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ObamaCare: What’s Really Sending Seniors Off a Cliff Posted by on
Frontpagemagazine ^ | Jun 8th, 2011 | Tait Trussell

Posted on 06/08/2011 5:50:13 AM PDT by SJackson

Even though a demonic TV commercial depicts a frantic grandma in a wheelchair being dumped off a cliff by a man resembling Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), author of a plan to save the Medicare system, Section 3025 of ObamaCare would suppress readmissions to hospitals, where delay or denial could mean death for millions of grandmas.

Democrats hate the reasonable Ryan plan to turn Medicare into a sound system involving patient choice. (Nearly all the House Republicans voted for it April 15.) The aforementioned commercial, sponsored by the liberal AgendaGroup Project began in May. It characterizes the Ryan plan as privatizing Medicare. The strain of “America the Beautiful” accompanies the scandalous melodrama of grandma’s fate, as conceived by the left-wing fabrication.

Section 3025 of Obama’s mislabled Affordable Care Act calls for financially penalizing hospitals which admit sick Medicare individuals who need to return to the hospital within 30 days after their discharge. The overlord of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), Dr. Donald Berwick, was granted a formula to penalize hospitals. He hopes to save $15 billion a year by suppressing hospital readmissions. A 250-bed hospital could lose $1.7 million unless it blocks follow-up hospital treatment for one of three categories of illness — pneumonia, heart attack, and heart failure.

Currently, Medicare pays for all rehospitalizations, except those in which patients are readmitted within 24 hours after discharge for the same conditions.

An important study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), written by a group of doctors, pointedly said “there is very limited research” addressing the issue of “diseases and processes that contribute to rehospitalization.” But analyzing a year in the mid-2000s, for which all Medicare billing statements were available, the authors found a total of 13,062,937 patients enrolled in the Medicare program were discharged from 4,926 hospitals. Some 516,959 of these patients died, and 690,276 went to other acute care settings, leaving 11,855,702 at risk for rehospitalization. That’s a lot of grandmas and grandpas.

The NEJM article quoted another study, which found that among persons 18 to 64 years of age, the rate of rehospitalization was “only weakly related to age.” So, why is Dr. Berwick given to such fascist inclinations with grandma and other Medicare patients? The devilish ObamaCare law makes him do it.

The NEJM physicians wrote: “We were unable to link measures of the number of beds in a community” to the over readmitting of patients or whether “higher rehospitalizaion rates are evidence of better care or just more care…[B]etter care may reduce the number of rehospitalizaions, but we have no data on where these features are provided.” Research, the doctors mentioned, shows that palliative care can reduce rehospitalization. (That should be apparent because palliative care normally is given to those in their final stage of life. It is care for comfort, not cure and normally found in Hospice.)

Variation in readmissions among different states and hospitals “may be possible on a national scale,” the authors of the NEJM study said, but “the data do not show which practices cause the differences or whether the differences are exportable” to other hospitals.

When the typical patient has “two chances of three of being rehospitalized or dying” within a year after discharge “it is probably wiser to consider all Medicare patients as having a high risk of rehospitalization…It would be premature to predict how much [cost] reduction can be achieved,” the study’s authors wrote.

This section of ObamaCare is a direct physical threat to seniors, whose lives apparently are not considered worth the money to pay for their return to the hospital. It also is a killer for hospitals. In Detroit, just as one example, St. Joseph Mercy Health System (hospitals) depends on Medicare for 45 percent of its revenue. In rural communities, the percentage often is even higher.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has the power to expand the list of the three selected conditions without limit after 2013. So, what ObamaCare considers “excessive” hospital care is, in truth, a real and effective way for Democrats to push grandma off the cliff.

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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/06/08/obamacare-off-the-cliff/


TOPICS: Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 06/08/2011 5:50:15 AM PDT by SJackson
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To: SJackson

Pubbies need to go into full assault mode on the Dems over the fraudulent caricature of the Ryan proposal...as well as for the media collusion with the Democrat’ sfor covering up the real provisions of ObamaCare that will lead to unreasonable deaths.

“crickets...”


2 posted on 06/08/2011 5:53:45 AM PDT by mo ("If you understand, no explanation is needed; if you do not, no explanation is possible")
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To: SJackson; ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas; stephenjohnbanker; DoughtyOne; calcowgirl; Gilbo_3; NFHale; ..
RE :”Section 3025 of Obama’s mislabled Affordable Care Act calls for financially penalizing hospitals which admit sick Medicare individuals who need to return to the hospital within 30 days after their discharge. The overlord of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), Dr. Donald Berwick, was granted a formula to penalize hospitals. He hopes to save $15 billion a year by suppressing hospital readmissions. A 250-bed hospital could lose $1.7 million unless it blocks follow-up hospital treatment for one of three categories of illness — pneumonia, heart attack, and heart failure. Currently, Medicare pays for all rehospitalizations, except those in which patients are readmitted within 24 hours after discharge for the same conditions

Obama-Medicare ping!

