From the 1961 Operation Coffee Cup Campaign against Socialized Medicine
Rationing Healthcare Creates Jobs?
Townhall
Every day Americans learn about another outrageous, irrelevant spending provision in Democrats’ so-called stimulus bill.
There’s money for global warming. There’s money for sex education. There’s money for Amtrak. There’s money for unions. There’s money to buy new cars and office space for bureaucrats. They’re even doing golf course renovations. Who knows, maybe they’ll even fix-up my rain gutter.
But here’s the bottom line: this bill has everything except economic stimulus. It’s just one big, sordid payback for Democrat special interests.
Congress has now become the make-a-wish foundation for greedy politicians.
And unfortunately, it gets much worse. Not only is the bill loaded with pork that will burden, rather than spur, the economy, but it also contains a dangerous – and overlooked – provision to begin handing over Americans’ healthcare freedom to bureaucrats.
It’s called “Comparative Effectiveness Research.”
While it sounds innocuous, the worst big-government programs always do. In short, comparative effectiveness research is a tool for bureaucrats take your health care decisions away from you and your doctor. Washington Liberals plan to use this “research” to determine which medical treatments are, or are not, ‘cost-effective,’ as they determine.
Just read the words from the House Appropriations Committee’s own report on the stimulus regarding this provision:
“Those items, procedures, and interventions… that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.”
In reaction, 63 patient advocacy groups including the AIDS Institute, the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, and the American Association for Cancer Research, have written a letter to Congress, expressing their concerns. They explained that this provision could lead to “restrictions on patients’ access to treatments and physicians’ and other providers’ ability to deliver care that best meets the needs of the individual patient.”
A federal health care board proposed and envisioned by several leading Democrats will result in comparative effectiveness research being used to ration health care in America. Rather than patients and doctors making decisions about what treatments or drugs make sense for you and your loved ones, a federal health care board will control which health care options are available.
Using “comparative effectiveness,” countries which already have government-run healthcare deny patients life-saving medical treatment. It’s been used, for instance, by the UK’s National Center for Health and Clinical Excellence to repeatedly denying breakthrough drugs to citizens suffering with breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, and multiple sclerosis.
Consider the case of UK resident George Robinson, a lung cancer patient who died while waiting for the life-extending drug Tarceva. The National Center for Health and Clinical Excellence has recently deemed the drug to not be cost-effective. And now, 2,000 lung cancer patients may soon face Robinson’s fate.
Government-run healthcare, which rations care to hold down cost, is a menace to free people everywhere. There are many thousands who would be alive today but for the monstrous myth that nationalized medicine works. And Comparative Effectiveness Research – shamelessly concealed in the stimulus bill – marches America toward that dreaded future when our most private medical decisions are made by far-off elites in Washington, D.C.
That day is now closer than ever. Recall that Tom Daschle – a leading force for government-run healthcare – nearly became Director of Health and Human Services. We dodged a bullet with Daschle, but the fight against government control of healthcare has only begun.
And in that fight, we must remember that freedom is as precious as it is vulnerable. It takes constant vigilance to preserve. But when taken for only a short time it may take generations to return. For the sake of our children, and theirs after, we must defend this basic freedom. We must not let history record that it was lost the day we were standing watch.
And this……….
( House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) ) Cantor Confirms Beginnings of Socialized Medicine in Stimulus Bill
Human Events
The United States Senate yesterday afternoon passed the largest spending bill in history by a 61-37 straight Democrat party-line vote, assisted by only three so-called Republican senators: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. 216 out of 219 Congressional Republicans opposed this immense spending bill that will cost the American taxpayers nearly $1.3 trillion dollars as passed by the Senate.
The huge spending bill will next emerge as a Conference Report that must once again pass both chambers (in the Senate by a 60-vote margin). According to Reid, the vote on final passage could happen as early as Friday.
“I’m shocked that any senator would say ‘that’s the bill we passed, take it or leave it,’” Hoyer said. Yet Democrats are keenly aware that final passage depends on at least two of the three RINO votes from Specter, Collins and Snowe and, of course, the Democrats holding their line.
Socialized Medicine Hidden in Bill
I asked House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Tuesday if House Republicans would address in conference the revelation by Bloomberg News on Monday (Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan ) that the foundations and action items for the government takeover of healthcare were secreted deep in the rotting bowels of the 778-page Senate bill.
Cantor told me, “The comparative effectiveness issue has been around for quite awhile and it makes the case again that its insertion in to this bill demonstrates that the focus has not been on job sustaining and creation. This is not a job sustaining and creating provision. Some support the notion that we ought to go down the pike of allowing CMS [Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services] now determine what kind of treatment takes place for a particular kind of patient and determine his or her doctor. That’s the kind of discussion we can have in regular order — that’s a discussion that needs some airing — but it doesn’t belong in a stimulus bill.”
I asked Cantor if Republicans would effort pulling this in conference. “I’m hopeful, certainly it’s on our list of objections,” Cantor said. “If we’re talking stimulus, why are we doing this? It’s not a decision of doing something or doing nothing, it’s about being smart and getting it right. That has no business in a stimulus bill.”
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Wild Thing’s comment…….
So let me try to understand this BS, you will not be permitted to even purchase your own medical treatment if the “committee” rules you can’t.
You will be condemned to death. All doctors must comply with the committee decision. The Trojan horse is “Medical records network” . A Doctor MUST join and then comply with treatment standard that are the same as illegal aliens on welfare even if you own your own. Noone can have better treatment..
