Obama Administration Bypassing Congress to Institute Death Panel ‘Discussions’
http://biggovernment.com/sm...h-panel-discussions/

quote On Monday, I wrote here of how President Barack Obama would pretend to work in bipartisan cooperation with the new Congress in deference to the shellacking he received in the November election – while behind the scenes dictatorially ramming through as many rules and regulations, directives and orders as he possibly can – and with which he can get away: (Obama) will do his best to put on a public show, but his Big-Government-At-All-Costs agenda will continue unabated. It will just be done behind the scenes via rampant, abusive expansion of the vast regulatory authority at his disposal. Every Commission, every Agency, every Board in the federal pantheon will ratchet up their orders, rules and directives. To impose via executive branch regulatory fiat what President Obama can no longer get done in Congress. In other words, bypass the obviously expressed will of the American people for smaller, more accountable government – so as to continue jamming through his on-all-fronts Titanic Government plan. And do so without the People’s representatives at all involved in the process. … The federal Cap & Tax on – I mean Trade – energy bill didn’t pass? No problem, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will enforce large swaths of it just as if it did. The union vote secret-ballot-abolishing Card Check didn’t pass? No sweat, the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will just pretend it did and move forward implementing it. As if on cue, we have Monday night’s announcement by the Administration’s Dr. Donald M. Berwick – administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In fact, the Christian Science Monitor article cited is entitled: ‘Death panels’ controversy: Is Obama avoiding Congress? Berwick’s only in his post as a result of – President Obama avoiding Congress. Berwick was never confirmed – President Obama chose to bypass the Senate and instead recess appoint him. And there’s a reason President Obama did that – Berwick is a ghoulish dude who advocates health care rationing and is “romantic” about the death panel-enforcing British National Health Service. Heaven forefend he would have to answer some advise-and-consent questions from the People’s representatives – better to just jam him through too. And now the jammed-through Berwick is jamming through his dreamed-of doctor death discussions – which are almost inarguably the first step towards death panels of our very own: In a move that could resuscitate the partisan battle over what Sarah Palin dubbed “death panels,” the Obama administration is set to implement a controversial federal health-care provision by executive authority. The new rule would pay doctors to consult with Medicare patients who want voluntary counseling about health-care options in the case of terminal illness. This policy was once proposed as a part of the overwhelmingly unpopular ObamaCare bill – but was stripped out as it was even more disliked than the bill itself. In other words, the American people didn’t want it – but the Obama Administration’s now going to jam it through anyway. An authoritarian action we will see repeated OFTEN during the next two years. Berwick’s move follows on the heels of the three Democrat Commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – knowingly without the Congressional authority to do so – voting themselves Internet Overlords on December 21st. Less than two months after the November election, the Obama Administration has already begun repeatedly bypassing the American people – who voted overwhelmingly against this President and his Big Government agenda. They are usurping Congress’s law-writing power – by writing law themselves. We need Congress to do their job – and engage in the serious Oversight required to check this endless onslaught of unconstitutional Obama power grabs. That means repeatedly effecting the Congressional Review Act, and holding hearings aplenty to get answers to questions President Obama and his Administration officials don’t want asked. Only proper Congressional oversight can restore Constitutional order. Ladies of Gentlemen of the People’s Congress – let’s get busy. The Administration already has.

quote Originally posted by ray b: CORPrats gold rules that is why no public option

There should BE no public option. It is not a level playing field.

Private options have to be fiscally responsible.

A "public" option doesn't. They can set rates to undercut the private options. That will make them run at a loss. So they go to the TAXPAYERS and TAX them to pay for the loss.

So you have private insurances going against taxpayer subsidized (i.e. redistribution of income), reduced rates and thinking they are going to be able to attract customers. Well, they can't. So ultimately the private "options" go away, and it becomes government run AND FINANCIALLY TAXPAYER SUBSIDIZED healthcare.


