The ugly truth of government rationing:
In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away
…
“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.
This is what a government healthcare system looks like. And it’s not just those near the end of their lives; newborns are getting the axe too:
Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday.
Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy – almost four months early.
They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment.
Those pushing a quasi-socialist system with a “public option” (that proponents privately brag is a path to single-payer) claim such notions are just “scare tactics,” even as Obama scares us with lies about cases of rescission, grossly exaggerates the number of people who need insurance, and pushes unconstitutional mandates that would force the young to subsidize health care for the old by calling people who don’t carry health insurance “irresponsible.”
Some will claim life expectancy and infant mortality statistics show U.S. healthcare is subpar. But these claims are as dishonest as Obama’s speech the other day; that premature infant mentioned above was not only left to die without any care, he doesn’t even get counted in their infant mortality statistics. This is beyond perverse: socialised countries set up rules saying if you are born too early or weigh too little at birth, you are not worth caring for or counting, then they trumpet their low infant mortality as evidence of how well their systems work. Only government could have the gall to let babies die and call it better quality care.
Furthermore, even with the American penalty for counting preemies as people, states like Hawaii and Minnesota have life expectancies as high as any in the world. This is because life expectancy is mostly driven by factors other than the state of national healthcare, as these maps demonstrate with a 10-year gap across the country.
The truth is there is very little about the status quo that can be improved with government intervention. American health care is the best in the world. We have the highest cancer survival rates, do twice as many transplants as Europe, have about twice as many MRIs per capita as the OECD average, and get new drugs an average of a year before Europe does.
Don’t let them trick you into taking all that away. Learn the facts and demand to be heard.
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… racist!!!!
Oh, sorry, was channeling Jimmy Carter there for a moment….
This is good, Price.
Yes, there were no spcifically named, “Death Panels” in the bill — per se.
But………..
The English experience you skillfully note above, with gov’t control, and gov’t guidelines, and a policy to cut costs, which costs are really high with old people, well, in effect, you are setting up a system of incentives………..
–HB
Kind of curious why you didn’t use an example from our public option for the elderly, called Medicare. We have “death panels” now, although nobody seems to want to acknowledge it.
Indeed, most of the elderly opponents to health reform at the town hall meetings liked their public option and want to keep it like it is.
Something doesn’t compute.
Medicare is pretty much an open pipe.
If you say that you’re going to let everyone at the pipe, then something has to give…
RogerR:
Citing Medicaid as an example of a public option that works is interesting considering your ideological leader has publicly said that it is so riven with rampant abuse, inefficiency and corruption that he can peel half a trillion dollars off of it without impacting its effectiveness.
However, I’m glad to see that you can actually recognize a death panel in a medical plan when you care to acknowledge it. That’s quite a bit better than calling other people who see the same thing “whackos”. Interesting that.
However, your point has enough validity that it deserves a response.
Here is that response.
If we use Medicaid as an example of where a full-blown “public option” is going to take us, then the current projected deficits measured in the trillions of dollars have to be acknowledged to be woefully lowball estimates. Also we would have to acknowledge that the limitations of the public option will create a cottage industry of “supplemental insurance” plans to cover the necessary things that the “public option” won’t cover.
Then we have to acknowledge that the public option will have its own “death panels” and rationing provisions.
And that’s completely ignoring Obama’s assertion that the public option will end up being so infested with corruption, inefficiency and fraud that it will lead to even higher deficits.
Is this really the argument you want to make?
Kind of curious why you didn’t use an example from our public option for the elderly, called Medicare.
Like most people, I’m assuming a ten trillion dollar expansion of Medicare is out of the question.
Besides, I have it on good authority Medicare is riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse.
Any day now, I expect to hear something like this:
They’re not death panels, they’re Life Panels!
We’ll get to decide who gets to LIVE!
It’s a happy, positive thing!
Why doesn’t anyone complain about the existing “public option” death panels ?
Let me count the reasons.
1) Medicare / Medicaid is not the only game in town and politicians, ever wary of making any kind of hard choice, are perfectly happy to let its insolvency grow unabated while a single payer public option that is the ultimate goal of the Democrats will have no such option. There won’t be any other major insurance or health care provider, so there will not be any opportunity to kick the can down the road and pretend Obamacare isn’t already bankrupt from day one.
2) As previously stated by CC there are supplemental insurance options that help to cover up the problems with Medicare while simultaneously deflecting the attention on its insolvency. You see if Medicare doesn’t pay for it, well that helps the bottom line. That extra money coming out of the elderly’s pocket is apparently irrelevant.
Generally speaking because Medicare is not the only game in town, the cost of care can just grow and grow and grow and nobody seems to care. And so no real rationing is required. But once Obamacare takes over and starts running a $500B annual deficit, then someone will start to care and the rationing will have to get more and more strict every year.
Frankly it is almost unbelievable that we are considering completely tearing down our current health care system and rebuilding it from the ground up with the government – THE GOV’T – in charge based on the fact that 10 million people can’t afford health care insurance. Yeah, thats right, 10 million. That doesn’t include the 10+ million that are either already on or eligible for gov’t insurance, the 10+ million that are not citizens, and the 15+ million that make enough money to afford insurance but choose not to carry it.
The funny thing is you never really hear about those 10 M non citizens. Forget that designation, where else do they fit ? Are they making a living that could support insurance, but they are also young and healthy enough that they choose not to carry it ? Seems to me that even if you include all those categories that we are likely double dipping in some areas. The fact of the matter is the whole point of this 1000 page debacle is to cover about 10 million people who want insurance, but can’t afford it.
By they way, Obama says that Medicare can be cut by half a trillion dollars without impacting its service to the elderly, but when Bush proposed cutting a mere 15 billion dollars from it (also citing ineffeciencies, fraud and abuse) Prominent Democrats, including one Barack H. Obama, called his plan “immoral” and accused Bush of wanting to put the elderly out to sea on an ice berg.
Funny how things change, isn’t it?
As an anecdotal point, two young relatives of mine (mmm… first cousins twice removed, by marriage— due to generation spread, they’re “Rob’s cousin’s kids”) just celebrated their third birthday. They were born at 22 weeks, one weighed a pound and one weighed half an ounce less. Due to circumstances of their birth, it is unlikely that they will ever have any siblings.
They were born in Alaska, not usually considered to be the center of prenatal care. As far as their doctors knew, there were no surviving twins born that early. And yet they survived, and with not nearly as many problems as you normally expect from preemies. A little eye trouble, pretty good lung function, and a little developmentally delayed (though that seems to be mending.)
They survived because they were born in a place that wanted to save them. And believe me, they’re loved by their mother, their grandmother, their great-grandmother, and their double-great-grandmother. And aunts and uncles and cousins and all.
Outliers matter.
Dave,
Thanks for turning an interminable discussion at Talk-Polywell into a post. I do the same thing from time to time (turn comments into posts).
Heh, well, if nothing else it let me accumulate some good links.
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