Obama’s Death Panel from Hell
You have to hand it to Nancy “Stalin in High Heels” Pelosi. She did a remarkable job preventing Congress from knowing what the hell they were about to vote on. She kept the public equally in the dark. Just days before calling for a vote, she had the audacity to say, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”24 That time has come. We’re now finding that what we feared about ObamaCare was just the beginning.
Case in point. Another one of President Obama’s controversial and dangerous “transformations” of the United States found in Section 1899A of the ObamaCare bill is the establishment of an “Independent Medicare Advisory Board” (IMAB)—often referred to as a “death panel” by critics. Advocates of the IMAB say the board is necessary and will have nothing to do with end-of-life decisions.
Which position is true?
Using innocuous sounding language, the bill explains that the IMAB exists to “reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending.” Translation: the IMAB is supposed to find ways to cut costs through the practice of medical rationing. While not specifically tasked with end-of-life decisions, the fact is that the IMAB is nothing more than a government-controlled panel that, in its quest to cut costs, will establish policies discouraging or prohibiting certain medical procedures. Or, conversely, it will give doctors “incentives” to withhold treatment in certain instances. Either way, coverage of certain life-enhancing, life-extending procedures will be
killed.
In practical terms, here’s how the IMAB will work.
Let’s say you’re seventy-two years old and need a heart transplant. With it, you’d be able to enjoy another fifteen or more years of life. The IMAB could set forth a policy denying seniors heart transplants in the name of faaaairness—since there’s only so much money to go around and medical rationing is a reality in light of supposedly finite resources. Instead, they’ll give the heart to a thirty-three-year-old since he’s a “productive” member of society and the elderly, in their view, will have outlived their usefulness.
Don’t think for one minute that this is a far-fetched scenario.
On June 13, 2009, in his weekly radio address, Barack Obama talked specifically about giving doctors “incentives” to “avoid unnecessary hospital stays, treatments and tests that drive up costs.”25 Two days later, speaking to the American Medical Association (AMA), Obama said, “Make no mistake: the cost of our health care is a threat to our economy. It is a ticking time bomb for the federal budget.” So far I agree with him. Just because I oppose ObamaCare doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t work to make reforms.
I believe in tort reform, for example, which is something this bill fails to address. Tort reform would make it more difficult for people to bring frivolous lawsuits for alleged harm or wrongdoing during medical treatment. Likewise, the size of the financial awards for damages in a medical malpractice suit must be capped, as it has been done successfully in California. Another cost-saving solution would be to close emergency rooms to noncitizens. That would go a long way to save the healthcare system. Again, this bill doesn’t address that option.
So what’s Obama’s cost-cutting solution?
That depends on which speech the man gives, but most often he and his advisors speak in terms of slashing 30 percent from the Medicare-Medicaid budget.26 As WorldNetDaily columnist Richard Poe points out, “A 30% annual cut is going to take a big bite out of somebody’s health care. The only question is whose. The numbers make clear that most of these cuts will have to come at the expense of those who need health care the most—the elderly, the disabled and the gravely ill.”27 Which is only logical. In fact, that’s what Obama implied while speaking to the AMA: “Older, sicker societies pay more on health care than younger, healthier ones.”28 In other words, the older you get, the more you cost society.
Now, when you understand that 5 percent of the public—those over age sixty-five—are the beneficiaries of 50 percent of all spending on health care, you realize that’s where Obama must surgically trim healthcare expenses—butcher expenses is more like it. Richard Poe puts it this way, “Obama will not meet his cost-cutting targets by reducing care to healthy young people. They are already spending next to nothing. It is the old, the dying and the chronically ill whose health care he will cut. The numbers make this clear.”29
Even a reporter for the über-leftwing Los Angeles Times picked up on this cold, hard reality of ObamaCare. He writes, “President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to trim medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don’t stand to gain from the extra care.”30 Indeed, Obama said, “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”31
How’s that for compassion?
Ironically, Obama cited his own grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, as an example of this need to make tough choices about “ultimately futile procedures.” You see, Obama’s grandmother had terminal cancer. The doctors had given her six to nine months to live. Complicating her situation was a fall in which she broke her hip. Regarding grandma’s hip surgery—in what was one of those Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” moments—Obama told his town hall audience, “and the question was, does she get hip replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?” 32
So, did she, or didn’t she get the surgery?
Obama never answered the question for them.
