Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Rationing’ Category

If the American people want the health-care world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that’s their choice. But they must be given that choice.

Barack Obama’s incredible “recess appointment” of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

The court’s decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds. Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine.

Dr. Berwick’s ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren’t merely about “change.” They would be revolutionary.

One may agree with these views or not, but for the president to tell the American people they have to simply accept this through anything so flaccid as a recess appointment is beyond outrageous. It isn’t acceptable.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, was taken aback at the end-around: “Senate confirmation of presidential appointees is an essential process prescribed by the Constitution that serves as a check on executive power.”

Let’s look, then, at what President Obama won’t let the American electorate hear Dr. Berwick say in front of a committee of Congress.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Rationing health care is now official Obama policy

Obama Fills Medicare and Medicaid Post Without Senate Approval

Berwick: ‘Excellent health care is, by definition, redistribution’ rather than ‘darkness of private enterprise’

Mark Levin: Obama Health Care Nominee Is Radical Redistributionist

“The decision is not whether or not we will ration care–the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
                                                              - New Medicare Czar, Donald Berwick

President Obama on Wednesday bypassed Congress and appointed Dr. Donald Berwick to head Medicare and Medicaid — filling the job while Congress is in recess to get around Republican opposition that threatened to derail Berwick’s confirmation.

Berwick’s supporters say he is the right man in the right place at the right time. Obama said in a written statement Wednesday that the recess appointment would allow Berwick and two other “extremely qualified candidates” to get to work “right away.”

“It’s unfortunate that at a time when our nation is facing enormous challenges, many in Congress have decided to delay critical nominations for political purposes,” Obama said.

But his opponents have lined up against him. They say that while he may be a the highly respected doctor, he is also an outspoken proponent of the British health care system, which they say is all wrong for Americans.

“This recess appointment is an insult to the American people,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Tuesday night. “Dr. Berwick is a self-professed supporter of rationing health care, and he won’t even have to explain his views to the American people in a Congressional hearing.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, accused the administration of showing “arrogance of power” with the move.

“This demonstrates a troubling pattern by this administration to force a dangerous agenda on the American people by whatever means necessary,” he said. 

Read more at Fox News

Obama Medicare Czar: ‘Excellent health care is, by definition, redistribution’ rather than ‘darkness of private enterprise’

Mark Levin: Obama Health Care Nominee Is Radical Redistributionist

Sebelius: Rationing Advocate is ‘Absolutely Right Leader At This Time’ to Run Medicare

Focused on what President Obama insists is the worst environmental disaster the country has ever seen, many Americans perhaps haven’t noticed the nastiness spewing from Obamacare’s two thousand pages. But the impact of the new healthcare law will be at least as disastrous as that of the oil gushing from the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, and even more hazardous to our health.

The Obama administration’s inept handling of the oil leak foreshadows what will happen when hapless government bureaucrats begin administering our healthcare. 

One of Obamacare’s major selling points was that nobody would be forced to change their insurance policies or doctors. “If you like your health care plan,” Obama told the American Medical Association, “you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

But as Obama’s team drafts the regulations for implementing this massive government takeover of the healthcare industry, it’s becoming evident that the president and his supporters misled the American people.

It was recently reported that 1.5 million Americans may lose their health coverage this year due to Obamacare regulations. Now we’re learning that new regulations may force tens of millions to lose their employer-provided healthcare plans.

Read more at Human Events

Millions losing health coverage due to Obamacare

The American Medical Association (AMA) is putting the doctors of America on notice. A major cheerleader for ObamaCare, the organization is now trying to silence doctors who oppose it. It is time the American people understood what the AMA is really all about.

Last month, not long after a Florida urologist placed a sign in his door making it clear that patients who voted for President Obama were not welcome in his practice, the AMA issued the following statement: “[P]hysicians might reflect on how to properly balance their obligations as members of the medical profession with their rights as individual citizens who will be affected by reform. In particular, physicians may wonder whether it is appropriate to express political views to patients or their families.” The statement goes on to say that while the AMA “supports the right of physicians to free political speech and encourages them to exercise the full scope of their political rights . . . physicians should conduct political communications with sensitivity to patients’ vulnerability and desire for privacy.”

Many doctors interpreted this as an attempt—albeit with verbal parachutes attached—to keep them from sharing their opinions about health-care reform with their patients. This position is troubling on many levels.

The AMA was not only a major supporter of ObamaCare but also an accomplice in its passage. Without the support of the AMA it is quite possible that the health-care reform initiative would have failed. So why the effort to silence other doctors? The AMA is not only worried about protecting this misguided legislation, it is worried about protecting itself.

