Paul Krugman "death panels"

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Neither have most people. It's just the illusion of choice, not unlike the illusion that consumers have a say in what insurance companies will and will not pay for. Anyone who believes a consumer could even afford to sue an insurance company, let alone win, needs to come back to reality.

Two separate issues. The "death panel" bs got started on the consultation. Krugman, in addition to talking "death panels," was also discussing that we do need to investigate which treatments actually work and which ones don't. Why is that a bad thing? If there is some redundancy in treatment, why not focus on what works? That's a perfectly logical idea. Choice will still exist, as it always has, for a consumer to purchase additional and unnecessary treatments if they so wish. Insurance companies today routinely refuse necessary treatments to their consumers. Why is that preferable?

There are bacterial infections that have similar symptoms to viral infections, and antibiotics can deal with those.

@ number5

Stop trying to spin it back to the Dem talking points.

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/08/09/de ... th-panels/


Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He's asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of "normal political channels," should guide decisions regarding that "huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . ."

Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats' proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through "normal political channels," they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats' proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we've come to expect from this administration.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 86024.html

Kinda sad when an ex-governor from Alaska is more on top of things than most of the mainstream media.

Also kinda sad that Rush Limbaugh actually found an example of Death Panels here in the United States, specifically the state of Oregon.
"However, Barbara is a resident of Oregon and therefore, part of the state-run Oregon Health Plan. The state [b]refused Barbara Wagner's request for the drug since it doesn't cover drugs that are meant to prolong the life of individuals with advanced cancer. After all, when the Oregon Health Plan was established in 1994 it 'was expressly intended to ration health care'" to save money. "But Oregon also has legalized assisted suicide, and in an unsigned letter from the state, Barbara was informed that the health plan would pay to cover the costs of a doctor to help her kill herself," but not give her the drug to prolong her life. She was not ready to have herself killed. "However, it seemed she had reached a dead end until a pharmaceutical company that invented the drug learned about her case and stepped in to provide Barbara with the drug free of charge."

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/ ... guest.html

Looks to me like the villain wasn't the pharmaceutical company it was the State Government.

Rush Limbaugh continues to point out:

It seems to me if you go to her Facebook, she's done some homework on this health care bill. She's become an expert on Section 1233. Politico writes about she's "doubling down." She's not backing down. She is doubling down, and this has got the White House in a defensive tizzy. But I would suggest that anybody who doubts her intellectual heft or her ability to learn and study, go to her Facebook page and look at the notes that she's taken. It's right there, the study that she has done and engaged in, in order to learn about section 1233. Now, this story in Oregon involving Barbara Wagner, again it's in Mark Levin's book Liberty and Tyranny, illustrates that they are death panels. And it's a great way to phrase this end-of-life counseling and so forth. There's no question that these expenses, these end-of-life expenses are among the most costly, and they will be used to cut costs. But the thing that nobody's talking about is you don't have to be old for them to kick in.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/ ... guest.html

Further research into the topic:

The Liberty Counsel analysis also pointed out the government would be allowed to ration health care procedures, prevent "judicial review" of its decision, tell doctors what income they can have, impose new taxes for anyone not having an "acceptable" coverage, regulate whether seniors can have wheelchairs, penalize hospitals or doctors whose patients require "readmission," prevent the expansion of hospitals and set up procedures for home visits by health care analysts.

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=106812

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-shepp ... rt-seniors

While people can argue if what Palin has said is accurate, the end result is that Obamacare will lead to rationing which would lead to people being denied medical care, they decide who lives and who dies. In other words a death panel.

By the way, just cause someone like Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh can be opinionated, doesn't mean they aren't telling the truth.

"Rationing" in some form or other must of necessity exist in any conceivable system. If you don't understand that, please review basic economics.

The only "death panels" Krugman proposed are panels looking at medical procedures and deciding which types of procedures are useless (or not useful enough to justify an extreme expense) and deciding that the government will not pay for such procedures. An example of a decision from such a panel might be "We aren't going to pay for homeopathy or other quack remedies." They would not be looking at individual cases and saying "Your life is not worth saving, so we're going to let you die."

Under the current system we have "death panels" in the form of insurance company bureaucrats whose job it is to avoid paying out a single dime for anyone's health coverage, if they can manage it.

As I can easily point out some proceedures will work for one person and not work for another. Let's say all cancers have to be treated with surgery and that cancer needs radiation or chemotherapy but that was banned because it wasn't judged effective. Guess that person is SOL.



Explains why an 'evil' pharmaceutical came to a woman's aid when the State Run Healthcare in Oregon basically gave her a death sentence.

No one's banning chemotherapy.


Unsourced anecdotal evidence? If I wanted that kind of BS on the healthcare debate, I'd watch a Michael Moore film.

Poe also documented how such health care limits already are being used overseas, including the U.K., where "British elders are routinely denied treatment for cancer, heart disease and other deadly illnesses."

Further, "death" boards already are operating in Oregon, where officials with the state Health Plan agreed to refuse a patient life-extending cancer drugs but volunteered to pay for her to commit suicide.

He reported Barbara Wagner of Springfield, Ore., was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005. Chemotherapy and radiation put her cancer into remission. But the cancer returned in May 2008.

Wagner's doctor prescribed Tarceva, a pill which slows cancer growth. There was a good chance it might extend her life by a few weeks or even months.

At age 64, Wagner had two sons, three daughters, 15 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Every moment she could spend with her loved ones was precious, he noted.

But Oregon's health officials nixed the plan. Her Tarceva treatment would cost $4,000 per month. Wagner was going to die anyway, so why waste the money?

