Barack Obama Says Grow Old and Die
February 17, 2009 by JD
Filed under Health News, News, Rants
Barack Obama’s newly passed stimulus package is supposed to provide a jump start to the economy. Providing tax cuts to stimulate spending and infrastructure projects to stimulate jobs, the 1200+ page bill is being represented as a much needed shot in the arm for the economy.
Well, it’s a shot to the heart for many people. They just don’t know it yet.
Among the hundreds of pages of the bill are a couple of health care provisions that radically change the way the medical field will be allowed to treat patients. Authored by Tom Daschle, the latest in a long line of problematic cabinet nominees, the provisions cover a couple of key areas.
The first is the establishment of a federal system to electronically track and store medical records for “every individual in the United States”. This will allow for the centralization of your health records and, in theory, will eliminate the need for the manual transfer of your records every time you see a new doctor. In addition, duplication of records and erroneous treatment histories should be minimized under this new central tracking system. Again, in theory.
Okay, aside from the potential privacy issues, the creation of a centralized records system is probably a good idea. Nice to know all your records are consistent and accessible to the doctors that need to see them.
But the bill doesn’t stop there.
The bill also provides for the creation of a new federal bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. This agency will monitor your medical treatments to ensure that your physician is only providing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The underlying intent is to cut health care costs by “guiding” your doctor’s decisions around treatment.
I am all for doctors being kept informed of the latest medical developments and treatment options, but not for the federal enforcement of treatment uniformity across the medical profession. Doctors are being told not to think, but to follow what will be regimented step by step treatment options for most any disease or illness.
Who gets hit hardest by this? The elderly.
According to Daschle, reform of the health care system will “not be pain free”. He alludes to the fact that senior citizens should accept the onset of age related conditions instead of seeking treatment for them. Currently, Medicare pays for treatment deemed effective and safe. The stimulus bill provision will change that and implement a cost-effectiveness factor into the treatment options to be offered. In other words, Medicare will no longer cover many of the treatments currently being prescribed to our parents and grandparents.
And who determines these cost-effectiveness standards? Another new federal agency called the Federal Council.
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. government agency that establishes treatment standards based on calculations related to condition severity, cost of treatment, and the patient’s expected years left to live.
As an example of how the new U.S. system would work, in 2006 this U.K. agency decreed that elderly patients suffering from macular degeneration would not receive treatment utilizing a costly but effective drug until they actually went blind in one eye. It took three years before public protest forced the agency to reverse that decree.
This is the health care system we are moving to. This is the first of many changes that certain politicians have been trying to push through since the Clinton administration. And the only reason you haven’t heard more about it is because this time they were smart enough to hide the provisions in a massive “we need it now or disaster will befall us” stimulus bill.
Prior to the bill being passed, President Barack Obama said it was “inexcusable and irresponsible” for senators to delay passage. Using guilt and misplaced public sentiment, Barack Obama has set the wheels in motion to nationalize health care in the United States.
The U.S. Constitution states “Bring us your sick, huddled masses”. I guess we’ll now need to add “Just don’t expect to get any better”.
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Just so you know, and no one else will fault your argument based on something misquoted, “Give me your sick and huddled masses” comes from the poem on the Statue of Liberty, not the U.S. Constitution.
Beyond that, I’m not really surprised that this sort of nonsense was hidden deep inside this bill. When Mr. Obama was attempting to force this bill through Congress, I suspected that there was more to it than just a bit of panic mongering. My question is what will people like Obama and Daschle do when they are the old, sick, and under-treated part of the population?
J Nettles -
Thanks for the clarification. I need to do my homework before throwing out historical quotes. And I agree, as hard as they’ve been pushing this bill for immediate passage, it was pretty clear they didn’t want anyone to actually have the time to read it.
Just, “trust us, we’re politicians”.
We do need some form of Nationalized health care in this country with over 47 million uninsured Americans, but your article raises some interesting issues. Thanks for your submission to Take Charge of Your Health Care Carnival.