OMG this is getting out of control!!
Please, please, please give me a doctor who is totally dedicated to the Hippocratic Oath they took! Sorry, but I want to be a doctor’s main focus when they are treating me and/or considering options…not some other guy on the street, for “social justice” sake. Call me selfish.
What I’d like to see is the government tightening up regulations and cutting some fat out of (translate: stop being lazy asses and do your job screening) the social hand outs and wanton spending; like generational welfare, outrageous pork in bills, the old boy network that forks over government contracts to their buddies – who charge “We The People” up the wazoo 300, 400, 500% or more what WE would pay for the same item.
If this new ObamaCare is so fantastic, why aren’t the Senators and Representatives made to fall in line? Why should they have a separate health care program? Apparently their program has worked great for them over the years. Perhaps Obama and his advisors are going at this all wrong, they should be looking at nationalizing the program currently in place for this select group.
It seems ludicrous that these morons don’t get it: if Americans don’t live long productive lives, who’s going to pay for all their friken programs? And to say that seniors shouldn’t have access to hip replacements, or angioplasty is to to say, we don’t need you around anymore or you’re no longer contributing to society. Where would the mentors be? Where would the volunteers be? They gonna count on a 25 year old for that? Doubtful.
Blumenthal is a blithering idiot. When has slowing technology down ever been a good thing. Okay, go ahead and forget the medical aspect for seniors argument for a second, all that new technology EMPLOYS PEOPLE! Something apparently he’s not concerned with – but should be with record high unemployment.
So they want to put the squeeze on the automakers – one of our countries greatest industries – I’ve seen the health care program with GM drop from full medical, dental and optical to only medical. Co-pays shot up 34% (used to be $10 for a doctors visit) and prescriptions jump between 4-34% depending on the medication. The UAW and automakers have already made concessions, why should they have to kowtow to a government just to get help. I didn’t see those deep of demands with the airlines, wall street, or the bankers.
I’m livid about this. What’s happening to our country? Is there no one left with a conscientious or a heart? Are all our TRUE intellects gone?
Read this post from Betsy McCaughey, it will explain my outrage.
DEADLY DOCTORS OBAMA ADVISERS WANT TO RATION CARE
By BETSY MCCAUGHEY
July 24, 2009
The health bills coming out of Congress would put the decisions about your care in the hands ofpresidential appointees. They’d decide what plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have and what seniors get under Medicare.
Yet at least two of President Obama’s top health advisers should never be trusted with that power.
Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.
Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).
Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).
Yes, that’s what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.
Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.
Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ‘96).
Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.
He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “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” (Lancet, Jan. 31).
The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts will be, the president’s budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn’t be accountable to the public.
Since Medicare was founded in 1965, seniors’ lives have been transformed by new medical treatments such as angioplasty, bypass surgery and hip and knee replacements. These innovations allow the elderly to lead active lives. But Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too “enamored with technology” and is determined to reduce access to it.
Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.
Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they’re “associated with longer waits” and “reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices” (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001). But he calls it “debatable” whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you’ll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)
Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically delivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.
In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist “embedded clinical decision support” — a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.
Americans need to know what the president’s health advisers have in mind for them. Emanuel sees even basic amenities as luxuries and says Americans expect too much: “Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy . . . physicians’ offices are typically more conveniently located and have parking nearby and more attractive waiting rooms” (JAMA, June 18, 2008).
No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views. Nor have most people heard about the arm-twisting, Chicago-style tactics being used to force support. In a Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch column, Emanuel explained how business should be done:
“Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”
Do we want a “reform” that empowers people like this to decide for us?
Betsy McCaughey is founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former New York lieutenant governor.
To see Besty’s post follow this link: http://www.nypost.com/seven/07242009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/deadly_doctors_180941.htm
