A Further Perspective
The Government Plan
With or without the public option, the idea is to assert government control over individual choice. Good luck with that.
Here’s Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein calling on Obama and Democrats “to stand tall” on healthcare and come up with “succinct legislation that guarantees that every American will have a basic health insurance policy and sets reasonable caps on the growth of government health-care spending. The details should be left to the regional exchanges and a new board of independent health experts to oversee Medicare and Medicaid.”
Is Pearlstein psychic or wildly influential? The President will (has?) push(ed) for a public plan, fully funded. And even if Congress ditches it in favor of some renamed version (Government capitalized, regulated cooperatives that are really just Medicaid managed care programs with no income limits), there will be plenty of government regulation of the dumb doctors, greedy special interests and thuggish patients who just want to spend health care money for the hell of it. (Can I have seconds on that colonoscopy, please?) Pearlstein asserts: “fundamental policy goals of universal coverage and cost containment are inconsistent with the political instincts to assure Americans who already have health insurance that they will be able to keep everything they already have.” In other words, stupid doctors and patients should follow government orders of what to use, how much and when.
Pearlstein provides us with a cognitive map of the social engineers in the Obama White House and elsewhere who truly believe — in the face of contrary evidence (namely faster rising health care costs in Canada and the UK even as new technologies are rationed) — that government should assert control over the introduction and use of medical services and new technology. Any deviation from that goal would “sacrifice first principles, embrace bad policy in the name of compromise and capitulate to political thuggery.”
Yet Pearlstein is quite willing to toss the public plan overboard. He, like many Democrats, understands that it is a growing ideological distraction. Defining it down would still leave in place all the worst features of government involvement in healthcare.
Which leave us with the Baucus “Framework for Comprehensive Health Reform.”
It is being pitched as the middle ground or the compromise proposal compared to the House health bill or the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension bill because it has no “real” hard public plan.
In fact, behind the generalities of the memo loom most of the government agencies, entities, actions that the other bills would require to both reduce Medicare spending and force doctors to practice medicine according to government guidelines — or else.
The Baucus memo “saves” money by shoving more single individuals into Medicaid. A doubling of Medicaid enrollment will be linked to penalizing doctors for “using more resources than their peers.” Which is on top of proposed freezes in physician reimbursement or cuts designed to achieved productivity gains (meaning using fewer resources than your peers without regard to the complexity of illness).
That is the Baucus definition of quality, which is also applied en masse to all doctors participating in Medicare. This process will be accelerated by the creation of a health quality “czar” who will have power to define what quality care is (determining what resources should be utilized before punishing doctors for using more of them or different ones) for doctors and patients in health exchanges, the Medicaid plans posing as non-profit health coops, real and vastly expanded Medicaid and Medicare.
Woe unto the Medicare consumer who is readmitted to the hospital for a “high cost condition” such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart failure above a certain one-size fits all (in order to save dough) thresholds. Think of the Baucus memo as the kinder, gentler version of healthcare reform? Who needs rationing and death panels when Medicare (and other plans) denies coverage based on a “lack of compelling comparative effectiveness evidence” that … newer technologies or more resources don’t benefit people.
Hence, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, which now spends more each year on reviewing old studies a high school student can download from Google Scholar than the Food and Drug Administration devotes to reviewing new medicines ($600 million to $500 million), produced a study “concluding” that a single statin drug is just as effective in reducing deaths from heart disease than combinations of drugs. Ditto a study about the comparative effectiveness of screening for breast and prostate cancer. Neither study took into account any of the variations in response that new technologies can identify or treat. You can’t pay for what can’t measure.
Sometime before the NFL playoffs, most Americans will laugh this media-assisted retooling of this government intrusion into individual choice out of existence. Pearlstein is already seething that the health care debate was “hijacked by ranters and ravers of all stripes and members of Congress who don’t know their own minds and cower before their own constituents.”
Can’t wait till Pearlstein tells us how he feels after “comprehensive” reform tanks. That will be another barometer of how arrogant and isolated from reality the liberal policy establishment has become. And how profound their punishment will be come next election.
About the Author
Robert M. Goldberg is vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and founder of Hands Off My H ealth, a grass roots health care empowerment network. His is new book, Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used To Hijack Medical Science For Fear and Profit, was published last month by Kaplan.
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Frank Marschino| 9.10.09 @ 12:32PM
President BO lied 27 times in 48 minutes last night. When one congressman calls him on it, the media fulminates and condemns his single word, and he apologizes. Never apologize for telling the truth.
crookedwren| 9.10.09 @ 1:51PM
Better watch out if we disagree with B. Hussein Obama. The President of the United States has decided that, if a patriot disagrees with him, if a thinking individual question his math, his projected outcomes, or his particular rendition of reality, that patriot is guilty of acrimony, causing a disturbance, bickering.
He's going to call us out!
What does that mean?
