Health Care Rationing

STIMULUS BILL MANDATES HEALTH CARE RATIONING

Feb. 10, 2009 - Betsy McCaughey, an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has exposed what may have been the best kept secret in Washington –– Obama’s ““stimulus”” bill allows a Federal bureaucrat to overrule the treatment decisions of the doctor who examined you.

The bill creates a new bureaucracy -- the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. Its purpose is to make sure your doctor is treating you the way the Federal government thinks is appropriate and cost effective. While your doctor is chiefly concerned with keeping you alive and healthy, the government is intent on saving money.

A similar proposal, she reports, was made by former Sen. Tom Daschle in his 2008 book, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.' In the book Daschle says doctors have to give up their autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Daschle also had advice for older persons. “Seniors,” he said, “should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.” Americans, he urged, should follow the example of Europeans and accept “hopeless diagnoses” instead of trying experimental treatments that could save their lives.

McCaughey notes that Medicare currently pays for treatments considered safe and effective. The stimulus bill changes that and applies instead a cost-effectiveness standard set by the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. It resembles a British government agency described in Daschle’s book.

It approves or rejects a treatment depending on the number of years it decides the patient is likely to benefit from it Treatments for older patients are approved less often because the agency believes they won’t live long enough to justify the cost.

This, of course, is a self-fulfilling projection since denying the treatment could result in early death. A succinct term for this policy is involuntary euthanasia or, even more succinctly, murder.

According to McCaughey, the bill doesn’t spell out what may happen to doctors who refuse to surrender their autonomy and persist in operating as “solo practitioners.” But it does make clear that hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. What “meaningful user” means is left to the Health and Human Services secretary who can impose more stringent measures of meaningful use over time.

The fact that Daschle was Obama's first choice for this post reveals the President's plans for our medical care and, ultimately, for our longevity..

Doctors who hope to avoid the “more stringent measures” will fall in line and limit the treatments they prescribe to those approved by the federal government even if it means the death of their patient. A succinct term for this policy is involuntary euthanasia or, even more succinctly, murder.