Obama: Terminal Patients May Be Denied Some Treatment Under Health Plan

Posted by Bill Dupray on Apr 30 2009 Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

But it won’t be a problem for rich guys like Obama. He would just pay for his loved one’s care out of his pocket. As for the little guy, well, that’s just tough luck.

From the New York Times.

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. . . .

Mr. Obama discussed the episode in an interview with The New York Times Magazine, posted online Wednesday and scheduled for print publication on Sunday, to point out one of the thorniest issues involved in overhauling health care: Much of the spending on medical care in the United States goes to people in their final months of life. 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.”

But I thought we were promised health care for everyone?

So is it a sustainable model or isn’t it? It is his plan. Shouldn’t he be able answer that question?
Of course, the New York Times lets the president punt the question. No follow-up on the big question of rationing, which is, after all, what they were talking about.

When Obamacare goes into effect, and Obama-supporter Joe Sixpack finds out that Granny Sixpack got tied up in The Department of Obamacare red tape for 6 months, only to be denied that hip replacement, maybe then he will realize that nothing is free and long for the days when Americans had the freedom to choose their health care.

And if you think the elderly won’t be denied treatment, think again. The Stimulus, which is now existing law, mandates it.

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what [Former Senator Tom] Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” . . .

The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Elderly Hardest Hit

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

This may be a giant Nanny-state health care plan, but any nanny that proposed that grandma should just suck it up and live with that bad kidney would be fired on the spot. Unfortunately, the idiots who elected Socialists to run our lives have relegated the rest of us to golden years full of pain and misery.

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