Obama and Pelosi are (surprisingly) having trouble convincing Democrats that Obamacare means everybody will have the best healthcare money can buy, nobody will have to pay for it and everybody wants this. Things started to fall apart when it was leaked in the press that paying folks would not be able to hold onto their current insurance - our health plans would all be controlled by Obama.
When Obama adds fifty million more people to the healthcare system, it will cost us less money than it does now and in fact, at the breaking point, healtchcare will start "paying for itself".
That's amazing.
When they buy a new MRI machine and twenty or so million more people get referred to use it, the machine will pay for itself.
Must be another brainchild of Barney Frank's? Everyone will just stop paying for things they buy and the wizards will come up with another stimulus package to write off the debt.
Nobody will remember Joe Biden's acknowledgment that they were way off on their projections in the housing fix, will they?In any event, they've got this figured out. It's going to cost a trillion dollars in the first ten years to take on 50 million more people. Somewhere there's a pot of money being wasted.
I shouldn't say figured out. It's all conjecture - but, they'll find it, don't you worry. The medical supply companies and drug companies and doctors will forfeit their profits. Something like that.
What Congress is debating with increasing intensity, up against Obama's hope of getting both houses of Congress to pass a measure before their August recess, is how to cover this $1 trillion price tag. Opponents of the emerging plans were emboldened last week by a report from the Congressional Budget Office that showed the plans would not accomplish their stated goal of significantly reducing federal health spending. However, the plans that Congress handed Douglas Elmendorf, the head of the CBO, have yet to include some of the bolder proposals that will curb costs.
Finding any savings to pay for the reforms is bound to anger someone, which is why Congress has yet to confront all the details about where to cut. "Waste is income for other people," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "When you find the waste -- and there's much, clearly -- that's all income for someone, whether it's the drug companies, the medical supply industry, doctors who might be paid too much for some procedures. Every single one has someone behind it who will fight to their last breath to keep Congress from taking them away."
Educated people know where they'll find "waste". Like every other reformation of healthcare in every other country, "waste" is rationing health care. Your mother has stage III cancer - they're not going to waste resources to treat her - at 62, she could be a goner. Your baby is born at 34 weeks and needs neonatal care? Sorry, not wasting resources.
Obama Administration officials are saying it in every way there is to say it and the mainstream media is not paying attention.
In his speech to the American Medical Association, President Obama said what White House health advisor Ezekiel Emanuel and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag have said in print some time ago. The only way to control health care costs is to get doctors to provide less care — fewer tests, fewer procedures, fewer everything. Of course, the Administration wants to eliminate only that care that is "unnecessary.
Clearly the Administration does not consider doctors the best judge of what people need. The obvious end game: Washington will tell doctors how to practice medicine....
If health care is to be rationed, what's the right way to do it? Zeke Emanuel (who is also the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) wrote an entire article on this subject in the Lancet on January 31, 2009. Emanuel advocated allocating health resources in order to maximize collective life years. Suppose a 25-year-old and a 65-year-old have a life threatening disease. Since the 25-year-old has many more potential years of life ahead of him, he should receive preferential treatment, says Emanuel. He justifies denying care to elderly patients in the following way:
The complete lives system discriminates against older people…. 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.
There's more. In a different article written more than 10 years ago for the Hastings Center Report, Emanuel said health services should not be guaranteed to "individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens." He continues, "An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."
After an internal squabble that fractured the American Medical Association, doctors have started to publicly mobilize against it.
Some doctors charge the bill will lead to inferior patient care as physician offices around the country triple their patient lists and become forced to ration care.
"This is war," Dr. George Watson, a Kansas physician and president-elect of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, told FOXNews.com Thursday. "This is a bureaucratic boondoggle to grab control of health care. Everything that has been proposed in the 1,018 page bill will contribute to the ruination of medicine."
Abortion is starting to be a tar baby for advancing socialized medicine.
...another group of Democrats and Republicans held a news conference Wednesday to call for an explicit ban on funding.
In a Tuesday night interview, President Barack Obama claimed he does not want abortion funding in the final health care bill Congress may send him. The issues of taxpayer-funding of abortions and mandates on abortion coverage are unifying pro-life groups in a massive effort to amend or halt the legislation.
They're not ruling it out, they're not ruling it in, they think medical doctors should determine it - but the President doesn't want abortions covered. No
ooooo. So if abortion shows up in the package, just remember that it wasn't Obama's idea, somebody else made THAT decision.
For those who enjoy intellectual dishonesty, there's a good debunking of Obama's magical and free healthcare
here, written by Bobby Jindal along with some common sense guidelines and principles in a reformation.
Should be an interesting few weeks as
the push goes on before summer recess. If we don't pass
his healthcare reform package, it will be Helter Skelter.
Give us a break.