And why can't the man even manage to utter the words "tort reform"?
I would have had a difficult time keeping my mouth shut through that speech last night. Fortunately for me, I was in my living room -- so I could shout at will.
Throwing sops to McCain.
Grotesque.
Pingback| 9.10.09 @ 3:10PM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : The Government Plan [spectator.org] links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Louis Jenkins| 9.10.09 @ 3:13PM
Wilson should have a medal pinned on his chest. Obviously he was the only one last night who really spoke his mind and who was interested in the truth.
saleboter| 9.10.09 @ 3:36PM
The apology should have said "I am sorry for what I said in the chamber, but it is still a lie."
c. j. acworth| 9.10.09 @ 5:58PM
Steven Pearlstein is upset with congresscritters who "cower before their constituents." And who, pray tell should they cower before? For whom are they working? If I'm signing his check, I want him to cower, grovel and press his lips to my posterior.
Osamas Pajamas| 9.10.09 @ 11:43PM
OBAMASCARE
Barak Hushpuppy OhBummer, "The Mistake of '08," is employing SCARE TACTICS to get his single-payer / universal / public-option / government-run socialized medicine / healthcare-hijacking fastened onto the backs of the American people. More Americans will die if we don't do it HIS way, he says ---- and we'll all be guilty of murder by turning OhBummer down.
Here he pontificates to the great masses of ignorant unwashed Americans, as he is inclined to regard them ---- who evidently don't trust this sneaky, sticky-fingered, smoothing-lying low-down skunk. Nope. Shake hands with OhBummer. Now count your fingers.
"I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than to improve it." MY ANSWER: Your plan is a hefty hunk of steamin' junk, there is no salvation for rot as ripe as this is.
"Well, the time for bickering is over," he said. "The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action." MY ANSWER: I feel exactly the same way, OhBummer, so knock off the scare tactics and propaganda, and the threats to the tea party and town hall protesters ---- and shut that lying hole in your face.
"I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last," he added. MY ANSWER: I am determined that you will be the last SOB to try to impose this crxp on the American people, too. You're just a heathcare hijacker and a predatory humanitarian ---- while pretending to be Santa Claus, wanting only to confer your "gift" on the American people ---- this is like getting a gift from Typhoid Mary.
Now, it is a mistake to suppose that OhBummer and the OhBummer Wrecking Crew mean to "reform" American healthcare. This is not reform, it is an out-and-out hijacking.
It is worth noting while the Marxist socialists seek to nationalize the entire system ---- such that all healthcare employees become government employees ---- Hitler's Nazis ["national socialists"] adopted another version of the same poisonous statism ---- "interventionism."
Under this system of total government control and dictatorship, the Nazis argued that they were merely "regulating" industry and that it continued to be "private enterprise under a system of private property."
But here's what the Nazis would never have tolerated publishing. A freeman owns himself, while a slave is owned by others. The first article of "private property" is "the self" --- and all other property earned or obtained by gift belongs to the individual.
Private property consists of the freedom of use and disposal thereof --- and because the Nazis and their philosophical partners-in-crime, e.g.: OhBummer, Nazi Pelosi, Dingy Harry Reid, Gaseous Al Gore, Mt Potato Head Biden, Hillary HotRod, and Sick Willie Clinton wish to "regulate" their betters, they effectively cancel private property ---- including the ownership of oneself.
Now, lads 'n' lasses! Go out there and kick over some bloody coffee tables, would ya?! And if OhBummer's thugs from the unions and Move On and Code Pink try to stop you, "get in their faces!"
Yi Ha ***
Minister of Information
Peoples' Capitalist Republic of Whizbangistan
*** Pronounced "YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"
Greg Zotta| 9.11.09 @ 2:30AM
OBAMACARE
President Barack Hussein Obama wants to overhaul the nations healthcare system, because of the so-called 50 million uninsured Americans, and stated he is open to requiring all Americans to buy health insurance. (What about the illegal immigrants?) The estimated costs would be $1.5 trillion over the next ten years. When asked about the costs he had no new solutions to that problem except to say he’d cut costs through such measures as managing chronic diseases and avoiding unnecessary tests and hospital readmissions. Sounds like rationing care and controlling lifestyle to me.
Obama wants it to be done by October. What he is saying is, Let’s hurry up and get this thing done before the people realize what this is all about and that is “Control.” The loss of freedom, you will be told what you can do, what you can eat etc. because it will be tied to healthcare.
Professor Stuart Altman of Brandeis University attended the hearings in the Senate Finance Committee on health-care reform and he reluctantly stated why waste money on in depth treatment for people who won’t live long anyway? In other words he is saying old people go home and die.
President Obama appointed Dr. Thomas Frieden as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Obama stated Frieden has been a leader in the fight for healthcare reform, and he led the campaign to ban smoking and trans-fats from New York City restaurants. He has been in at the forefront of the fight against heart disease, cancer, and obesity, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS, and in the establishment of electronic health records. Making it easier to keep tabs on people and thus control their lives, (no soda or sugary foods for you).
