A provision for an end-of-life “death panel” in Barack Obama’s health care reform plan, brought to light by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, already exists in legislation passed earlier this year under the Stimulus Bill.
H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or the Stimulus Bill) contains US $1.1 billion in funding for the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is the brain child of Tom Daschle, who lost the nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary due to an unpaid tax scandal. Daschle is also co-author of the book Critical: What we can do about the Health Care Crisis, in which he not only outlines the details of the Council but advocates for the rationing of medical care based on age and other qualifiers. He also argues that Americans ought to be more like Europeans who passively accept “hopeless diagnoses.”
Tom Daschle
Daschle’s stated purpose (and therefore President Obama’s purpose) for creating the Council is to empower an unelected bureaucracy to make the hard decisions about health care rationing that elected politicians are politically unable to make. The end result is to slow costly medical advancement and consumption.
“Daschle says health-care reform ‘will not be pain free,’ writes former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey. “Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.”
One prominent member on the Concil is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Dr. Emanuel has written the following bone-chilling statement on why health care should be rationed for the elderly:
Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.
As American Thinker writer Joseph Ashby properly concludes:
On average 25-year-olds require very few medical services. If they are to get the lion’s share of the treatment, then those 65 and over can expect very little care. Dr. Emanuel’s views on saving money on medical care are simple: don’t provide any medical care. The loosely worded provisions in H.R 1 give him and his Council increasing power to push such recommendations.
Cass Sunstein
The impending bureaucracy needed to regulate such loosely-defined legislation is mind-boggling to say the least. This will leave Obama’s Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, to play a major role in defining the government’s role in controlling medical care.
How does Sunstein approach end of life care? In 2003 he wrote a paper for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies arguing that human life varies in value. Specifically he champions statistical methods that give preference to what the government rates as “quality-adjusted life years.” Meaning, the government decides whether a person’s life is worth living. If the government decides the life is not worth living, it is the individual’s duty to die to free up welfare payments for the young and productive.
Sunstein is also romantically linked to Harvard professor Samantha Powers, who was forced to resign from the Obama campaign for calling then-rival Hillary Clinton a “monster” in The Scotsman newspaper. In addition to being 15 years younger than Sunstein, Powers is a vocal anti-Israeli activist who is reportedly an adviser to now US-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Middle East policy.
“They’re definitely an item. He was at her book party on Friday night and said as much during a speech he gave on her behalf,” wrote Above The Law in February 2008.
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Comparative Effectiveness Research works like this: If a bureaucrat doesn’t want 70 year olds to have total knee replacements, they compare total knee replacement to sitting in a wheelchair and taking pain pills. They find equal life-expectancies, so they are deemed equivalent treatments, and the cheaper (wheelchair/narcotics) is the new standard for 70 year olds. Easy, no? If I were a 70 year old who voted for Obama, I’d be having serious voter’s remorse.
Death Panels came into existence with the HMO revolution started during the Nixon Administration. Insurance companies panels (board of directors) have denied many of their insured vital health services in order to increase their profits. People have died as a result of not receiving needed care. It was recently reported that the CEO of United Healthcare “earns” $100000.00 an hour in compensation. After paying off the executives and providing some crumbs for the stockholders, how much is left to actually pay for the care and treatment of the insured.
The whole healthcare system needs a complete overhaul. Healthcare has become more and more unobtainable due to the cost of expensive treatments and modalities. Drug companies and others that sell healthcare products are the ones that pay for research and developing new treatments to bring to market. As corporations, they are interested in the MOST PROFITABLE treatments and not the most effective treatments. Furthermore, these companies make billions on selling products that treat disease and would end up going bankrupt if cures were actually discovered. What would happen to Eli Lily if diabetes was cured? They would go under. Do you think Eli Lily is interested in finding a cure that would put them out of business? Of course not. Too much money in insulin, infusion pumps, glucometers and strips, etc.
Insurance companies also are in it for the money. They contract with doctors to pay them highly discounted and reduced fees and they are taking higher and higher premiums from their insured to basically transfer the discounted rates to their insured. With higher deductibles and co-pays, the insurance company hardly has to pay out anything. For example, an insurance company will pay a maximum of $40 as a per diem for therapy regardless of how many therapies are done. The doctor will get $40 dollars no matter what he does. If the insured has a $40 co-pay which is quite common, then the insurance company doesn’t have to pay a penny. The insured pays the doctor directly.
Money needs to be spent on independent research to discover and bring to the public the most effective and least costly treatments in order to get the costs under control. We rely way to heavily on private corporations to do this research which leads to more and more expensive treatments. Research is extremely expensive but well worth it in order to contain health costs.
The general public should be afforded the same health care discounts that are negotiated by insurance companies with doctors and hospitals. The government can negotiate a fair price and it does not have to be made mandatory. However, if docs are willing to provide care at these discounted rates already, I would be surprised if they chose not to participate in this plan. I am sure that plenty will.
The government should start or encourage non-profit or co-op insurance companies to compete with the existing companies. This should also go a long way in knocking down costs. CEOs of insurance companies should not be making hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation while hard working people are being denied even basic healthcare.
There is no question that any attempt to provide good healthcare for everyone in our great nation within the existing framework will be so prohibitively expensive as to either bankrupt this country, deny health services based on subjectively based criteria (so called death panels) or both. Fundamental change is required or this nightmare will never end.