Obama's Death Panels

Obama is cutting Medicare reimubursements to doctors treating cancer and cardiac patients.

These cuts will force cardiologists and oncologists to limit care to their Medicare patients, withdraw from treating Medicare patients altogether or require their patients to pay more out of pocket to make up the difference in the cost of these services.

Unless these proposed changes are rescinded, current and future cardiac and cancer care patients will suffer the consequences, especially in rural areas where the proportion of Medicare patients is exceptionally high and patients have fewer choices of health care providers.

The changes certainly will force the closing of outreach clinics in rural areas, leaving many people without easily accessible cardiac or cancer care. They will be forced to travel to hospitals, sometimes long distances from home, and to wait for hours, if not days and weeks, for the tests and services they need.

Death Panels

Obama surrogate Evan Thomas is for them.

The idea that we might ration health care to seniors (or anyone else) is political anathema. Politicians do not dare breathe the R word, lest they be accused—however wrongly—of trying to pull the plug on Grandma. But the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate. Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it. At a more basic level, Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable.

I don't believe that the only solution to solving our supposed healthcare crisis is death panels, although Obama clearly does.

And, there's the other, more subtle forms of rationing.

The normal critique of socialized medicine is to point out that people have to wait a long time for these kinds of treatments in places like Britain. And that's certainly a valid critique. I'm sure my mom and daughter would still be waiting for their treatments, while my father and wife would probably be dead.

The key point, though, is that these treatments didn't just come out out of the blue. They were developed by drug companies and device makers who thought they had a good market for things that would make people feel better.

I do wish that this were more prominent. The fact is that both indirectly, as in the above link and directly (here), Obamacare will stifle the introduction of new lifesaving drugs and treatments.

The argument that Obamacare with smother new treatments by outlawing profits might be a bit cerebral, so we should take advantage of the Democrat's oafishness by pointing out that they are actively attacking medical progress.

Obama's Death Panels, In His Own Words

Well, since he brought it up, it's worth reminding people that Barack Hussein Obama himself has advocated rationing healthcare to the elderly.



So, who should make these decisions? A panel of experts, according to Obama.

A New York Times interviewer asked Barack Hussein Obama how we should decide who gets health care and who doesn't.

"I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."

And Obama makes it clear here where he sees potential savings in health care.

“That’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues,” he said in the April 14 interview. “The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health- care bill out here.”