And my response to their reply:
AARP: As a provider and director of quality assurance in the health care field for thirty-five years, let me remark on how astoundingly patronizing, misleading , but oddly revealing was your reply to my recent e-mail to AARP regarding that portion of the “stimulus bill” just passed by Congress dealing with our medical system. Where to begin? Perhaps with the biggest big lie of all – “our broken health care system”. Our health care system is not “broken”. Eighty-five percent of the people in this country have appropriate access to the system, as do thousands from all over the world who come here annually seeking diagnosis and treatment which they can’t receive under the wretched systems, most of them nationalized, in their own countries. Of those not adequately plugged into our system, three quarters are either eligible for coverage by already existing programs but not enrolled due to being irresponsible or ill-informed, illegal aliens who shouldn’t be in the country at all, or those capable of purchasing healthcare with their own resources but for their own reasons not doing so. The remaining quarter can easily be covered if need-be by extensions of current programs, including Medical Savings Accounts, at a fraction of the cost and none of the disruption which will result from eliminating Medicare along with other programs and putting everyone in one massive nationalized system, which AARP clearly favors.
Your reply completely ignored any mention of those features in the “stimulus bill” which are in fact the first stealth steps toward this all-inclusive nationalized program, and with good reason. Such programs where instituted in other countries are notoriously inefficient, technologically backward, and ineffective in consistently delivering quality medical care (see among others “Lives at Risk” by Goodman et al ). A ”National Coordinator of Health Information Technology”, a “Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research”, health care determinations based on cost and how long the actuarial tables say one has to live – all mentioned or implied in the bill – are modeled on the British health system, which is perhaps the worst of the worst. News stories in that country chronicle the system’s problems virtually daily. Hospitals are so underfunded and understaffed that they are plagued by outbreaks of infection continually. Patients die waiting for tests or treatments that are routinely available in this country. After spending seventy billion pounds on the development of an integrated medical information system (sound familiar?) the National Health Service has not yet been able to effectively link together the elements of the system or in fact sign off on the completion of any individual element. Let’s look at the practice of “stacking” as practiced in London hospitals. When patients in their emergency rooms were spending up to two days waiting for treatment, the NPS decided to fix the problem by ordering that henceforth no patient would wait for more than two hours until being seem by a physician. When the government is in charge it can do such things, and it worked. Now no patient admitted to an ER waits longer than two hours to be seen. But they do stack up outside ER’s waiting for their turn to be admitted, which comes when ER staff believes they can be seen within two hours. Now people are dying because they can’t get an ambulance to take them to the hospital because patients are waiting in the ambulances to get into ER’s. You will attempt to dismiss all this by calling it “scare tactics”. I call it just plain scary.
You neatly avoid addressing any of this unpleasantness by focusing your reply on a disingenuous consideration of “comparative effectiveness research”, which is a boondoggle and Trojan Horse. The most effective treatment for any patient is the one that works for that patient. To try to determine the best therapy in a group and then go back and apply that treatment to an individual patient, expecting that it will automatically be the optimum therapy for that patient, is nonsense. Any gains which might be made in treatment effectiveness through such research would be trivial compared to those produced by an equivalent funding to research into cancer and heart disease. It is not the way to improve patient care. It is, however, the way to collect massive amounts of confidential information on private citizens, and to provide government bureaucrat wonks with the illusion that they can play doctor and override treatment decisions made by trained and experienced physicians. It is an attempt at medicine by cookbook, at one-size-fits-all health care. You know, one- size-fits-all like the spam generic reply you sent to me and probably hundreds of others, none of whom likely felt their concerns were adequately addressed. I will be posting your comments along with this response on several internet websites where there have been recent discussions about the impending tragedy in American medical care. I think it important that as much of the public as possible become aware of AARP’s insensitivity to the genuine concerns many of us have regarding the contemplated changes in health care, your contemptuous dismissal of those raising such concerns as “opponents of health care reform”, and your hostility to interests attempting to preserve Medicare and the rest of our medical system, the best in the world , rather than destroying them. I thank you for confirming my wife’s oft-stated opinion that “AARP isn’t good for much” and my own that you are nothing but one more shill organization for the left and the Democrat party. Oh, and in these days of tight money thanks too for helping us determine how we can save a few bucks in the future – by not renewing our AARP membership.
Thanks for posting these...