Thread by Fred.
In 1993, Mitt Romney was a successful businessman with an urge to enter public life and a plan to challenge Ted Kennedy for a Senate seat from Massachusetts.
Romney was also a high-ranking official in the Mormon church -- in charge of all church affairs in the Boston area -- with a dilemma over abortion. Romney was personally pro-life, and the church was pro-life, but a majority of the Massachusetts electorate was decidedly pro-choice.
How Romney handled that dilemma is described in a new book, "Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics," by Boston journalist Ronald Scott. A Mormon who admires Romney but has had his share of disagreements with him, Scott knew Romney from local church matters in the late 1980s.
Scott had worked for Time Inc., and in the fall of 1993, he says, Romney asked him for advice on how to handle various issues the media might pursue in a Senate campaign. Scott gave his advice in a couple of phone conversations and a memo. In the course of the conversations, Scott says, Romney outlined his views on the abortion problem.
According to Scott, Romney revealed that polling from Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan's former pollster whom Romney had hired for the '94 campaign, showed it would be impossible for a pro-life candidate to win statewide office in Massachusetts. In light of that, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life.
All lies, all the time: Mitt's greatest hits
Threads by NYer and me.
Those who have implied that the Presidents health care law will establish death panels, have encountered excessive criticism. Yet, more and more information is being released identifying that rationing of care will in fact occur, and that it will be done by government bureaucracies.
For example, a phone call into The Mark Levin Show on WLS 890 from a Chicago neurosurgeon last month revealed that a Health and Human Services (HHS) document, associated with the Obama Administrations federal health law, will inhibit patients over the age of 70 from receiving neurological care. Instead of receiving advanced neurosurgical care, units, (meaning patients), over 70 will receive care to make them comfortable. In order to provide the neurosurgical care, a physician would have to appeal to a ethics committee made up of administrators, not physicians, to determine if the services can be administered.
This document, not surprisingly, has not been presented to the public.
Listen to the call by clicking the link below:
Obamacare Rationing A Phone Call From A Neurosurgeon
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Dr. Alexander K. Smith is a brave man.
It has taken physicians a very long time to accept the need to level with patients and their families when they have terminal illnesses and death is near and we know that many times those kinds of honest, exploratory conversations still dont take place.
Now Dr. Smith, a palliative care specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who also practices at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and two co-authors are urging another change, one they acknowledge would radically alter the way health care professionals communicate with their very old patients.
In a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, they suggested offering to discuss overall prognosis, doctorspeak for probable life expectancy and the likelihood of death, with patients who dont have terminal illnesses. The researchers favor broaching the subject with anyone who has a life expectancy of less than 10 years or has reached age 85.
(Excerpt) Read more at newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com ...