Why not? Because the president wanted to lead his audience to believe that denying coverage in such a case would be the right thing to do. You know, take the painkiller instead of having surgery. In reality, Obama’s grandmother did get a hip replacement.33 Of course, it’s unclear whether she would still have had that option now that ObamaCare has passed. As Barack Obama told the Old York Times, “you get into some very difficult moral issues” when deciding “to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill as a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.”34
Who does Obama think should answer these issues?
You? Your doctor?
Wrong, and wrong again.
Obama says, “There’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider. And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options.”35 Once again, government knows best. The government should be the ultimate referee because the self-serving American public knows nothing. Instead, we’re supposed to bow before this “honest broker” with our most intimate medical issues and trust them to do the right thing.
Doesn’t this president understand that the public’s distrust of Congress is at an all-time high? Does he really think the sheeple will go along with such a plan when, in March, 2010, a Rasmussen poll found 41 percent of voters “think most members of Congress are corrupt”! Furthermore, 64 percent of voters say Congress is doing a “poor job.”36 If they’re botching their job in Congress, why should they be entrusted with our individual health and welfare? No, Obama wants you to trust the feds instead of a doctor by your hospital bed.
Where does the Constitution grant such powers to the government?
Actually, that’s just the start of Obama’s intrusion into the patientdoctor relationship. Like a good social engineer, Obama wants to use other “experts” to help us shape those pesky “moral issues”:
I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels.37 [Emphasis added].
Which scientists? Which ethicists?
If Obama has any say in the matter, and if his track record on the appointment of czars tells us anything, we can expect the wor
st of the worst. Do we really want someone like Princeton University’s immoralist professor, Peter Singer, making these sorts of decisions and policies? Singer, who is ideologically akin to Hitler, believes in infanticide—which is a belief consistent with Obama. Singer has said, “Very often it is not wrong at all to kill a child once it has left the womb. Simply killing an infant is never equivalent to killing a person.”38
Just what America needs. More psychos like this Red Diaper Doper Baby determining who gets to live and die if Obama’s grand dream of integrating “ethicists” into his plan to cut costs. Soylent Green, anyone? Make no mistake, Obama is eyeing the elderly as the prime target audience for making cuts. He’s on record saying as much: “When it comes to Medicare and Medicaid, where the taxpayers are footing the bill … we have an obligation to get those costs under control.”39 If that’s not clear enough, Obama pointed that “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80% of the total health care bill out
here.”40
If they’re 80 percent of the bill, then that’s where the savings are to be found.
Are you starting to get the picture? He’s targeting the most vulnerable portion of the population! That’s exactly the opposite of the liberal propaganda.
This is why Obama created the Independent Medicare Advisory Board.
As you might expect, all this talk of a “death panel” was repeatedly mocked by Paul Krugman, a radical leftist and illogical Nobel laureate who writes a column in the Old York Times that few outside of the media take seriously. Krugman said the idea of a death panel in ObamaCare was “a complete fabrication” 41 and blasted the concept as an invention of “the crazy right, the tea party and death panel people—a lunatic fringe that is no longer a fringe but has moved into the heart of the Republican Party.”42 Really? Watch how this ignoramus talks out of both sides of his forked tongue.
While participating in a roundtable discussion on ABC’s This Week, Krugman sneered at those who believe the newly passed ObamaCare bill will lead to something resembling a death panel:
Paul Krugman: Think about people on the right. They’re simultaneously screaming, “They’re going to send all of the old people to death panels” and “It’s not going to save any money.” That’s a contradictory point of view.
Jake Tapper (host): Death panels would save money, theoretically.
Paul Krugman: The advisory path has the ability to make more or less binding judgments on saying this particular expensive treatment actually doesn’t do any good medically and so we’re not going to pay for it. That is actually going to save quite a lot of money. We don’t know how much yet. The CBO gives it very little credit. But most of the health care economists I talk to think it’s going to be a really major cost saving.43
So which is it, Mr. Krugman?
One moment you’re mocking the concept, the next moment you’re praising it as a means to “save quite a lot of money.” Let’s face facts. Even if the sun stood still and hell froze over, there’s no way Krugman or Obama would publicly admit that medical rationing via the IMAB is an essential tool to provide universal healthcare coverage for tens of millions of uninsured Americans—who may or may not want the coverage in the first place.
