Health Care Rationing Has Begun
Posted by Bill Dupray
on May 19 2009 Filed under Politics.
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Neat trick, huh? They haven’t even passed Nationalized Health Care yet and we already have rationing. Under Medicare, which is Nationalized Health Care for the elderly, the government decided yesterday that virtual colonoscopies, a non-invasive diagnostic tool, costs too much and the government will no longer pay for them.
From WSJ.
[The] future is playing out in miniature in Medicare right now. Desperate to prevent medical costs from engulfing the federal budget, the program’s central planners decided last week to deny payment for a new version of one of life’s most unpleasant routine procedures, the colonoscopy. This is a preview of how health care will be rationed when Democrats get their way.
At issue are “virtual colonoscopies,” or CT scans of the abdomen. Colon cancer is the second leading cause of U.S. cancer death but one of the most preventable. Found early, the cure rate is 93%, but only 8% at later stages. Virtual colonoscopies are likely to boost screenings because they are quicker, more comfortable and significantly cheaper than the standard “optical” procedure, which involves anesthesia and threading an endoscope through the lower intestine. . . .
The problem for Medicare is that if cancerous lesions are found using a scan, then patients must follow up with a traditional colonoscopy anyway. Costs would be lower if everyone simply took the invasive route, where doctors can remove polyps on the spot. As Medicare noted in its ruling, “If there is a relatively high referral rate [for traditional colonoscopy], the utility of an intermediate test such as CT colonography is limited.” In other words, duplication would be too pricey.
So an effective, available, and more comfortable treatment (in a bygone era, such things were celebrated as breakthrough technological advancements to improve people’s lives), costs too much. So the government has decided that the elderly are not allowed to have them.
Democrats know that European countries, which have had Socialized medicine for decades, routinely ration care. But they are trying to pretend that it won’t happen here. Even President Obama was asked in an interview about how his own grandmother would have fared under her grandson’s plan. His answer? She would have been fine because he would have paid out of his own pocket. As for everybody else’s grandmother, sorry, they are screwed..
In the weeks before he was elected president, Barack Obama confronted a life crisis all too common in families across America. His grandmother, who already had a diagnosis of terminal cancer, fell and broke her hip, possibly because of a mild stroke. The question became whether to replace her hip even though she was dying. . . .
If society is to rein in health costs, at what point are expensive operations like Ms. Dunham’s hip replacement surgery no longer affordable?
“I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost,” Mr. Obama said in the interview with David Leonhardt of The Times. “I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement, just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model is a very difficult question.”
So no colonoscopy now, and no hip replacements later. Of course the elderly are, well . . . old, and the liberals, those champions of the weak and downtrodden, are perfectly content to let them die early, painful deaths . . . for the good of the State.
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