On Aug 21, 9:14*am, WQGT447 wrote:
On Aug 20, 4:23*pm, "~ RHF" wrote:
On Aug 19, 6:03*pm, No ObaMao wrote:
There was a time when rushing a thousand-page bill through Congress so
fast that no one has time to read it would have provoked public
outrage. But now, this has been attempted twice in the first 6 months
of a new administration.
The fact that they got away with it before, with the "stimulus" bill,
may have led them to believe that they could get away with it again.
But the first bill simply spent hundreds of billions of dollars. The
current "health care" bill threatens to take life-and-death decisions
out of the hands of individuals and their doctors, transferring those
decisions to Washington bureaucrats.
People are taking that personally-- as they should. Your life and
death, and that of your loved ones, is as personal as it gets.
The mainstream media are again circling the wagons to protect Barack
Obama, but this time it may not work. One of those front-page
editorials disguised as a news article in the New York Times begins:
"The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama's health care
proposals would create government-sponsored 'death panels' to decide
which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in
recent weeks."
Nowhere? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is "Special Advisor for Health Policy"
for the Obama administration. That's nowhere? He is also co-author of
an article on Americans' "over-utilization" of medical care in the
June 18, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Medical
Association. Is that nowhere?
Why do some people call Prez Obama's
"Special Advisor for Health Policy"
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel - 'The Doctor Death' ?
Was Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel responsible for
End-of-Life {Ending-Your-Life} Counseling
in Obama-CareŠ ?
Dr. Emanuel's article points out that Americans do not visit doctors
or go into hospitals more than people in other industrialized
countries. In fact we go to both places less often than people do in
those other countries, which include countries with government-
controlled medical care.
As the article points out, "It is more costly care, rather than high
volume, that accounts for higher expenditures in the United States."
There are more Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) devices per capita in
the United States, more coronary bypass operations and Americans use
more new pharmaceutical drugs created within the past 5 years.
Americans also have more of what the article calls "amenities" with
their medical care. "Hospital rooms in the United States offer more
privacy, comfort and auxiliary services than do hospital rooms in most
other countries."
In other words, it is not quantity but quality that is different-- and
more expensive-- about American medical care. This is what Dr.
Emanuel's "over-utilization" consists of.
At one time, it would have been none of Dr. Emanuel's business if your
physician prescribed the latest medications for you, rather than the
cheaper and obsolete medications they replaced. It would have been
none of his business if you preferred to have a nice hospital room
with "amenities" rather than being in an unsanitary ward with
inadequate nursing care, as under the National Health Service in
Britain.
The involvement of government gives Dr. Emanuel the leverage to
condemn other Americans' choices-- and a larger involvement of
government will give him the power to force both doctors and patients
to change their choices.
As for a "death panel," no politician would ever use that phrase when
trying to get a piece of legislation passed. "End of life" care under
the "guidance" of "some independent group" sounds so much nicer-- and
these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New
York Times back on April 14th.
He said, "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives
are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care
bill out there." He added: "It is very difficult to imagine the
country making those decisions just through the normal political
channels. That is why you have to have some independent group that can
give you guidance."
But when you select people like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to give
"independent" guidance, you have already chosen a policy through your
choice of advisors, who simply provide political cover. The net result
can be exactly the same as if those providing that guidance were
openly called "death panels."
http://townhall.com/columnists/Thoma...whose_medical_....
Whose Medical Decisions? Part II
When famed bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he
said: "Because that's where the money is."
For the same reason, it is as predictable as the sunrise that medical
care for the elderly will be cut back under a government-controlled
medical system. Because that's where the money is.
My experience is probably not very different from that of many other
people in their seventies. My medical expenses in the past year have
been more than in the first 40 years of my life-- and I did not spend
one night in a hospital all last year or go to an emergency room even
once.
Just the ordinary medical expenses of keeping an old geezer going
along in good health are high. Throw in a medical emergency or two and
the costs go through the roof.
So long as my insurance company and I are paying for it, it is nobody
else's business what my medical expenses are. But once the government
is involved, everything is their business.
It is not just a question of what the government will pay for. The
logic of their collectivist thinking-- and the actual practice in some
other countries with government-controlled health care-- is that you
cannot even pay for some medical treatments with your own money, if
the powers that be decide that "society" cannot let its resources be
used that way, or that it would not be "social justice" for some
people to have medical treatments that others cannot get, just because
some people "happen to have money."
The medical care stampede is about much more than medical care,
important as that is. It is part of a whole mindset of many on the
left who have never reconciled themselves to an economic system in
which how much people can withdraw from the resources of the nation
depends on how much they have contributed to those resources.
Despite the cleverness of phrases about people who "happen to have
money," very few people just happen to have money. Most people earned
their money by supplying other people with goods or services that
those people were willing to pay for.
Since it is their own money that they have earned, these people feel
free to spend it to give their 80-year-old grandmother another year or
two of life, or to pay for a hip replacement operation for their mom
or dad, even If some medical "ethicist" might say that the resources
of "society" would be better used to allow some 20-year-old to talk
over his angst with a shrink.
Barack Obama has talked about the high costs of taking care of elderly
or chronically ill patients in terms of "society making those
decisions." But a world in which individuals make their own trade-offs
with their own money is fundamentally different from a world where
third parties take those decisions out of their hands and impose their
own notions of what is best for "society."
Calling these arbitrary notions "ethics" doesn't change anything,
however effective it may be as political spin.
More is at stake than the outcomes of medical decisions, extremely
important as those are. What is also at stake is freedom and the
dignity of individuals who do not live their lives as supplicants of
puffed-up power holders who are spending the money taken from them in
taxes.
One of the many phony arguments for government-controlled medical care
is that Americans do not have any longer life expectancy than in other
countries, despite much higher medical expenditures.
This argument is phony because longevity depends on health-- and
"health care" and "medical care" are not the same, no matter how many
times the two are confused in the media or in politics. Health care
includes things that doctor cannot do much about.
Homicide affects your longevity but there is not much that doctors can
do about it when they arrive on the scene after you have been shot
through the heart, except fill out the paperwork. Rates of homicide,
obesity and narcotics usage are higher here than in many other
countries, reducing our longevity.
But in the things that medical care can do something about-- like
cancer survival rates-- the United States ranks at or near the top in
the world. But that can change if we give up the real benefits of a
top medical system for the visions and rhetoric of politicians.
http://townhall.com/columnists/Thoma...whose_medical_....
http://townhall.com/Columnists/ThomasSowell/
http://www.tsowell.com/-Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
- Are you on dope or something? *
Why do some people think Prez Obama's
"Special Advisor for Health Policy"
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel -is- 'On Dope or Something' ?
- This is all unadulterated nonsense, reading
- in all sorts of baloney that just ain't there.
Was Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel responsible for
the 'unadulterated nonsense' of End-of-Life
{Ending-Your-Life} Counseling in Obama-CareŠ ?
Obama-CareŠ full of 'all sorts of baloney
that just ain't there' . . . except higher Taxes
and Limiting Medical Treatment for All.