More Reasons to Hate the Fraudulus Bill
The more we read, the more reasons we find to hate this monstrous bill. On Bloomberg today, Betsey McCaughey writes about one of the health provisions of the bill. This small piece of the proposed law places much of the pain we all will have to bear on the elderly. Give it a few years, and that will include me. The references to Tom Daschle in the piece refers to his book, that is apparently the genesis of this proposed provision. A sample:Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.Read the whole thing.
Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.
In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.
Hidden Provisions
If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes the Senate in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.
The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).
Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”
Similarly, another piece of this puzzle rolls back Clinton's welfare reform, by removing the work requirement from AFDC payments. The New York Times especially likes this. This will return us to the day when government paid any woman who had a child out of wedlock, whether she had a job or not. I can well remember what the ghetto looked like back then. Why in the world would American blacks do not cry out for this provision to be left out is beyond my ken.
All we citizens can do is sign the online petition to stop the bill from passage. It is the least we can do, and we can all do it. If you have not already done so, do it now.