In the weeks since passage of this 2,700 page bill, more and more of its policy land-mines have exploded, including rising insurance premiums and admissions of inevitable rationing. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of physicians have expressed alarm over the impact that the legislation will have on their patients. This growing opposition makes the actions of the AMA, which represents only 17% of the doctors in the U.S., look very bad.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Obama’s Office of Management and Budget Director, Peter Orszag, has now indirectly admitted that ObamaCare will impose a system of rationing through the newly-created “Independent Payment Advisory Board.”

What’s even more horrifying than the fact that Sarah Palin was right after all is that ObamaCare also illegally strips Congress of its legislative powers over health care.

Every day-to-day decision made by this “independent” death panel will immediately become law and can only be reversed individually, through a separate act of Congress each time (with a 67-vote majority), signed by the president.

This impossibly stacks the deck against any real efforts to create accountability or oversight. It leaves the entire health care system in the hands of one tiny, unaccountable, un-elected federal bureacracy…which can now issue any arbitrary edict it pleases on who can provide what services where, and to whom, from on high, with total impunity.

Read more at the Examiner

The new federal health-care law has raised the stakes for hospitals and schools already scrambling to train more doctors.

Experts warn there won’t be enough doctors to treat the millions of people newly insured under the law. At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Government hates competition.

Because of the new health care law, Dr. John Dietz has an empty building that he’s not sure what he’s going to do with.

Dietz is part owner of the Indiana Orthopedic Hospital.

“It is an expansion of our hospital that is three-quarters finished; it had three operating rooms for outpatient surgery,” he said. “Now it can’t be used for that purpose. We’ll have to figure out an alternative for it.”

Dietz and his fellow investors put $27 million into that new building.

Under the new law there are a host of bureaucratic hoops that physician-owned hospitals must go through to expand.

• The hospital must apply to the Department of Health and Human Services and can do so only once every two years.

• It must then wait for a period for members of the community to provide input.

• It must be in a county where population growth is 150% of the population growth of the state in the last five years.

• Inpatient admissions must be equal to or greater than the average of such admissions in all hospitals located in the county.

• Its bed occupancy rate must be greater than the state average.

• It must be located in a state where hospital bed capacity is less than the national average.

• Once a hospital meets all of those conditions, it is prohibited from expanding more than 200%.

And they are the lucky ones. There are currently 60 to 65 physician-owned hospitals under construction. Those that aren’t finished and don’t have a Medicare provider number by Aug. 1 (Dec. 31 if the reconciliation bill passes) will probably never open their doors. Without a provider number, such hospitals can’t treat Medicare patients, which are usually essential to financial survival.

Read more at Investors Business Daily

You can’t put a price on human life…unless you’re a government health care bureaucrat.

If the Left was always this honest, our job would be so much easier.  Keep talking!  Tell America what you REALLY believe!   You’re doing us a great favor!

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Left-leaning New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman says the so-called “death panels” established by President Obama’s trillion-dollar nationalized health-care plan will end up saving “a lot of money” for the government.

The comments from Krugman, who also writes on the New York Times blogs, came during a discussion of “Obamacare” on the ABC News Sunday program “This Week.”

Read more at World Net Daily

Heritage Foundation Responds to President Obama’s Claims on Health Care Reform

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President Obama this morning cited The Heritage Foundation’s research in an attempt to sell his health care package as a “middle of the road, centrist approach.” We take great exception to this misuse of our work and abuse of our name. This is but the latest act in a campaign to sell this big-government program as a moderate law that incorporates conservative ideas. Americans should not be fooled.

Let’s be very clear: We oppose this new law because it is a radical new intrusion into the daily lives of all Americans and a massive takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. We view the President’s health care law as inimical to our national interests and offensive to the historic American dedication to the principle of self-government.

Our research has shown that President Obama’s health approach is financially unsustainable and will ultimately lead to health care rationing, a lower quality of care and a greater degree of dependence on government. We deplore those outcomes and are committed to making the intellectual case for this law’s repeal.

What part of that does President Obama not understand?

Specifically, President Obama told NBC’s Today Show host Matt Lauer that a centerpiece of his health care package, “in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market—that originated from The Heritage Foundation.”

But the President knows full well—or he ought to learn before he speaks—that the exchanges we and most others support are very different from those in his package. True exchanges are simply a market mechanism to enable families to choose their health insurance. President Obama’s exchanges, by contrast, are a vehicle to introduce sweeping regulation and federal standardization on health insurance.

Read more at Red State

BINGO! Earth to liberals: Medicare and Social Security ARE unconstitutional! And for those who insist that these socialist programs are “compassionate”, how compassionate is it to encourage millions of seniors to entrust their declining years to a corrupt, bankrupt, government-run ponzi scheme??

