Posted on 08/12/2009 9:27:48 AM PDT by NotSoModerate
“I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost,” Obama said in the interview. “I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother.”
Obama said “you just get into some very difficult moral issues” when considering whether “to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill.
“That’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues,” he said in the April 14 interview. “The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health- care bill out here.”
(Excerpt) Read more at macedoniaonline.eu ...
That seems horribly high. Most people who die are old and on Medicare. If that 80% number was true, Medicare's share of total national medical expeneses would be a lot higher than 45%.
I think like your father did. At some point in my life, barring an accident or heart attack, it is just going to be my time to go. I don’t plan on spending what little I do have or putting my family thru a bunch of grief and misery trying to wring a few months or a year or so out of it. I would rather my family have my things and remember me for who I was.
parsy, who will self-ration if necessary
When it’s MY grandmother, it’s none of YOUR business, Mr. Obama.
To the point exactly!.....My family will take care of my family! GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY OBAMA!
I always tell my hubby that if I get false teeth and I’m willing to leave the house without them, it’s time to put me out on the ice.
Give me a cup of coffee, saw a hole in Lake St. Clair, drop a fishing line, then tell everyone that I took up Ice Fishing!!!
Seriously, my Dad saw us spending money on Co-pays that he thought was a waste. He didn’t want to die in a hospital. We were all there when he went. I was 20.
“That’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues,” he said in the April 14 interview. “The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health- care bill out here.”
Your post:
He is misquoting a statement concerning the expenses of the MediCare program. The statement should be that approximately 80% of the cost of all medical care received by an individual is spent in the last 6 months of their life.
I dug up the whole quote, lest we be accused of taking him out of context (which they’ll invariably claim):
THE PRESIDENT: …I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care — it’s a related one — is what you do around things like end-of-life care —
NYT: Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.
THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.
So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.
And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.
I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.
NYT: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.
THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
NYT: So how do you — how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: …you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
Just to be fair, they should just set an age limit and kill people when they reach it. For Democrats age 150 limit, for Republicans age 37 limit. Then Dr Zeke can use our young corpses for organ harvesting including addadictomy’s for prisoners. Live on Mr Happy!
Medical resources will always fall short of demand, and the only sensible inquiry is how should they be allocated; by a bureaucrat with his/her own political motivation, or the free market? An example of the bureaucrat’s decision process is when the city of San Francisco decided their employee benefit plan would pay for sex change operations without any recognition that those operations would divert monetary resources from other medical needs. Unless, of course, that the city felt there was a surplus of medical resources???
Kind of an odd sales pitch...actually it is a pretty stupid sales pitch...unless you are selling to an 18 to 35 age group who do not want to pay for the medical care of their parents?
> Obama seems to be a cold-fish psychotic only able to imitate human emotions.
I would have ventured possibly a sociopath. He’s not quite in Idi Amin’s domain... yet. Tho’ Lord knows what he’s done to his brain with drug use.
> I just can’t quite figure out what makes him tick other than a lust for power.
What or possibly who. We’ve heard him called an “empty suit” for quite some time now. His resume is paper thin. This life experiences about nil, and any that he might have documented we’ll never know about because he has them sealed. To me, he’d be a prime candidate for the former KGB (if they were still around) to run by remote control. They were one of the few enemy services capable of such a cunning ruse...
Is someone running Obama? I dunno. Who might it be?
bookmark
Thank you. That was the word I was searching for. I knew psychopath wasn't right, but it was the only one I came up with without a five minute Google hunt.
For your ping list?
>>Obamunism<<
I like that!
Utilitarianism prescribes The Principle of Utility (or The Greatest Happiness Principle) to determine the morality of one’s actions. The problem with this type of moral cost/benefit analysis is that an individual tends to weigh his or her happiness higher than another’s pain. Indeed, it is quite possible to justify immoral actions under the guise of promoting the greater good. Social Darwinism tends demonstrate The Real Principle of Maximum Utility quite well.
This is of what they speak, the “greater good”. When they take this view, there is not much that cannot be done based upon achieving this “greater good”. Remember, it all depends on the definition of the “greater good” ...
Once we head down this path, where does it stop?
schu
Thanx. I think the entire quote makes it worst. Nonetheless you’re right, they’ll say we’re making things up if the entire quote isn’t up.
And that is the point. The farther away the center of command the more general the commands given. The bureaucrat in Washington can never know the intimate details of the situations he proposes to regulate. He can only issue broad mandates. And the result is that all the little (and sometimes not-so-little) details that are unique to each of us are simply ignored (because they are unknown) in the push to get the desired result as mandated by that far away bureaucrat.
It is at the local level that decisions can be made that take into account the “hard moral” choices. The more local and personal the power of choice is located the more just and right the ultimate decision is likely to be for the simple reason that the person(s) making the choices know the people involved and are most familiar with all the circumstances surrounding each individual. Just and fair decisions are far more likely to be made by those directly involved than by some remote stranger.
In the matter of illness, life and death the choices made, to be anywhere near wise enough to take into account all the moral and ethical issues in play, MUST be made by the people directly involved. Anything else results in injustice because the decisions become more and more arbitrary due to distance and ignorance. People complain about insurance companies and HMOs for precisely this reason. To replace these with a central control in D.C. will only make matters worse.
“... who decides what ‘terminal’ is?”
Very good question.
I wonder if we shouldn’t declare all folks who contracted HIV via ‘risky behavior’ to be terminal in terms of health care they will receive from the state???
4. The ederly American citizens who paid their bills, taxes, mortgages as well as paying into the medicare/medicade/social security fund all their lives will be forsaken for the freeloaders and illegals; favorites of chairman obama...
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