It is just a sneaky way to get to public controlled, taxpayer funded health care.
Regarding the advanced directive, it is a JOKE that the administration is funding advanced care planning because it "...improves end-of-life care and patient and family satisfaction and reduces stress, anxiety and depression in surviving relatives." It MIGHT actually DO all those things.

THAT ISN'T WHY THE ADMINISTRATION WANTS IT DONE.


About 80% of the total health care dollars of a person's life are spent in the last 2 years of their life. End of life care is extremely intensive and extremely expensive.

Right now, the default mode is that if a person doesn't have an advanced directive, then the doctors and hospitals MUST do EVERYTHING.

Well, EVERYTHING is much more expensive and much more effective now. At keeping people alive. But not necessarily at returning them to functionality.


So the administration KNOWS that there is a HUGE cost savings for anyone they can get to do an advanced directive LIMITING care. And it is NOT a bad thing for MUCH of that care to be limited. I can't tell you how many patients I have had that have reached a point where they have zero chance of recovery, but I have to keep things going for weeks (expensive weeks) until the inevitable death finally happens anyway.


STILL. Make no mistake about this. ALL of this is about ways to LIMIT CARE PROVIDED. ALL OF IT. But it will be under the guise of "oh, it's BETTER for people."

Here is another one. The PANEL of "experts" is going to review ALL treatments done on people of ALL ages. Then they are going to decide which ones are EFFECTIVE, and then they aren't going to pay for treatments they decide isn't effective.

That's GREAT. EFFICIENCY! Eliminate wasteful, unnecessary treatments. SOUNDS GOOD!


Oh, brother. You trust "experts" hired by THE GOVERNMENT to determine efficacy??? The doctors they talk to are a bunch of academic nerds who wouldn't know what to do with a REAL patient if they saw one. BUREAUCRAT doctors go into academic and university settings. Not REAL ones with REAL judgement ability.


But a BUNCH of you people on the forum have already PROVEN that you are TWITTERPATED by academic degrees and institution names. And you actually give CREDENCE to what they say! Oh my goodness.


Well, you'll get what you allow. I'll be able to take care of myself. I don't know what the rest of you are going to do.


Oh, and rayb, people above 65 go on medicare. Most of those people aren't ON private insurance. And MOST people below age 65 in the U.S. don't die. So the number of people denied life-saving treatment by insurance companies would be tiny even IF it was happening. TINY.

About Those Death Panels . . .
The very real threat of government health care rationing.
http://www.weeklystandard.c...s_536874.html?page=1

