Video: Oregon Health Plan won't pay chemo drug, but will pay for doctor-assisted suicide?

Barbara Wagner’s doctor hoped a new chemotherapy drug would help her, but the Oregon Health Plan told her the treatment was not approved. On the bright side, they offered to have her killed.

“You want life time maintenance medication for your sick child? Sorry, we can’t afford that. We do however have a special running on cyanide pills..”

You appear to be glossing over a very nasty conundrum:

1) We all want ourselves, our families, our friends, ... to have all possible health care that would or might save their lives.

2) We have compassion when we hear that someone else needs medical care, but ...

3) Some medical procedures which have some probability of positive outcomes cost more any any “normal person” can possibly afford, and ...

Health Care is NOT A RIGHT - if you can’t afford it, you don’t have a right to force other people to do it or pay for it. And even if you were ...

4) We have found from experience that there is not enough taxpayer funds to pay for every possible treatment for everyone — if you don’t believe me, look at the history of Medicare and Medicaid.

Oregon grappled with this problem several years ago, and finally arrived at the following solution:
a) Legislature decides how much of the State revenues will be devoted to publicly funded health care
b) Physicians rank order procedures for cost and effectiveness,
c) Statisticians predict how many people will probably require each procedure during the next year
d) A committee computes how much total money would be required for each procedure, and adds them up until the legislature designated funding level is reached.

Oregon then draws a line, and says that if anyone requires public funding for a procedure, it had to be above the line. So, things like bone marrow transplant (e.g., 10 % chance of recovery for $250,000)and experimental cancer treatments are below the line; if you can’t pay for it yourself, Oregon will not. Oregon believes that this provides the “greatest good for the greatest number”.

So if your treatment is below the line, what do you do? Either get friends to chip in, convince the physicians and hospital to donate the treatment (and perhaps charge other patients more money to make up for it), or contact the drug maker to get it for free, or go to California and let them pay for it, or go to India or China to get the treatment cheaper, or ..... go without... and maybe die. It might not be fair, but that is the way it is.

The siren call of “just increase taxes a little bit more to pay for it” leads to the kind of socialism that bankrupts countries. As Margaret Thatcher noted, “The only thing wrong with socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money”.

So before presenting the false choice of “You want life time maintenance medication for your sick child?
Sorry, we can’t afford that. We do however have a special running on cyanide pills..”, you need to get your story straight:
* are you assuming that you have the RIGHT to force others to pay for everyone to get all possible medical treatments? (If so, you are living in fantasy land), or
* are you advocating that Health Care is a “RIGHT”, and the State should compel taxpayers to pay for every possible treatment for everyone?(again, you are living in a fantasy land); or
* are you so wealthy and so compassionate that you are volunteering to pay for all those treatments yourself? or Or have you just not thought it through?

Hillary Clinton ran into this problem (called “cost containment”), and advocated a single payer system where everyone (rich or poor) would get the same treatments (so it would be fair), and it would be illegal for any physician to perform any procedure not “authorized”, even if the patient was willing to pay himself. The result was to elect enough Republicans to take over the House.

Perhaps you have a different approach, better than Oregon’s, so that every possible person gets access to every possible treatment?? If not, there will always be some baby somewhere that will not get the treatment that will save its life.

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