Friday, March 27, 2009

Hospital Horror Update: House Health Plan to Include Government-Run Option

President Obama launched his "bold" nationalized health-care plan a weeks ago.

Just as Rahmbo The Ballerina said never let a good crisis go to waste, Obama has used the economic crisis as the impetus for passing his radical nationalized health-care agenda.

It's our view, that the President is not terribly concerned with actually fixing the economy.

Instead, he will use smoke and mirrors to covertly pass a radical Socialist agenda, establish a vast power grab for voting supremacy, and attempt to implode America from within.

The Obama Budget contains a $634 Billion "down payment" on national health-care that will ultimately top $1 Trillion!

Sneaky Democrats on Capitol Hill quietly sneaked "stealth-care" into the $800 Billion CRAPulus Socialism Bill.

And all of this crap to get health care that Europe has proven as a complete and utter failure. British PM Gordon Brown recently issued an apology for a "Third World Hospital".

Bloomberg reports:

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House this year will consider health-care legislation including an option for a government-run program that would compete with insurers.

“This is a big agenda, and I believe it should have a public option in it for it to be really substantial,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference in the U.S. Capitol.

President Barack Obama has said he wants Congress to produce legislation that would expand health-care coverage for the country’s 46 million uninsured and reduce medical costs. Republicans and some insurers have opposed the creation of a new program modeled on Medicare as part of the effort. The top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, last week called the idea a “deal-breaker.”

Pelosi said the Democratic-controlled House will be “aggressive” in its approach to a health-care overhaul, which is a centerpiece of Obama’s agenda. She said a government role in health care will help U.S. companies be more competitive.

“This is not only about the health of individuals in our country, which will be justification enough,” said Pelosi, a California Democrat. “It’s about the competitiveness of our businesses to make them globally competitive because they are competing with companies and countries where the federal government -- their governments -- pay for health care. They don’t have to bear those health care costs.”

Sen. Jim DeMint wrote a great op/ed in the Washington Examiner a few weeks ago on the dangers of national health care.

In Great Britain last year, a 24-year old woman named Katie Hilliard was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The disease has since spread to her lungs and lymph nodes. In October, she took time off from her course of chemo and radiation therapy to marry her fiancĂ©e because, in her words, “We didn’t know how ill I would get.”

The family of Claire Everett does know. She died in September, of the same disease, with her parents, husband, and two-year old son by her side. She was 23.

Both could have been diagnosed early and possibly saved by a routine screening test. But the British National Health Service does not allow women under the age of 25 to receive that test.

These kinds of stories are commonplace in nations with government-controlled health care, with good reason. As the miracle workers in the global medical research field develop treatments to keep us alive and healthy much longer than ever before, the costs of health care inevitably rise. Government health services looking to cut costs usually choose to ration coverage.

In Great Britain, Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere, government bureaucrats decide which patients may receive which treatments based on how beneficial the treatment will be – beneficial to the government, that is, not the patient.

The process by which government health departments decide who gets what is called “Comparative Effectiveness Research” (CER). And you might be surprised to know there was more than $1 billion allocated for CER in the so-called economic stimulus bill passed last month by Congress.

The same research that countries with government-controlled care use to deny hip replacements to seniors with osteoporosis, let patients with macular degeneration go blind in one eye before treatment, and deny breakthrough drugs to patients with Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis, has now become part of American federal law.

Americans should be shocked, but not surprised. CER is only one step in the Obama Administration’s insidious plan to take over American health care… for our own good.

Consider the case of Tom Daschle, President Obama’s first choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), and America’s leading cheerleader for CER. He wrote a book calling for federal bureaucrats to make “specific coverage decisions” for government-managed health care programs and to “exert tremendous influence on every … provider and payer, even those in the private sector” [emphasis added].

Consider the billions set aside in the stimulus bill to begin creating a national database of digitized medical records, Health IT. I have no problem with electronic medical records – they will probably reduce mistakes, lower costs, and even save lives.

But I have a big problem with the government mandating the format of those records, fining any insurer who chooses alternative formats, and then using its massive database of confidential patient information to conduct its CER studies. But that’s exactly what the president’s 2010 budget advocates: “When [CER is] coupled with electronic health records, these findings can form the basis for clinical decision support tools.”

And consider the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the first health care bill President Obama signed into law. Enacted in 1997 to provide health coverage for children of the working poor, the new SCHIP will cover children of parents who earn up to $106,000 per year. That is, children throughout the lower, middle, and upper-middle class will now grow up eligible for and accustomed to government-managed health care.

Unless Americans act quickly, this health care nightmare could soon be reality: when “Generation SCHIP” reaches adulthood and risks losing its “free” health care, voters will finally allow Democrats to socialize medicine once and for all.

Armed with its Health IT-based CER studies, the federal government can start rationing health care as it must to control the costs of a massive universal system.

When that happens, the consequences here in America will be the same as they have been everywhere else socialized medicine has been tried. Sick patients will wait weeks to see a primary care physician. They will wait months to see a specialist. They will wait years to receive routine treatments. And they will be denied extraordinary treatments altogether. And before long, we’ll understand the true, human costs of a “free” system.

If we do not act quickly to reject socialized medicine, the next Katie Hilliard or Claire Everett won’t be across an ocean, but across town, across the street, or maybe even across the kitchen table.

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