What’s wrong with the 1,018 page Health Care Reform bill being rushed through congress? Almost no one has read it! No one has had time to discuss it! The President and his staff want to keep it that way because it will scare the living daylights out of you. Dr. Betsy McCaughey, a health policy expert and former Lt. Governor of New York State (In 2004), explains some scary details of the Health Care Reform bills. To Listen click here.
Here’s the truth. The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts will be, the president’s budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn’t be accountable to the public. This is a power grab to hide the truth that the $500 billion-plus cost savings will come from rationing care to medicare recipients. That means denying medical care to your 72+ year old mom and dad simply because the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research has determined that dementia is not a cost-effective use of funds.
According to Dr. McCaughey , “the health bills coming out of Congress would put the decisions about your care in the hands of presidential appointees. They’d decide what plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have and what seniors get under Medicare.”
“Yet at least two of President Obama’s top health advisers should never be trusted with that power,” she says.
“Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.
Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).
Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).
Yes, that’s what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.
Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.
Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96).
Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.
He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “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” (Lancet, Jan. 31).
Americans need to know what the president’s health advisers have in mind for them. Emanuel sees even basic amenities as luxuries and says Americans expect too much. No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views.”
Dr. McCaughey has read the entire 1,018 pages of the House Health Care Reform bill. To read her overview of concerns quoted above or to find a pdf of the entire House and Senate versions of the bills, click here.
To hear Dr. McCaughey explain the scary details of President Obama’s Health Insurance Reform Plan to Senator Fred Thompson on his radio show, click here.