This is interesting above. How do the the hospitals refuse re-admissions without being eventually sued for it?

3 posted on 06/08/2011 5:59:34 AM PDT by sickoflibs (If you pay zero Federal income taxes, don't say you are paying your 'fair share')
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To: All
YOU GET A PRIZE IF YOU CAN FIND Accountable Care Organizations in this diagram.

Here it is----your new Obamacare healthcare system. O/Care adds over 100 new boards, commissions and programs. For example a new Medicare Commission, exempt from judicial review, will unilaterally write rules about utilization and pricing of medical devices and drugs often needed by surgeons. Many regulatory bodies will be overarching in their abilities to select and direct medical subjects concerning Tri-Care, employer group policies, Veteran’s Administration, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.

Diligent govt personnel could not fit all of O'Care's new law’s boards, commissions, mandates, and other elements on this chart. So they created “bundles of bureaucracy.”

Seven collective symbols respectively represent clusters of four loan repayment and forgiveness programs, four other new regulatory programs, 17 insurance mandates, 19 special-interest provisions, 22 other new bureaucracies, 26 other new demonstration and pilot programs, and 59 other new grant programs.....

NOTE These 151 additions do not appear individually on the Obamacare diagram. If included, the diagram would be three times larger.

4 posted on 06/08/2011 6:15:20 AM PDT by Liz ( A taxpayer voting for Obama is like a chicken voting for Col Sanders.)
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To: SJackson
I would like to see the "Grandma over the Cliff" commercial run with a voice-over of Obama answering the question about a woman's mother getting a pace-maker, where he said grandma should just take the pill.

Maybe someone has already done it. Anyone know?

5 posted on 06/08/2011 6:17:42 AM PDT by Marylander (Offendiphobia)
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To: SJackson

Not only should obamacare be repealed, but all those who designed or pushed through obamacare—plus Obersturmbannführers Berwick and Sebelius—should be tried for conspiracy to commit mass murder, and punished accordingly!!!!


6 posted on 06/08/2011 6:24:51 AM PDT by Honorary Serb (Kosovo is Serbia! Free Srpska! Abolish ICTY!)
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To: Honorary Serb

It is unfortunate that the Ryan plan used the word “voucher” as that is a direct threat to the union mentality of the Dems. He should have said we will give seniors a credit card like they do with food stamps, to purchase wherever they choose to. So far the government has not demanded certain grocers be used with the food stamp debit card.


7 posted on 06/08/2011 6:45:55 AM PDT by Semperfiwife (Thank you veterans for keeping us free. Now we have to free ourselves from Obama tyranny)
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To: Marylander
Back in 1974 when I first entered college, my inclinations were conservative leaning, but generally apolitical. I went to the Young Democrats and found most of the women to be angry and bitter. Then I went to the College Republicans and found most of them to be sweet and way, way better looking.

They showed us a film of Ted Kennedy and other prominent DemocRAT lookalikes talking like they probably actually do when they are off camera and driving a car over a cliff. It was an awesome advertisement for the base but, for whatever reason, the stupid party thought it would be too far over the top for the general public. They never aired it. Then Ford pardoned Nixon (why he couldn't have waited until December was never explained) and the GOP proceeded to get shellacked.

8 posted on 06/08/2011 8:24:26 AM PDT by Vigilanteman (Obama: Fake black man. Fake Messiah. Fake American. How many fakes can you fit in one Zer0?)
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To: SJackson

Can’t someone from the GOP hijack this commercial and throw this crap right back in the Devilcrats faces? How about 15 IPAB board members sitting imperiously in front of granny telling her she can’t have a new hip or pacemaker?


9 posted on 06/08/2011 8:49:05 AM PDT by grumpygresh (Democrats delenda est)
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To: sickoflibs
ObamaCare will be talked about - in a few years - like Social Security is talked about today.

It'll be referred to as an 'entitlement' and MUST BE CUT. Same language used today... Means testing, bankrupting, selfish, unsustainable etc. ObamaCare is nothing more than giving first class medical care to the hopelessly dependent and criminal - at the expense of the productive and responsible... Laying one more burden on the productive - and one more link of chain on the neck of the dependent.

Doctors, lawyers and those who receive political donations from these two groups will do well...

If that's what dems want, why aren't they just honest about it? It's obvious.

10 posted on 06/08/2011 9:11:09 AM PDT by GOPJ (In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. - - Orwell)
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