quote When Sarah Palin warned that Obamacare could lead to medical rationing and “death panels,” supporters were outraged. Alarmism! they roared. A lie! Right-wing propaganda! Alas for supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Palin’s provocative sound bite was at least partly grounded in reality—which is why the term entered the political lexicon. Now, however, some are seeking to wield the term against conservatives. Case in point: The Arizona legislature recently cut its Medicaid budget because the state is in dire financial straits—a move approved by the Obama administration. When the cuts led to canceling Medicaid coverage for organ transplant surgeries, and a potential organ recipient died, death panel claims suddenly became all the fashion. For example, CBS’s HealthWatch opined: There is a certain irony here. During last year’s federal battle over President Obama’s health care legislation, some Republicans claimed his program promoted “death panels” which they seemed to suggest would involve government bureaucrats deciding who lives and who dies. The health care bill did include language which paid doctors to offer end-of-life counseling. That was eventually removed. Facing a tough budget situation, however, Arizona has instituted what critics say is much closer to these so-called “death panels” than anything that ever appeared in the federal government’s health care legislation. Republicans kept ranting about how “Obamacare” would put the federal government between you and your doctor and try to save money by prohibiting said doctor from using the best treatments and procedures. All this came to mind when I was talking to Flor Felix, whose husband, Francisco, a 32-year-old truck driver with four kids, was denied a liver transplant because the Arizona Legislature had yanked funds for it out of a state Medicaid program. But these and other similar columns and editorials miss the point: The Arizona Medicaid story was not grounded in conservative heartlessness or hypocrisy. It resulted from a single-payer health care system crashing into a budgetary brick wall. The real lesson here is that “single payer” and “death panels” go together like “See’s” and “candy.” Oregon, a decidedly liberal state, provides an unequivocal example. In 1993, the Clinton administration gave permission to the Oregon Health Plan, the state’s Medicaid program, to introduce rationing. The system involves a treatment schedule that lists 649 potentially covered procedures. The state pegs the number of procedures the state will cover to the available funds. Patients requiring procedures above the cutoff line are out of luck. As of October 2010, only the first 502 treatments were covered. But even that low number doesn’t tell the full story of rationing in Oregon. The Oregon Health Plan also rations covered procedures under certain circumstances. Chemotherapy, for instance, is not provided if it is deemed to have a 5 percent or less chance of extending the patient’s life for five years, meaning that a patient whose life might be extended a year or two with chemo may not receive it. Worse, even though it is not a formally ranked procedure, assisted suicide is covered under state law. Thus, when two recurrent cancer patients were rationed out of receiving potentially life-extending chemotherapy in 2008, an administrator wrote a letter assuring them that the state would pay for the costs associated with their assisted suicides. Talk about a death panel! As state Medicaid budgets become increasingly strained, some within the medical establishment are promoting formal rationing systems. Thus, the Wisconsin Medical Society recently argued that the state’s Medical Assistance program should be “allocated” and “prioritized” by creating a “ranked order” of coverage. “The goal is health,” the association stated, “rather than health services or health insurance,” a potentially alarming prospect for those with serious—and expensive to treat—illnesses and disabilities. Looking abroad, one should note that rationing is routine in single-payer health systems. Canada’s Medicare allocates services primarily by time, forcing patients to wait weeks, or even months, to receive urgent diagnostic screenings and surgeries. A recent study by the free-market Fraser Institute found that the median wait for surgeries in Canada has grown to 18.2 weeks—141 percent longer than in 1993. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) best illustrates the connection between stringent health care rationing and single-payer funding. Until very recently, the National Institute for Clinical and Health Excellence (NICE) determined what procedures—and which patients—would be covered by the NHS. (The new government in Britain is replacing NICE rationing with decisions made by general practitioners, creating the potential for conflicts of interest between physicians and their patients.) In its heyday, NICE followed a complicated quality-of-life/cost-benefit formula to ration care, using a unit of measurement called the “quality adjusted life year,” or QALY. Briefly, the process of determining whether a given treatment would be covered involved determining how much time a procedure might give a patient, then subtracting for low quality of life. The resulting QALY estimate was then analyzed to determine whether the predicted benefit was worth the projected cost. Some Obama-care supporters—including the New England Journal of Medicine—want the United States to adopt a QALY system, raising the prospect of bringing the worst aspects of single-payer rationing to federally controlled private health insurance markets. Our current private system certainly has serious problems that need addressing. But no private insurance company would dare unilaterally deny a previously qualified patient life-saving surgery, as Arizona did. Only government can get away with something like that. Indeed, if insurance companies fail to pay for covered care, they risk juries’ awarding tens of millions in punitive damages against them in “bad faith” lawsuits—and there are plenty of trial lawyers eager to bring such cases. At the same time, government regulators of private systems are much more likely to side with patients than insurance companies, a benefit of the doubt likely to be reversed in single-payer or federally bureaucratized plans. Potential loss of market share serves to keep private carriers on the up and up—particularly in markets with robust competition, which is why expanding health insurance markets is an urgent agenda item for those seeking to replace Obamacare. As the nation continues to debate health care reform, we should keep in mind that many Obamacare supporters see the Affordable Care Act as merely a first step on the road to a national single-payer plan. Those who oppose such a centralized system should stress that avoiding death-panel medicine in a time of strained budgets requires that we eschew both single-payer financing and federalized bureaucratic control. They should also promote cost-containment innovations, such as price competition at the source of services, and reforms that enable hard-to-insure people and workers with low wages to gain broader access to coverage or inexpensive care.