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=134401

Hmmm, looks like in a score between Orwell and Rush Limbaugh.

Rush 1: Orwell 0

The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.

"It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won't give you the medication to live."
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5517492&page=1

That is two sources confirming Rush Limbaugh.

ABC NEWs article goes on to say:
But a 1998 study from Georgetown University's Center for Clinical Bioethics found a strong link between cost-cutting pressures on physicians and their willingness to prescribe lethal drugs to patients -- were it legal to do so.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5517492&page=2

While ABC News does the usual song and dance about private insurance companies and I didn't see anything mentioning the important fact that Oregon's health care system is state run, I did find something else they did mention.

Meanwhile Wagner has faith in her medicine, not assisted death. Now, at the request of her doctor, the pharmaceutical company Genentech is giving her Tarceva free of charge for one year.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5517492&page=3

Looks like Rush Limbaugh's story checks out, and your assertations do not Orwell.

Read the fine print on your insurance policy. I am willing to wager that the fine print includes words to the effect of, "we reserve the right to withhold coverage..." in many locations. You can't successfully sue someone for doing something that you have given them the contractual right to do.

You can, I suppose, look for a company that does not reserve the right to deny coverage--but this is a company likely to be uncompetitive, and thus not around in the marketplace for long.



What utter rubbish. No publicly funded health insurance system in the world does that. If your government wants you to cut your sodium intake, government has the much more expedient method of banning the addition of sodium in food processing.



Okay, I'm putting my doctor hat on now.

Do not confuse the common cold with the flu--they are different diseases, the most signal distinction being fever. A runny nose, cough and sore throat, on its own, is no reason to rush to the ER. And if you do have symptoms of flu, then the emergency room is the last place you should be!! All you will succeed in doing in infecting a lot more people.

The best way to consult your doctor is on the phone! Describe your symptoms, and your doctor can give you better advice about what to do. If you don't have a doctor, then call the public health nurseline, or a walk in clinic.

Fixed your quote because the part you quoted, I didn't write.

They may have that in fine print, but they usually won't use it. First, they don't want to end up on the evening news, second if that person is an employee to a company that does business with the insurance company, the employer of the person they are denying treatment to may take their business elsewhere which would cost the insurance company far more than simply paying for the treatment.



That is telling you what you can eat you just admitted I was right while saying what I was saying was rubbish. Also we have to have salt in order to live, if you have 0 intake of salt you will end up dieing.

Over the past few years New York has gained a reputation for taking the health of its citizens seriously – or nannying them, depending on your point of view.

Now a member of the city's legislative assembly has gone a step further by introducing a bill that would ban the use of salt in restaurant kitchens.

Bill A10129 would forbid the city's chefs from using salt in any of their recipes. The ban's proposer, Felix Ortiz, a Democratic member from Brooklyn, says it would give consumers the choice about whether to add salt to their meal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ma ... s-salt-ban

Other sources include:
http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2010/03/ ... an-absurd/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -soar.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30352252/ns ... _nutrition
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink ... s-way.html


About the ER, if I have the sniffles (and for me it is usually a bacterial infection not a virus) I go to a doctor's office not the ER. However those doctors may quit practicing medicine due to Obamacare so I would now be force to go to the ER to actually get treatment.

Do you get your health insurance through an employer? Because, as I pointed out, that means it's the employer that does most of the choosing. That's problematic - it would be better to let the individual whose health is at stake makes the choice - but Obamacare goes in the wrong direction there by pushing things even further in the direction of employer choice.

Our family currently gets health insurance through a large employer who offers the choice of two plans, with different sets of supported doctors, coverages, deductibles, and maximums. That's a small amount of choice, but it is a real choice.

When we were paying for our own insurance directly, we had a choice of many different insurers and types of plans. For example, we could select an HMO, which tends to provide better coverages but requires you to go to their general practitioners so they can emphasize preventive measures, or a pay for service plan, which tends to have higher deductibles but allows you to go to whatever providers you want. Different insurance companies also offer different plans geared to different people, covering different providers, etc.

In most states, there's quite a bit of choice out there - it just tends to be hidden from the individual because of the whole "employer pays" thing. There would be even more choice if interstate competition were allowed as recommended by the Republicans.

The issue is that, as Inuyasha's example points out, treatments that work may still be dropped simply because they are too expensive.

If we ever get to Single Payer (may the day never come!) rest assured that medical services will be rationed by fiat.

ruveyn

So the mere possibility that an effective treatment may be dropped concerns you more than the millions of people who have been completely dropped?

Also, even if a treatment was to be dropped from coverage, the patient would still be able to pay for it on their own. Isn't that something you ultimately support - work hard and pay for your own?

Forgive the ad personam argument, but I have seen private insurers rely on the fine print many, many times.

Now, I don't deny that business is responsive to threats to its business. But bureaucrats are responsive to their political leaders and political leaders are responsive to public pressure. The argument about media pressure works on both sides of the equation.



For heaven's sake, think before your post. My point is that government can regulate you already. Why would they use the clunky justification of paying for public health insurance when they can just regulate directly? Your example simply proves my point.

Meanwhile, it is insurers have to take the more insidious route, combing through your entire medical history (which you have given them the contractual right to do), looking for any sign of "pre-existing" medical condition to deny you coverage.



Now your just making it up as you go along. Sure, some family physicians will leave practice. But most are leaving practice because private insurance won't pay for decent front-line care anymore, so they don't have enough revenue to keep their practices open.

The suggestion that was described as Death Panels by Sarah Palin was in fact a Republican suggestion.