Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-C.S.Lewis
To great derision, Sarah Palin was critical of Obamacare in August of 2009 in Facebook.
President Obama can try to gloss over the effects of government authorized end-of-life consultations, but the views of one of his top health care advisors are clear enough. It’s all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing, and more evidence that the top-down plans of government bureaucrats will never result in real health care reform.
The choice of who would be allowed to receive care and when was interesting:
Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly, and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system these “unproductive” members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care.
The furor over “death panels” caused it to be dropped from the Obamacare legislation, but Barack Obama is not one to allow America to get in the way of his desires. Obama is re-instituting the death panels through regulation- through executive fiat. This is a harbinger of other things to come. We will see the language of bipartisanship spoken while we live under the soft tyranny of Barack Obama.
WASHINGTON — When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.
Now doctors will be incentivized to advise patients to end their lives.
Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.
But whereas the previous proposal stated that this end of life planning would occur every five years the new regulations make end of life incentivization yearly.
The final version of the health care legislation, signed into law by President Obama in March, authorized Medicare coverage of yearly physical examinations, or wellness visits. The new rule says Medicare will cover “voluntary advance care planning,” to discuss end-of-life treatment, as part of the annual visit.
If there was any doubt about these being death panels we’ll let Don Surber emphasize the importance of Dr. Donald Berwick, referred to by some as a one man death panel.
From the London Daily Telegraph: “Hundreds of thousands of NHS patients are being denied routine procedures as dozens of trusts cut back on surgery, scans and other treatments in order to save money, a Daily Telegraph investigation has found… The situation is predicted to get worse as the NHS struggles to save £20bn over the next four years.”
From Dr. Donald Berwick, the Obama administration’s head of the Medicare/Medicaid programs: “The only thing that exceeds my admiration for the NHS is my hope for the NHS. I hope that you will never, never give up on what you have begun. I hope that you realize and reaffirm how badly you need, how badly the world needs, an example at scale of a health system that is universal, accessible, excellent, and free at the point of care – a health system that is, at its core, like the world that we wish we had: generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just. Happy birthday!”
It’s important to put into perspective how insidious this effort has been:
The e-mail continued: “Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response. The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”
So much for transparency.
Now here’s where this really starts to get rotten.
“Using unwanted procedures in terminal illness is a form of assault,” Dr. Berwick has said. “In economic terms, it is waste. Several techniques, including advance directives and involvement of patients and families in decision-making, have been shown to reduce inappropriate care at the end of life, leading to both lower cost and more humane care.”
Keep this in mind.
And then keep this in mind:
“…what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that is not making anybody’s Mom better….that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not gonna necessarily improve care…maybe you’re better off taking the painkiller.”
Which brings me to Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro.
When he signed Obamacare, Barack Obama claimed that it was for his Mother.
“I am signing this reform bill into law on behalf of my mother, who argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days,” Mr Obama said.
Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro was living in Indonesia in 1994 when she exhibited stomach pain which was dismissed as indigestion by a local doctor. That pain was later shown to be advanced ovarian cancer.
Obama spoke of her illness in 2007:
I remember my mother. She was 52 years old when she died of ovarian cancer, and you know what she was thinking about in the last months of her life? She wasn’t thinking about getting well. She wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs. And she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a preexisting condition. I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms. So, I have seen what it’s like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system. And it’s wrong. It’s not who we are as a people.
The question I have is- why didn’t she procure health insurance prior to her illness? Dunham has been described in glowing terms as being quite accomplished:
Dunham then had a career in rural development championing women’s work and microcredit for the world’s poor, with Indonesia’s oldest bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women’s World Banking, and as a consultant in Lahore, Pakistan. While at the Ford Foundation she developed a model of microfinance which is now the standard in Indonesia, a country that is a world leader in micro-credit systems.[41] Peter Geithner, father of Tim Geithner (who later became United States Secretary of the Treasury in her son’s administration), was head of the foundation’s Asia grant-making at that time.[42]Dunham also worked with leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women’s rights, and grass-roots development.[32]
So why did she not have health insurance? She apparently care a great deal for Indonesia but sought health care here in the US and then apparently wanted health coverage AFTER she became ill.
Barack Obama holds the health insurance industry at fault instead of recognizing his mother’s irresponsibility. The needs and demands of the irresponsible need to be subsidized by the responsible.
And that is why I despise Barack Obama and liberals in general.
But what I would like to know from Obama is this:
If your mother became ill under Obamacare would you, knowing that further efforts at terminal ovarian cancer are futile (or a waste, as Obama put it), tell your Mom to simply take the painkiller?
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
This is sincerely a personal if not family activity. Is preparing a health directive a bad thing? Is having the right to make your own decisions concerning those treatments you chose at the end of life a bad thing? Should we not all take it up on ourselves to assist our family when it comes to making the hard decisions? All these questions are a matter of person choice.
So what the heck is all the BS about . . . Oh, I get it . . . they are going to take these choices away from me . . . I get it.
BS, BS, BS . . . WTF . . . I think I will just get it over with and drink the coolaid by myself!!!
Can I please have the “off switch” . . . but sir you have already “off-ed” yourself 42 times . . . we just keep bringing you back . . . thinking that eventually you would realize that WE LOVE YOU!!!!
I believe the answer to your last question would have been yes. We can all agree that Obama’s lack of passion and his narcissism would have made it impossible to be anything else. At that point, she and her medical needs would have been an irritation in his ordered and self-centered life. I don’t believe he was even with her when she died. And to be quite honest about it, she raised him to be just the man he has become.
Which is why he is readily able to do the same to our mothers and fathers.
