This bill has enormous long-term implications for your family, their privacy, the amount and quality of health care they will receive. Healthcare decisions are a personal matter and sharing this information with anyone other than those directly involved in improving your condition is unacceptable.
This bill will affect every individual including your family (sections 445, 454, 479). Their medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.
However, this bill goes too far. As I understand it, a new bureaucracy will be created called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. They will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” a physicians decisions (442, 446). Doctors will no longer have autonomy in their decisions to provide care based on their special knowledge of patients.
The goal of the bill is to provide standardized care. In other words deliver only as much care as what the government has deemed is an average based on charts and figures.
I assure you, as one who had an operation that was complicated by a mistake the surgeon made, that I did not fall into an average or mean for recovery. I was to have healed completely from this operation in 6 weeks. However, the pain persisted for nearly two years before subsiding enough that I could again work out and return to my active lifestyle. While I was relatively young and had a lot of strength internally, there are many who would have given up entirely. These people will need access to medical care and medication that enables them to lead a normal life. Perhaps not without the pain but with the tools that can help them cope with the pain and make it not a primary thought as they go through the day but just something they have to deal with, using the tools at hand.
To give you an idea of what standardized care is I was complaining about the pain for months after the surgery and looking for solutions. The surgeon, who performed the operation, had no idea why I was in pain and offered zero solutions that would help me manage the pain.
What he did offer me was an insult and said “You are a wimp. There is nothing wrong with you. As a wimp you have made this up in your head”
I was angry at that response to say the least as I was only looking for something that would allow me to return to working out, hiking, skating and playing the many other sports I had previously enjoyed.
I did not return back to my active lifestyle until finding a new doctor who did indeed provide the tools that help me to manage the pain and I am today active once again.
This bill would make that situation worse and untenable for some people. The government would conclude, much like an HMO that I should be healed according to some average mean, and no further treatment is necessary.
What the government will do is enforce uniformity as far as medical care goes.
In fact, my doctor, whom I have chosen and pay out my own pocket, because I don’t want anyone making decisions for me, would be subject to penalties that would discourage him from helping me.
Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)
What penalties will this bureaurocrat impose on my doctor should he exceed government mandated protocols for my condition which is atypical? What if I require or decide that experimental treatment is a last option? What will be the impact on your family member? How will you feel when they are denied care? Will you want the option to do anything to relieve the suffering your loved one is enduring?
This bill creates something called the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (sections190-192). With the goal being to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs.
I understand that this idea is based on Europeans as being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” but that, senator, has been tried before and it is called “eugenics”. Will the US government provide the same medical care as the Nazi regimes of Germany and Italy? I thought the character of our nation was better than reducing a human life to a commodity based on some chart. Each and every life has value no matter the condition or age. I am sure their families and yours would agree.
This legislation will affect you and your family, as well, me and my family. The end results of this legislation will not be freedom, choice and individualized care. The end result will be a bureaucrat deciding who should and should not receive care, how and when they should receive care and what care the person should receive.
This person or persons has no stake in the outcome of your life or your loved one but they will control what and how much healthcare you receive in direct contravention to your wishes or unique circumstance.
Surely there are members of your family whom you would like to receive the best care possible and not some basic minimum health care that may not apply to their unique situation. Will you want them to be told no and turned away with no means to seek alternatives?
Will your grandmother or you at the age of 96, after breaking a hip, be told that you have lived out your useful days and the actuaries have determined you will live only another year? What if you had a hip replacement and three years later you are still alive and walking? Would you want to live or be relegated to a chair or bed because someone has determined you, a human being, are no longer relevant to society?
I am not talking about a hypothetical here I am talking about a close friend whom I love and admire. She broke her hip at 96 and today using a walker leads a full life much as she did before.
Would you want to walk again, even it meant you might have some assistance with the use of a walker or cane? If you were 96 would you want the chance and opportunities that today’s science and medical care can deliver? What if this was a family member?
I am sure you would want the very best medical care delivered to you and your loved ones, as do I.
This bill was cobbled together with ideas that have been proposed legislation as legislation that would deny you, me and our loved ones the care we choose.
I urge you, VOTE NO on THE STIMULUS BILL.
Since members of Congress are exempt from the provisions of the bill, I am not sure this approach will impress Senators, but maybe it will.