Final word on death panels and rationing?
[Editor's Note - I posted this in March 2010. After repeatedly insisting that ObamaCare would never be able to ration care or ever have death panels and even after the self-proclaimed politifact.com labeled this their "lie of the year"; fast forward to September 2011, now the truth is reported so casually that even Robert Reich and Paul Krugman have admitted that death panel like rationing will be necessary and the ObamaCare "Independent Payment Advisory Board" is common knowledge. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich were the first to call this what it was and deserve credit for doing so by stating the obvious: that the words "death panel" do not have to appear in the bill because Congress, by passing the ObamaCare law, has handed such overwhelming regulatory authority over to these faceless bureaucrats that they have the ability create law by regulation at the stroke of a pen.]
Bloomberg News reports about one of the ways health care will be rationed, notice it starts after the upcoming presidential election.
So will it become a death panel?
The legislation also creates an Independent Payment Advisory Board to suggest cuts in spending by Medicare, the government health program for the elderly and disabled, that could threaten payments for drug and device-makers. Starting in 2014, the panel’s recommendations would take effect unless federal lawmakers substitute their own reductions.
[youtube= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7Y0TOBuG4]
The president's own cousin, Dr. Milton Wolf, said that this bill does harm and rations care in multiple ways - LINK:
As one example, consider the implications of Obamacare’s financial penalty aimed at your doctor if he seeks the expert care he has determined you need. If your doctor is in the top 10 percent of primary care physicians who refer patients to specialists most frequently – no matter how valid the reasons – he will face a 5 percent penalty on all their Medicare reimbursements for the entire year. This scheme is specifically designed to deny you the chance to see a specialist. Each year, the insidious nature of that arbitrary 10 percent rule will make things even worse as 100 percent of doctors try to stay off that list. Many doctors will try to avoid the sickest patients, and others will simply refuse to accept Medicare. Already, 42 percent of doctors have chosen that route, and it will get worse. Your mother’s shiny government-issued Medicare health card is meaningless without doctors who will accept it.
Obamacare will further diminish access to health care by lowering reimbursements for medical care without regard to the costs of that care. Price controls have failed spectacularly wherever they’ve been tried. They have turned neighborhoods into slums and have caused supply chains to dry up when producers can no longer profit from providing their goods. Remember the Carter-era gas lines? Medical care is not immune from this economic reality. We cannot hope that our best and brightest will pursue a career in medicine, setting aside years of their lives – for me, 13 years of school and training – to enter a field that might not even pay for the student loans it took to get there.
Of course, when the regulations written by bureaucrats get written how will they be interpreted and enforced? Several of Obama's Czar's and advisers have said in no uncertain terms that value judgements about who should get care need to be made, and we have reported those statements right here on this web site.