To pay for Obamacare he wants to put the squeeze on doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals. Taxes on beer, wine, liquor, and tobacco would go up. Soda and other sugary drinks and cereals would also be taxed because they lead to obesity. The idea behind the proposed increases is to tax lifestyle choices that contribute to rising medical costs. Controlling our lives!!
Government run Social Security and Medicare are going bankrupt. We do not need the government to run the healthcare system.
The United States has the greatest healthcare system in the world. Sure it needs to be fine-tuned but we do not need socialized medicine or universal healthcare (Obamacare). I urge everyone to contact their representatives in government and have them oppose this government takeover of the healthcare system.
Greg Zotta
Greg Zotta| 9.11.09 @ 2:32AM
HealthCare
The United States has the greatest healthcare system in the world, but because of government intervention and regulation costs are, and have been skyrocketing. Government is not the solution to the problem with healthcare. Medicare and Medicaid are government programs that are going broke. This country does not need socialized/nationalized medicine.
There are people that say 47-50 million people are without healthcare/insurance coverage, and some are politicians who want to provide health insurance for them. Some of the reasons why these people do not have health insurance is because they are young and physically fit and do not think they need it, some are illegal immigrants, some can afford it but choose to be self-insured, and some just do not want to pay for it using the emergency rooms as their clinic.
We do not have a healthcare problem in this country; we have a health insurance problem. Nobody is denied healthcare in this country and if they go to the emergency room they will be treated, regardless of the ability to pay. This in itself is not right because the doctors, nurses, hospital etc. provide a service to that individual and they should be paid. Some hospitals are going out of business because of this. Also people who have health insurance are paying more because a percentage goes for people who do not pay.
Unfortunately there are many people and politicians who think healthcare is a right. That is a big problem, for there is a need and a want for healthcare/insurance but it should not be a right.
The solution to the healthcare/insurance crisis is in the free market. One way is for people to buy catastrophic healthcare insurance to cover the costs of a major illness or injury, and to pay for doctors visits, therapy, drugs, etc. out of pocket. The individuals should purchase the insurance themselves and their employer should not provide it to them. People should be paid for the work they do, and buy what they want when they want. When people have their health insurance paid by their employer, they get locked into plans they may not want and have to stay employed with that company in order to keep the insurance. There is a lack of competition in the health insurance industry when employers provide health insurance to their employees. The reason employers began providing health coverage was because the government imposed a wage freeze the under Stabilization Act of 1942; therefore business circumvented the wage freeze law by offering paid benefits in lieu of wages. Also some companies that have promised to pay the health insurance for retirees have reneged on that promise.
Another solution to the healthcare/insurance crisis is to set up some form of medical savings accounts, wherein people purchase insurance to pay for medical expenses and if they do not use the coverage they would get back some of their money. This would empower the people to be in control of their lives and make decisions about their healthcare.
Medical insurance should be available to purchase across state lines, which would increase competition in the industry thus lowering cost. Insurance companies need to be held accountable for the services that were contracted in the policy when individuals have paid their premiums for health care coverage, and the insurance company should not be able to cancel coverage on that individual because of illness or injury.
What the Government is proposing in the overhaul of healthcare amounts to socialism. It is about control and the loss of freedoms. The loss of freedom will occur because you will be told what you can do, what you can eat etc. because it will be tied to healthcare.
To pay for it Obama wants to put the squeeze on doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals. Taxes on beer, wine, liquor, and tobacco would go up. Soda and other sugary drinks and cereals would also be taxed because they lead to obesity. The idea behind the proposed increases is to tax lifestyle choices that contribute to rising medical costs. Controlling our lives!!
The United States has the greatest healthcare system in the world. Sure it needs to be fine-tuned but we do not need socialized medicine or universal single-payer healthcare (Obamacare). I urge everyone to contact their representatives in government and have them oppose this government takeover of the healthcare system.
Greg Zotta
Crystal Muz | 9.11.09 @ 3:30AM
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Now, it is a mistake to suppose that OhBummer and the OhBummer Wrecking Crew mean to "reform" American healthcare.
Karen Price | 9.11.09 @ 3:31AM
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Obama wants it to be done by October. What he is saying is, Let’s hurry up and get this thing done before the people realize what this is all about and that is Control.
Frank Collatt| 9.13.09 @ 2:15PM
Rep. Joe Wilson does not owe an apology to anyone. In fact, Rep. Wilson should outline all of the LIES told by this OBAMA Administration and rattle the House Floor with it!! Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid need to apologize for trying to mislead Americans on their Health Care, and OBAMA should be removed from Office because he acts just like a petulant child when he doesn't get his way. OBAMA's body language and mannerisms are an accurate reflection of this fact!!