The Liberal Examiner opines:

In an effort to capitalize on the Republican-Tea Party-Fox News frenzy whipped up over passage of historic health industry reform, McCollum – running to replace Governor Charlie Crist – filed a lawsuit along with 12 other state attorneys general (11 of them Republicans) trying to overturn the legislation.

But according to the National Senior Citizens Law Center legal experts, if the lawsuit has success, it will set a critical precedent for future challenges to Medicare and Social Security, due to similarities between the individual mandate provision in the new health bill and in the two bedrock pieces of social legislation that so many millions of senior citizens depend on.

Key words: “depend on”.   Since when are Americans supposed to be dependent on government instead of on the accumulated fruits of their own labor (which would be much more if not for confiscatory taxation), or the kindness of their neighbors, churches and local charities who actually get to KNOW them and do SO much more than just mail a check? 

Medicare And Social Security Are Going Bankrupt And Obama Isn’t Even Trying To Fix Them

In the Red: Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year

300 Million, Social Security, and Solvency

Social Security Reform: A Free-Market Alternative

Free Market Solutions to Medicare and Medicaid

Nil desperandum” — never despair. That is a sentiment that conservatives need to take to heart now that Congress has narrowly passed a bill that simultaneously undermines life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We are now being told that the campaign to repeal this legislation is over before it has even begun, that Americans will come to appreciate the benefits that a bountiful government is giving them, and that the growth of the welfare state can never be reversed. We understand the odds against repeal. We understand, indeed, that complete repeal of every provision of the bill is impossible. The doughnut hole — a gap in Medicare’s prescription-drug coverage designed to encourage seniors to economize — has been filled, and it is not going to be re-opened.

But the larger thesis seems as superficially plausible, and as ultimately convincing, as were earlier predictions that state socialism or secularization were our inevitable future. It is quite possible that the majority of America that rejects this legislation will get its way in the next few years — if it is given the right leadership. And it is worth the effort to try.

Read more at National Review Online

Time for drastic measures

I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

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Jesus told us to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. Under Obamacare, the ultimate goal is the nationalization of our bodies. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. They belong to ourselves and to God, NOT the state. THIS is where we draw the line!

From his corner at National Review Online:

Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be “insurers” in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that’s clear we’ll be on the fast track to Obama’s desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It’s a huge transformative event in Americans’ view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. Their bet is that it can’t be undone, and that over time, as I’ve been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there’s plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it’s also unaffordable. That’s why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it’s less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we’ll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America’s enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side . . .

The Nationalization of Your Body

Who Owns Your Body? Under Obamacare, Not You…

The Problems with Socialized Health Care

Mark Steyn on Obama’s Ultimate Goal For Healthcare

Krauthammer: ObamaCare Will Be the Law of the Land as of Tonight and We’ll be a Different Country

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Obamacare is an historic moment – like the Black Plague

The government takeover of health care will go down in history as the worst piece of legislation to emerge from a Congress held in general disdain by the American people.

The new system will suffer a tsunami of bad publicity when states sue the federal government over unfunded mandates, when the IRS begins enforcing the aspects of the bill that voters never knew existed, when small businesses start firing employees because they cannot afford the higher costs of the new system, when new and unforeseen costs blow out the already record federal budget deficit, and when seniors begin to feel the impact of Medicare cuts. All of this is what Mr. Obama euphemistically calls “bending the curve” but which seniors will find out is better termed “denial of care.” Whether the formal “death panels” will convene before the November elections is still to be determined.

Read more at The Washington Times

In November 2008, Americans elected a socialist as their president. In March 2010, they woke up stunned to find themselves living in a socialist country.

Health insurers – once private companies – are now organs of the federal government. Every citizen is a ward of the state, which can now compel you to have insurance; punish you if you don’t; determine if your insurance is acceptable; punish you if it isn’t. Thousands of new federal bureaucrats will soon spill from the D.C. Beltway and flood the country, scrutinizing our finances to verify compliance with this new law.

A government that grants itself this kind of power over us can conceivably do anything to us. For our own good, of course. Such a country is in no meaningful sense “free.”

And this is only the beginning. Liberals are salivating in contemplation of all the fanciful window trimmings that can in the future be hung from this legislative framework. Public option will soon appear as prelude to single payer, as was the intent all along. Soon, Americans won’t even have the illusion of a choice – the government will move from subsidizer to provider, and it will be the only game in town.

Read more at American Thinker

Health Care Bill: How The House Members Voted

A little ObamaCare humor.

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