There are two smart, Conservative ideas in healthcare reform, and we have demonized both of them. The first is the individual mandate, which is to say that you should must take responsibility for your own coverage and not throw yourself on the state when you get sick. The second is what has been caricatured as the Death Panel, but is in fact a living will, a rational discussion of what measures you as an individual would like to see taken, balancing the possibility of preserving your life against the quality of that life at a very advanced age.
You can’t demonize a demon. Living wills are voluntary. The “independent payment board” (obamacare’s version of NICE)—the real Death Panel— is dictatorial.
NO health care rationing, NO “independent payment board”, NO euthanasia, NO support for abortion!!!!
Repeal obamacare! Dump and prosecute obama, Daschle, Berwick, Sunstein, Sibelius, and all the other Satan-inspired designers of that evil law!!!!
are you nuts?
where does the federal government get the authority to do either of those?
“The second is what has been caricatured as the Death Panel, but is in fact a living will...”
I don’t know where you get your ideas regarding the IPAB Death Panels, but you are 100% wrong.
Please explain how a government panel dictating which operations a patient is legally allowed to seek is “similar to” a living will?
The key difference that you, and many others, miss is that in a living will, the PATIENT makes decisions for himself.
But the opposite is true with OmoslemCare, wherein a panel of BUREAUCRATS makes those decisions, then tells the patient what decisions have been made regarding their medical care — based upon a “life-years” cost calculation of age-vs-cost.
In other words, this “living will” you mention is a bunch of Neo Nazis in a conference room, consulting a chart of price vs age, to determine whether they’ll allow Grandma to get the operation she needs.... Or whether they’ll deny her that medical care and send her home with a bottle of Oxycodone to zone out and die.
Just as the Nazis practiced, it’s a great way to kill folks who have “outlived their usefulness” as workers.
That’s some “living will.” More like a Death Warrant.
The Death Panel is a living will only in the sense of letting a committee of strangers write your living will on the spot with respect to what they estimate is the cost of your care and the value of your life, converted to dollars.
The "living will" provision punishes doctors who don't make a documented effort to obtain a living will. It also punishes doctors whose patients change their minds once they get sick. What's that about? Well, consider this: Most healthy people are horrified at the idea of severe illness or injury, so they are likely to state while they are healthy that this or that condition would be intolerable pain, or too great a hardship on family, or too humiliating to live with and reflect these fears in "living wills," but if they later get into one of these "intolerable" conditions, they tend to find they can live with it after all and change their minds. The authors of the Law know this, so they included the "Don't let your patient change his mind" provision. The doctor has a problem of possible divided loyalties: How much of a financial punishment would he be willing to take before he tries to influence the patient not to change his "living will?"
So, we have the inherent inserting of politics in individual healthcare decisions and we have the bonus effect of built-in division of the loyalties of doctors. To suggest that government control of your medical bills and your "living will" is in any way better than your own judgment in these matters, is anti-Conservative.