By Ralph R. Reiland on 10.27.09 @ 6:06AM
From central planning -- "We're going to let you die."
I saw two stories last week that had diametrically opposed
messages.
The first was pro-life in the broadest sense of the word, a
breakthrough against cancer via a new tumor-targeted genetic
medicine, Rexin-G, that produced clinical remissions in
late-stage cases of three chemotherapy-resistant, otherwise
intractable cancers -- prostate cancer, metastatic osteosarcoma,
and pancreas cancer.
The second, fundamentally anti-life, was a video of a speech
delivered by Robert B. Reich on health care reform at the
University of California at Berkeley on September 26, 2007.
Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and more
recently a member of President-elect Obama's transition advisory
board and an economic adviser to President Obama, told the
Berkeley audience what a candidate for President of the United
States would say if he was honest about health care reform.
"This is what the truth is," explained former Harvard professor
Reich, "what candidates should say if we were in the kind of
democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice
of citizenship, and they were educated in terms of what the
issues were, and they could separate myth from reality in terms
of what a candidate was telling them."
Reich then plays the role of that straight-talking presidential
candidate:
Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see
you and I would like to be president … Let me tell you a few
things on health care. Look, we have the only health care
system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And
that's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to
reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people.
But that means you, particularly you young people, particularly
you young healthy people, you're going to have to pay more
(scattered applause). Thank you, and by the way, we are going
to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all
that technology and all those drugs for the last couple years
of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of
weeks. It's too expensive, so we're going to let you die
(heavier applause).
Also, I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal
government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid -- we already have a
lot of bargaining leverage -- to force drug companies and
insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their
costs. But that means less innovation, and less products and
less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably
going to live not much longer than your parents (scattered
applause). Thank you.
California Newswire provided a profile of one of the
aforementioned cancer cases:
Remarkably, a Catholic priest who was previously bedridden and
in withering pain, suffering from end-stage prostate cancer
that had spread to his bones, received successive courses of
Rexin-G, during which time the bone pain was relieved, the PSA
tumor markers fell, the bone tumors stopped growing, and even
the previously inoperable primary tumor disappeared on
follow-up CT scans. As the priest's bones began to heal and
strengthen, he arose from his bed and is currently saying daily
Mass and delivering lectures in the seminary. What is even more
remarkable is that this revered man of the cloth was over
90-years-old at the time of his treatment and remission.
For guys like Reich, that sounds like a bad outcome -- too
budget-busting, too innovative. Too much life.