Senators of the 111th Congress
….Thank you Mark for sending this to me.
Mark
3rd Mar.Div. 1st Battalion 9th Marine Regiment
1/9 Marines aka The Walking Dead
VN 66-67
This is all part of the Democrats plan. Consider who is the majority in this country right now…..The Baby-Boomers who have reached the senior citizen status. We grew up being taught values and responsibilities but unfortunately we tried to make our children’s lives better by giving in to them and letting them have their way. During the late 60’s and through the 70’s, moral values went into the toilet. Smoking pot was the “in” thing and everyone danced to kum-bay-yah….Flower children flourished!!!!
We seniors are a major concern for this administration because we are the last obstacle in their path to Socialism and Communism. Anyone over the age of 50 is a threat to them. What better way to reduce or eliminate that threat than to kill them. And that is what this Comparative Effectiveness Research bill will do….snuff out the voice and cry of FREEDOM!!
Republicans and the Republican Party has been a contributor to this situation. I’m not talking about the true Conservative Republican…I’m talking about the wannabe and RINO Republicans. They sat back fat, dumb and happy when we had the majority in Congress with a sitting Republican President and thought we had the world by the ass. Meanwhile, the Democrats did their homework and found and capitalized on our weaknesses. They played to the young and found major financial contributors. They sang the right song to a populous that hated G.W. Bush and they played this hatred against McCain by comparing him to Bush at every chance they got.
In addition, greed and the “Me-Me-Me” mentality of our politicians and corporate leaders played right into their hand.
We now have a serious battle to wage and it will be the strong true conservatives in this country that will take it back and preserve our freedoms!!! But we need to be better prepared than the Dems were and we need to do it now. We only have two short years to start making ready for this battle.
In the movie “We Were Soldiers”, Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.), studied his enemy long and hard which made a significant difference in the outcome of the battle at Ia Drang. Had Moore not studied his enemy and learned his weaknesses, the outcome would have been considerably different.
We must do the same. We must know our enemy inside and out and capitalize on his every mistake. I hope that the Republican Party now under new leadership with Steele will be a strong supporter and ally. However, I haven’t heard much from them over this stimulus bill fiasco. We need to identify those strong conservatives who share our core values of Capitalism and Freedom and get them prepared for 2010 and beyond. Rush was right…..the Dems will crap in their bed and the Republicans will regain power but we have to be ready to take the fight to them and stop waiting for someone else to do it for us!!!!
I will be a senior citizen in about 15 years. The health facts speak for themselves–the elderly get more disease, more broken bones, more cancers, heart attacks and strokes because our bodies have aged to the point it’s starting to shut down, no matter how healthy we are. My daughter has a favorite movie, Soylent Green and it’s a shocking little movie–kill the old folks and eat them. I suppose this is what Obama wants now? At the age of 65, you turn yourself in and become food for the masses?
What a jerk!
Dr. Michael Savage (www.michaelsavage.com) said last night that ILLEGALS have CO$T us over ONE BILLION dollars in reference to medical services, education and incarceration expenses. Wake the F up people! We only have three CONSERVATIVE patriots left in the US Senate: Demint (SC) Sessions (AL) and Cornyn (TX)….
Lots of good physicians are going to quit, or retire. Fewer qualified students will go to medical school. We will have to import doctors with degrees from places like Islamabad U. and Medical School of Haiti. Foreigners will be the only ones willing to work under socialized medicine.
The cost of medicine will go up even more and the quality will plummet. The patient/doctor relationship will belong to the government.
After a lifetime of paying into FDR’s system of three slush funds, State and Federal income taxes and two layers of Socialist Security Taxes, those funds, that if invested privately could have been used to live on in old age, involuntarily taken then and now instead, at the time when the generation that paid in the most will need it, they are being robbed of their life force. Make no mistake every spent moment is using up your life force, that half of your work life spent toiling to support others life force with yours is being stolen. You are now. Expendable!!! Like this generation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDWES5vHzXo
In two years, the abolished death tax comes roaring back at its old levels. The Government will get 65% of what you have built in your lifetime when you die. The control of the Medical Industry will allow them to control Government revenues like a car accelerator from the death tax.
When Democrats are in office, they cut medical costs, people die and the Government’s revenues increase. If the Republicans only double the Medical spending as bush did on so much medical research programs, then they are being heartless curmudgeons. They are forced to increase Government medical costs until revenues drop and the budget is out of balance again.
By the way if you take out the immmigants’ vote the seventy and eighty kids vote very conservative.
This only coincides with B. Hussein’s views on infanticide.
Bob A.
As a medical professional it will sicken me to provide or not provide health care to americans under these conditions, i imagine myself standing next to a bed saying, sorry the gov. won’t let me replace your hip because you are passed the stated age that they think you no longer need a working hip. Treating the patient like a lame horse.
Doctors leaving their profession has become quite a problem. Where we lived in Ohio, our area became inunated with Ob-gyn lawsuits. Suddenly there was a shortage of doctors in that specialty. Malpractive insurance for a doctor is upwards of $100,000 dollars, per year, specialist are in the neighborhood of twice that.
Now with obama’s plan, some narcoleptic nitwit bureaucrat in Washington can tell a doctor how to treat his patient or not. What happened to the ‘oath’ and the basic medical tenant, “Do no harm”.
Here’s one for the ones crying for a smoking ban as well.
http://demotivationalminds.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/poster99370652.jpg