The Rationing Commission Meet the unelected body that will dictate future medical decisions.

The Wall Street Journal ^ | NOVEMBER 15, 2009

[goodnesswins]

yes, you are correct

[cripplecreek]

I have a Russian doctor friend who is an American now. She’s told me about the old soviet system that has very much infected modern Russia and state run hospitals. Its a horror story. Private hospitals are very much prefered as a place to be treated or to work.

She said they would get new death certificates with the cause of death already filled in and they had to assign them to patients no matter what the real cause of death was. One month it would be lung cancer caused by smoking, the next it would be kidney disease or heart failure. She said it lead to money being doled out to various areas of research. She even had some 30 pediatric patients die of “lung cancer” in a two month period once.

[Mack the knife]

This sounds suspiciously like the Oregon plan.

We have Medicare codes for every procedure, and a cost for each. We have data on how many of these procedures were paid for, and can project that forward to estimate the number of these procedures that are expected to be performed this coming year.

Now have this panel rank order these procedures by cost and efficacy, and estimate total cumulative cost for each procedure added to the list. Now decide how much you would like to spend, find the amount, and draw a line. Procedures above the line will be funded this year, procedures below this line will not.

Since Medicare is the only source of medical insurance available to the public (except for unions), non-union retired people will pay the price in pain and death in order to keep the over all cost of Medicare down.

On the other hand, Union medical plans for retirees will be subsidized.