections Tuesday as voters used the ballot box to vent their frustrations about higher taxes. According to unofficial results at press time, only five of 39 school district budgets were passed, a 12 percent approval rate, the lowest this decade and possibly longer. The only other time this decade that fewer than half the budgets failed was in 2006 when only 17 of 39 budgets won approval. School officials said the results were not surprising given the...

Still wondering why we are resisting socialized medicine? We are resisting it because it does have a tendency to kill people. Over the last few weeks, we have chronicled the NHS in the UK, and its record on killing British citizens. Here is the latest installment, courtesy of the Daily Mail. "Up to 20,000 people have died needlessly early after being denied cancer drugs on the NHS, it was revealed yesterday. The rationing body NICE has failed to keep a promise to make more life-extending drugs available. Treatments used widely in the U.S. and Europe have been rejected on grounds...

Buzz and bullets: Gun fans cheer Starbucks' policy Sunday, February 28, 2010 E-mail this story | Print Bookmark and Share By GREG BLUESTEIN (AP) -- Dale Welch recently walked into a Starbucks in Virginia, handgun strapped to his waist, and ordered a banana Frappuccino with a cinnamon bun. He says the firearm drew a double-take from at least one customer, Welch's foray into the coffeehouse was part of an effort by some gun owners to exercise and advertise their rights in states that allow people to openly carry firearms. Even in some "open carry" states, businesses are allowed to ban...

video at the link.

The biggest gift came from Swift herself. The singer has donated $250,000 to schools around the country that she's either attended or worked with. The money will pay teachers' salaries as well as buy books and fund various educational programs. "Something I wanted to do at the end of this amazing year and especially on my birthday was give back to something I really believe in, which is education," says Swift. "The schools that I went to and the amazing people I got to learn from really turned me into who I am, and I wanted to give back."

Tens of thousands of osteoporosis sufferers will be denied drugs unless their condition worsens, the NHS medicines rationing body has ruled after a year long legal battle. Campaigners branded the decision 'unethical' and called for the guidance to be reviewed next year. Patients with the disease, which causes the bones to thin and become brittle and prone to fracture, will have fewer treatment options if they do not respond to the first drug, it was argued. The original guidance was issued in October last year and since then the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence has been embroiled in...

11/23/2009 US Foreign Policy Obama's Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage By Gabor Steingart AP US President Barack Obama is back in the US after an Asian trip that produced few results. When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it's not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming. There were only a few hours left before Air Force One was scheduled to depart for the flight home. US President Barack Obama...

By Richard Knox In his full-bore battle against brain cancer, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy resorted to treatment many consider experimental -- proton beam radiation therapy. Sen. Kennedy returns to Senate last year after treatment for brain cancer. Medicare pays for it. But his death leaves open a slew of questions about the costly treatment, which delivers high doses of radiation to tumor cells while largely sparing healthy tissue from damage. Did it do him any good? Should Medicare (or private insurers) pay for the unproven treatment? And most politically fraught, should Kennedy's legacy issue -- universal health care -- include...

How much is one additional year of your life worth? Or one more year of life for your father or your wife? For your child? In Great Britain, the government has settled on a number: $45,000. That’s how much a government commission with the Orwellian acronym NICE has decided British government-run health care will pay for one additional year of life for a British subject. Think it could never happen here? Then you need to pay closer attention to what Washington is planning for your health care.

Health Care: There might not be a "death panel," as Sarah Palin described it, but federal bureaucrats will be making end-of-life decisions. That's why state-run medicine is a leading cause of death in Britain and Canada.A post on the former Alaska governor's Facebook page has caused a stir by discussing openly what many privately fear and something we have written about. End-of-life counseling and efforts to measure cost-effectiveness of treatment will combine in a perfect storm to ration care in a way that lets the government decide who lives and who dies. "The America I know and love is not...

Rationing: In the recesses of the House health care "reform" bill is a provision for end-of-life counseling for seniors. Don't worry, granny, they're from the government and they're here to help.At a town hall meeting at AARP headquarters in Washington, D.C., President Obama was asked by a woman from North Carolina if it was true "that everyone that's Medicare age will be visited and told they have to decide how they wish to die." At first, the president joked that not enough government workers existed to ask the elderly how they wanted to die. The idea, he said, was to...

This is my first posting and I aplogize that it is a vanity. But every morning I get up at 5:30 and check into what is happening on FR. My wife appears at about 6:30 and asks what's going on. After a few minutes of me railing, she always asks if there are any "fluffy bunny" stories. Normally, I would consider a perp getting shot, a fluffy bunny story, she is looking for something different. Stories about baby pink elephants are good. Srories about an old WW2 vet getting his H/S diploma are good. So could the FR team help...

GRAPHIC footage of a youth's brutal bashing at a train station shows three attackers taking turns to kick him in the head. Detectives investigating the vicious assault say they are appalled by the level of violence, which left the 23-year-old man from Sunshine in Melbourne's west with serious head injuries. The man was beaten even after he handed over the backpack that appeared to be the motive behind the gang-attack.

For anyone who doubted that NICE people don't exist, here is their website. NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, is the organization in the UK that sets the guidelines on healthcare rationing for the NHS. Look around the site. See what you find. You'll find quite a bit. Like this gem which I found under Implementation Tools, Costing Tools, CG24 Lung cancer: costing template (England).Click here to go directly to the source. Check out in the first column, second row of the chart..."cost of futile surgery avoided". Note that while the analysis does mention how they can...

After the Mumbai jihad there was a response of "Do good deeds." The Jews of Chabad (the sect that had its members tortured to death) asked for Jews to do "mitzvahs," good works. A yoga group that had some of its members killed believes that love will triumph. Then Deepak Chopra weighed in with his "think good thoughts" campaign. Chopra's effort has the "magic" of if a million people pledge to think good thoughts the world will change for peace. All of these efforts may be summarized by one phrase: Be Nice.

Comity artist, John McCain, told a nice little lady at one of his townhall meetings standing up to state she was afraid of Obama becoming president that, ’Senator Obama is a nice family man, a good man whom McCain would not be afraid of to be president.’ Sorry, that’s just stupidity, not comity. Barack ’ACORN’ Obama is not a nice man, he’s a nightmare for the Republic. Barack Obama is not a nice family man, he‘s a proven liar. A nice man doesn't work legislatively to protect infanticide in Illinois. A nice man doesn't train and fund an army committing...

NICE, France: In patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), immunosuppressive therapy followed by autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation elicited high response rates and improved quality of life for up to 6 years. The results of the study were presented here at the 18th Meeting of the European Neurological Society (ENS) by Tatiana Ionova, MD, PhD, Department of Haematology, Pirogov National Medical Surgical Center, Moscow, Russia. During the last decade, high-dose immunosuppressive therapy followed by autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation has been used with increasing frequency as a therapeutic option for patients with MS. "The aim of the study was to assess...