After I stopped laughing I thought, "hey, shouldn't I be upset about this sort of treatment?"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...
Yes Friends, more evidence of Owe-bama lies. Plain and simple. Cut the health care opportunies for the elderly and depress them into looking into the "end of life" options the government will offer. After all isn't it mostly the old people that stand in the way of progress, watching O'reilly and attending all those church services with their outdated views of the world.
Obama has tried valiantly to keep discussion of cutting Medicare focused on the idea of cutting waste and waste alone, but the fact that the CBO (and Obama himself) concede that the bill on the table is not adequately funded in the first 10 years or beyond, has some folks worried.
Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey gave credence to seniors' worries with this comment at a Colorado town hall Wednesday:
"There's going to be some people who are going to have to give up some things, honestly, for all of this to work," Markey said at a Congress on Your Corner event at CSU. "But we have to do this because we're Americans."
While reminiscent of Joe Biden's famously politically astute "higher taxes are patriotic" line, I'm not sure how well this is going to go over with Obamacare skeptics, particularly of the senior variety.
It will make them wonder how much of the idea of cutting Medicare benefits is really a "myth," as the president says:
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, another myth that we've been hearing about is this notion that somehow we're going to be cutting your Medicare benefits. We are not. AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare, okay? So I just want seniors to be clear about this, because if you look at the polling, it turns out seniors are the ones who are most worried about health care reform. And that's understandable, because they use a lot of care, they've got Medicare, and it's already hard for a lot of people even on Medicare because of the supplements and all the other costs out of pocket that they're still paying.
So I just want to assure we're not talking about cutting Medicare benefits. We are talking about making Medicare more efficient, eliminating the insurance subsidies, working with hospitals so that they are changing some of the reimbursement practices.
Can Obama really blame seniors for being suspicious about whether cutting waste in Medicare (which I'm in favor of) means cutting benefits? After all, Democrats have been dedicated to the demagoguery of just that equation whenever cutting costs has come up in the past.
It has put Obama in the strange position of saying, Well, all cuts to social programs were evil and harmful until I came along, but now they're to serve a greater good, so get on board, oldsters!
In another ironic Medicare twist, Obama's quest to cut Medicare waste may undercut another selling point of the left's beloved "public" government-run insurance option. Obama has argued repeatedly that Medicare's low administrative costs are proof of government's efficiency, but the level of the administrative costs is due to a combination of fuzzy government accounting and the very lack of oversight Obama claims to want to eliminate to save money. By employing more people to oversee Medicare to cut waste and fraud, Obama will eliminate the administrative savings he's been touting to sell yet another government health program.
Even the New York Times conceded as much in a 1997 story about the fraud and waste that has long plagued Medicare:
The Federal agency that oversees Medicare points to the program's tiny overhead as proof it is well administered. But recent reports suggest that Medicare's administrative costs are shockingly low, below 2 percent of costs, because Medicare is shockingly unsupervised. The amount of fraud and waste is huge, and supervision of the quality of medical care provided recipients is largely nonexistent.
Just keep squeezing that balloon. Welcome to government efficiency and truth in accounting. But if you give into your skeptic side, you're just succumbing to "myths" and "fear-mongering."
The good news is that this guy isn't yet in the Obama administration.
Op-Ed Contributor
Health Care’s Generation Gap
By
http://topics.nytimes.com/t...>
RICHARD DOOLING
Published: August 16, 2009
IN the 1980s, I worked as a respiratory therapist in intensive-care units in the Midwest, taking care of elderly, dying patients on ventilators. I remember marveling, along with the young doctors and nurses I worked with, over how many millions of dollars were spent performing insanely expensive procedures, scans and tests on patients who would never regain consciousness or leave the hospital.
When the insurance ran out, or Medicare stopped paying, patients and their families gave the hospital liens on their homes to pay for this care. Families spent their entire savings so Grandma could make yet another trip to the surgical suite on the slim-to-none chance that bypass surgery, a thoracotomy, an endoscopy or kidney dialysis might get her off the ventilator and out of the hospital in time for her 88th birthday.
That was back in the mid-’80s, when the nation was spending around 8 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. I and other health care workers solemnly agreed that the spending spree could not continue. Taxpayers and insurance companies would eventually revolt and refuse to pay for such end-of-life care. Somebody would surely expose the ruse for what it was: an enormous transfer of wealth based on the pretense that getting old and dying is a medical emergency requiring high-tech intensive-care intervention and armies of specialists, which could cost $10,000 or more per day. (Europeans have so far resisted this delusion, one reason they spend much less than we do on health care, with far better results.)
But we were wrong. Health care spending has since doubled, to around 16 percent of our gross domestic product, and in the next 25 years or so is projected to reach 31 percent of G.D.P. Despite having those figures in hand, Congress might still pass legislation calling for spending more, not less, on health care, even though we’ve been told for decades that what we spend has almost nothing to do with the quality of care we receive.
In fact, expensive care is often worse care, because it snowballs into what some are calling an “epidemic of overtreatment,” in which unnecessary procedures, tests and medications all spawn more tests, more meds (to treat the side effects of the first batch) and more follow-up scans and procedures (in stand-alone clinics owned by the same doctors prescribing the tests, scans and procedures).
With so much evidence of wasteful and even harmful treatment, shouldn’t we instantly cut some of the money spent on exorbitant intensive-care medicine for dying, elderly people and redirect it to pediatricians and obstetricians offering preventive care for children and mothers? Sadly, we are very far from this goal. A cynic would argue that this can’t happen because children can’t vote (even if their parents can), whereas members of AARP and the American Medical Association not only vote but can also hire lobbyists to keep the money flowing.
One thing’s for sure: Our health care system has failed. Generational spending wars loom on the horizon. Rationing of health care is imminent. But given the political inertia, we could soon find ourselves in a triage situation in which there is no time or money to create medical-review boards to ponder cost-containment issues or rationing schemes. We’ll be forced to implement quick-and-dirty rules based on something simple, sensible and easily verifiable. Like age. As in: No federal funds to be spent on intensive-care medicine for anyone over 85.
I am not, of course, talking about euthanasia. I’m just wondering why the nation continues incurring enormous debt to pay for bypass surgery and titanium-knee replacements for octogenarians and nonagenarians, when for just a small fraction of those costs we could provide children with preventive health care and nutrition. Eight million children have no health insurance, but their parents pay 3 percent of their salaries to Medicare to make sure that seniors get the very best money can buy in prescription drugs for everything from restless leg syndrome to erectile dysfunction, scooters and end-of-life intensive care.
Sir William Osler, widely revered as the father of modern medicine, said, “One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.” Perhaps the second duty should be to administer an ounce of prevention instead of a pound of cure.
What a surprise. A liberal puting a spending limit on senior's health care. A death panel by any other name...
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