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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Former Obama Adviser Advocates Death Panels in NYT



Death panels?! What death panels? Oh, right... those being advocated by Obama's advisers. Welcome to the world of denying something and then a few years later calling for its implementation. It's all kind of Orwellian, isn't it?

From The New York Times' opinion piece by Steven Rattner, former counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration:

"WE need death panels.

"Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.

"But in the pantheon of toxic issues — the famous 'third rails' of American politics — none stands taller than overtly acknowledging that elderly Americans are not entitled to every conceivable medical procedure or pharmaceutical.
 
"Most notably, President Obama’s estimable Affordable Care Act regrettably includes severe restrictions on any reduction in Medicare services or increase in fees to beneficiaries. In 2009, Sarah Palin’s rant about death panels even forced elimination from the bill of a provision to offer end-of-life consultations.
 
[...]
 
"Medicare needs to take a cue from Willie Sutton, who reportedly said he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. The big money in Medicare is not to be found in Mr. Ryan’s competition or Mr. Obama’s innovation, but in reducing the cost of treating people in the last year of life, which consumes more than a quarter of the program’s budget.
 
"No one wants to lose an aging parent. And with price out of the equation, it’s natural for patients and their families to try every treatment, regardless of expense or efficacy. But that imposes an enormous societal cost that few other nations have been willing to bear. Many countries whose health care systems are regularly extolled — including Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have systems for rationing care.
 
"Take Britain, which provides universal coverage with spending at proportionately almost half of American levels. Its National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence uses a complex quality-adjusted life year system to put an explicit value (up to about $48,000 per year) on a treatment’s ability to extend life.
 
"At the least, the Independent Payment Advisory Board should be allowed to offer changes in services and costs. We may shrink from such stomach-wrenching choices, but they are inescapable."
 
Huh. Does anyone remember when Grayson was bellowing about how Republicans wanted you to die quickly? Seems like the Democrats are advocating it in opinion pieces. Hey, it costs too much to keep you alive, so why don't we just cut their treatments. It's for the greater good and all...
 
I guess Sarah Palin's "lie of the year" might have been a little more truthful than not... Oh well, die quickly little people. The important people in the government and politically connected businesses have important things to do.
 
 

2 comments:

  1. This is not in the least surprising. Leftists are always about death panels . . . they just like to pretend otherwise until they think they can come "forward!". This, as I keep saying, is not hypocrisy, it's how totalitarianism works. The government, OF COURSE, gets to decide who gets what treatment, when, and for how long. That's how it works. The fact that they lie about is nothing new, that's also how it works. We keep pretending that we are dealing with people who are like us; we are not.

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    1. Yeah. I think Rattner's timing couldn't have been worse for Obama. He should've published this crud earlier or later, but not DURING the campaign.

      I have no clue as to how people like Rattner can justify this crap. I mean he hails the UK where people with his status and money all buy private health insurance and get better care than the rest. Do you think Rattner puts a $48,000 per year price tag on HIS life. Nonsense. He's got places to go and things to do. It's the rest of us proles that he's extending his tag to. Rattner's idea of "fairness" seems to be extending crappy care to as many people as possible, rather than working to limit crappy care to the least number possible.

      It's both elitist and deplorable.

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