Paul Greenberg: As every polemicist knows, the way a question is asked can determine the answer. To quote one of those experts — a thanatopsist? — at the University of Michigan, someone with heart disease might be asked: ‘If you have another heart attack and your heart stops beating, would you want us to try to restart it?’ Or someone with emphysema could be asked, ‘Do you want to go on a breathing machine for the rest of your life?’ Or the cancer patient would be asked, ‘When the time comes, do you want us to use technology to try and delay your death?’ As if anyone could know when the time will come, and how the patient will feel about it then. And please note the phraseology: It’s not save your life, but delay your death. Never underestimate the power of negative thinking.
Category Archives: Legislation
Concerns about ‘death panels’ overhyped
Cutting human beings
Articles & Commentary: Arizona attempted to save money by curtailing expensive procedures that were believed to be relatively ineffective. From the standpoint of hard choices and cold calculation, this principle is defensible. But there is little reason to believe that Arizona undertook the time-consuming and painstaking data collection and cost-benefit analyses that should inform such policy change. Instead, it clumsily targeted a discrete group of people with names and faces who will die without a standard procedure that is proven to be successful in so many cases.
Krugman: Death Panels Will Fix Debt Crisis
Krugman: Death Panels, VAT Will Fix Debt Crisis: Paul Krugman, NY Times columnist, apparently thinks death panels could be one way the federal government will be able to keep soaring medical costs under control as baby boomers enter retirement. Video
Katie Beckett: Patient Turned Home-Care Advocate
After more than two years living in St. Luke’s Methodist Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Katie Beckett’s family reached the limit of what its private insurance would pay for Katie’s care. Medicaid, the state and federal health insurance for the needy, started picking up the cost of that expensive breathing machine and other care. But Medicaid would pay only as long as the little girl lived in the pediatric intensive care unit at the hospital.
Beckett’s parents, Julie and Mark, said they wanted their daughter at home. The girl’s doctors agreed, saying she needed to grow up in a more normal environment than a hospital room. At first, federal officials refused to make an exception. But then Reagan was told about the family. A few days later at a press conference on Nov. 10, 1981, Reagan expressed his anger at what he called an example of a cold bureaucracy.
It cost six times as much for the girl to live in the hospital, the president said, and “this spending most of her life there and away from the home atmosphere is detrimental to her. Now, by what sense do we have a regulation in government that says we’ll pay $6,000 a month to keep someone in a hospital that we believe would be better off at home, but the family cannot afford one-sixth that amount to keep them at home?”
President Reagan changed the Medicaid rules and Katie Beckett left that Iowa hospital and went home in time for Christmas. Shortly after, the government allowed exceptions in other states so that parents like the Becketts, who made too much money to qualify for Medicaid, could be covered for their children with extreme medical costs.
The real meaning of rationing
Rationing already takes place in many ways in health care. Managed care is exactly a form of rationing in which a private insurer determines whether patients should or should not receive services. In addition, private sector rationing injects profit motives into the calculations. The recent debate over health care has centered around who should do the rationing: private enterprises, often driven by profit or other private objectives, or government officials who are easily characterized as motivated by the immediate political returns of lower taxes or hiding the true shortcomings of services they administer. JAMA
Shame on the MS Society
The American Multiple Sclerosis Society issued the following statement regarding “Embryonic Stem Cell Lines Available for Federally Funded Research”:
The National Multiple Sclerosis Society urges Congress to support the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007 (H.R.3 and S.5) at all levels of the legislative process. The legislation would increase the number of approved embryonic stem cell lines that can be used in federally funded research by allowing new lines to be generated from embryos that have been donated for research purposes by people using the services of in vitro fertilization clinics, while establishing important ethical protections.
[Translation: The MS Society was/is just itching to get their hands on stem cells at the cost of human life generated artificially by perverse science.] Mark Pickup
Rationing Health Care? You Bet Your Life!
If you thought all the talk about “death panels” was conservative hogwash, think again. An anti-market socialist, Berwick once decried the U.S. health system as “trapped in the darkness of private enterprise.” With Berwick at the helm, Medicare and Medicaid programs are expected to cut billions of dollars in services. And why not? According to the socialist model that Berwick admires, it’s much cheaper to let sick people die. FRC