Narcissism is the root of liberalism and that C.S. Lewis quote nails it. They do it for themselves, not for you.
There was a section in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life movie where a man was murdered so his liver could be harvested for someone else.
While they were there, the medics also got permission to kill the wife anytime they needed some organs from her…..which turned out to be that day also!
Obama’s financial incentive to MD’s to get folks to agree to a supposedly distant hypothetical is almost exactly the same thing.
Is there such a thing as a ”terminal disease?’
Not to you if you get diagnosed with cancer.
Your doctor will give you your odds.
And you will read about those who beat those odds.
Some people do.
Not if you get diagnosed with heart disease.
Again, people beat the odds by decades even after a ”bad” heart attack.
Some people do.
In fact I can’t think of any disease where some people don’t beat the odds, if they give it their all and their doctor does his part.
But I guess that’s the rub.
On the taxpayers’ dime should a doctor do his all?
Die now, it is for the children….
So we consider the doctor as a human . . . after all isn’t a doctor a human being too? Does this mean that a doctor is the final judge of whether we live or die? No not necessarily, but what it does mean is that the doctor can be just a human or he can be a “god”. I have personally had one doctor prescribe medication that did indeed help me with my health situation, made my life a better quality, allowed me to sleep at night, allowed me to experience less pain . . . he helped me. Then I had to change doctors. The new doctor told me to my face . . . “I do not believe the drug helps . . . I don’t prescibe this medication for the use that you are making of it”. Thus the new doctor left me in pain, not able to sleep, and reduced the quality of my life.
This is actual . . . this is NOT BS . . . now why would one doctor help me and another be unwilling to do so?
I would happily pay the cost of the drug out of my own pocket . . . why would one and not the other?
I think it is not the doctor’s fault if they are unaware of the how different people react positively or negatively to a medication. I think to a great degree most of the doctors in the world are at the bottom of the triangle of knowlege . . . a triangle with two points on a horizontal line with the third point (doctor) at the bottom . . . sort of like being at the bottom of a funnel.
In this country the “furthering of education” of doctors, especially in pharmacology, is a function of the doctor’s own desire to learn and the source of our medications, all the big drug companys.
Thus today, the drug companies being money motivated, educate or provide educational opportunities so that their profits are maximized. So a doctor that decides to prescribe a med is part of the machinery of profit. In capitalism that is LIFE!!!
Here is a link to a website that illustrates what I am talking about:
http://www.lowdosenaltrexone.org/
Please note that this website is even less commercially oriented than is FA!!!! There are medical doctors (MD’s) that are in direct support of this med. Several major universities also support this site. If you want to be treated by a doctor that is referenced by this page it IS possible and probably easier than YOU think. Yet . . . it is on YOUR nickle!!! Get it? If you want to be treated with drugs that are “out of patient” YOU must look hard to find a doctor that will prescribe them for you. Wow, is it true? You need look no further than YOUR own medical challenges!!!
Rob in Katy;
There is a time coming when for a citizen to be in debt to the government will be a death sentence . . . a capital punishment crime.
Thus since we are all indebted to pay xxx of thousands dollars because our government has put us in debt . . . can’t they just execute us anytime they want?
Ah, so that is the real purpose of the Executive Branch of Governmnet is to execute we the people!!!
You can’t believe anything that comes from Obama’s lying mouth, especially about his own mother.
Now, you can do a time-line and you will come away with the impression of Obama watching his dying mother pour over insurance form after insurance form, is nothing but a fairy tale.
Ann Dunham returned state-side in early 1995 and died the same year from ovarian cancer. But Obama was in Chicago, teaching at the university, and no where in his book does he mention returning to Hawaii to be with his ailing mother. He DOES talk about getting there “too late” as he did not get to Hawaii before she died. As a matter of fact, nowhere does Obama talk about returning to Hawaii after he left to attend Occidental University. Again, when his grandmother was dying, he was “too late” chosing to stay on the campaign trail instead of being by her side.
It was not until 2007, when he was in full-blown campaign mode, that Obama spun the tall of his ailing mother laboring over insurance forms, insurance that she obviously had obtained AFTER she was diagnosed with cancer.
The government will never be a good arbitor of your medical care. Medicare, of all insurers, has the highest rate of claim denials, over 6% compared to UHC’s 2+%. So what happens when the bureaucrats decide that since a person is dying anyway, just deny them the “painkillers”? Maybe they will select to call Dr. Kovorkian, or in this case, Dr. Eziekel Emanuel, who subscribes to physician assisted suicide. If the pain is great enough, you will agree to be strapped into Old Sparky just to end the pain.
But the point is clear: what Obama can’t achieve legislatively, he will achieve through agency fiat.
While you are kissing your nation good-by, kiss your ass good-by as well, since your worth is now going to be determined by the “communal” good.
Funny, I thought it was the GOP that wanted us to die. At least that’s what Alan Grayson told everyone…
Does this mean that Rep. Grayson was lying??!!
*gasp!*
Why in the world can people not see the disastrous implications of Obamacare? My 85 year old father just had a stroke and I am scared to death of what services they are going to deny him.
whoa, I have cancer from agent orange and am 73, what hope should I have?
@Pat
I don’t believe he would. Why didn’t he just say “Mom, stop fighting with the insurance company and just take the pain pills. You’re stage 4. It’s too late.”?
One leads by example.
Instead, he wanted insurance companies to bear the burden of more welfare, which is exactly what the elimination of pre-conditions is.
Your “T-Y-R-A-N-T” picture reminded me that Obama always has his nose in the air as if he is above the rest of us. The only pictures you see with his head bowed is when he is in front of dictators, then it goes WAY down.