Whether they acknowledge it or not, socialized medicine comes with a hefty price tag: increased taxation and medical rationing. Period. Dr. Miguel Faria Jr., a Clinical Professor of Surgery (neurosurgery) at Mercer University School of Medicine, isn’t wearing Obama’s rose-colored glasses. With regard to higher taxes and dwindling coverage, he sees clearly the handwriting on the wall:
To reach the goal of universal coverage and capture those elusive 30-45 million Americans, who remain uninsured and, inconveniently for government planners, refuse to buy coverage, the rest of America will be saddled with socialized Obama-Care, more taxes and less coverage, as in Canada and the United Kingdom.44
You see, Obama has a problem. His healthcare bill saddles the American taxpayer with at least a $2 trillion tab over the next decade, according to figures released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). We all know that government cost projections are rarely accurate and often end up costing the middle class significantly more than the original estimate. Case in point.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Act of 1965, he set into motion the first step toward government-run, socialized medicine. It was sold to the public as a necessary and relatively inexpensive benefit. As we all know, Medicare is now teetering on insolvency. That said, look how far off the government estimates were regarding the projected cost of this program:
At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly ‘conservative’ estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.45
Put another way, the government microcephalics at the CBO and the bureaucrat hacks missed their Medicare projections by nine-fold! Nobody in the real world would get away with such a flagrant mismanagement of cost projections. Most businesses would fire such incompetent accountants and economists on the spot.
Imagine if you owned your own contracting business. Imagine that you had a customer who needed a new office building. What would happen if you told your client that his new building would cost $1 million to construct, but the final cost was $9 million? He’d laugh in your face and tell you to go to hell. And yet, the CBO wants us to trust its figures.
They want us to believe that ObamaCare will cost $2 trillion.
I don’t think it comes close to the total tab the middle class must pick up.
Even if, for the sake of argument, that figure proved to be an accurate cost projection, the president and Congress have told future generations of Americans to drop dead. Their tax burden will be, out of necessity, so disproportional, our productive children and their children can forget about saving, building personal wealth, or enjoying many of the things you and I take for granted. It will take everything in their power just to keep feeding the beastly ObamaCare monster.
Your Pain, His Gain
If you’re a senior citizen, hold on to your pacemaker.
There’s plenty more bad news in this bill targeting you.
In an attempt to assuage the justified fears of seniors, who smelled a rat every time the president tried to sell them on his bill, Obama told the elderly at an AARP-hosted forum: “Nobody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits. Medicare benefits are there because people contributed into a system. It works. We don’t want to change it.”46 Guess what? As I documented a moment ago, it was just another one of this president’s boldfaced lies.
With Obama, you must ignore what he says and watch what he does.
The plan Obama signed into law slashes $500 billion from Medicare,47 which is guaranteed to hurt the coverage that seniors over age sixty-five receive. After paying into the system their entire lives, seniors will spend their sunset years with shrinking coverage—although “Democratic leaders,” who never mislead us on anything, “have promised the reductions will not affect service to Medicare recipients.”48
Tell me, how is that possible?
How do you cut half of a trillion dollars from a program and not impact coverage? What world do they live in? Why can’t the Obamanics see this economic reality? What more proof do you need that liberalism is a mental disorder? The Democrats demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of how supply and demand works. Even Obama’s CBO Director Doug Elmendorf disagreed with the president’s rosy assessment. Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, Elmendorf stated that any Medicare cuts “would reduce the extra benefits that would be made available to beneficiaries through Medicare Advantage plans.”49
Which begs the question: how many seniors will be affected?
According to U.S. Representative Paul Ryan (R), millions of senior citizens will be impacted by Obama’s cuts.
“As a practical result of this legislation,” says Ryan, “an estimated six million current Medicare Advantage beneficiaries no longer would be able to afford their current plans or would lose access altogether.”50 Six million? Let’s put that figure into perspective. That’s the equivalent of terminating the health benefits for every senior sixty-five or older living in the states of Florida and New York combined!51
I thought nobody was talking about reducing Medicare benefits.
What’s more, did you know your government intentionally worked to silence such information from becoming public? That’s right. Obama’s promise of conducting his administration as “the most open and transparent in history” just stuffed a rag in the mouths of his critics.52 According to Representative Ryan, a gag order was put into place to prevent insurance companies from warning their customers about the serious nature of the cuts should ObamaCare be passed. Representative Ryan said:
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, recently placed a gag order on Medicare Advantage providers to prevent them from sharing information with their enrollees about pending changes to their plans. Disregarding private health care plans’ right to inform their enrollees about consequential legislation, CMS has launched an investigation against Humana for mailing a factually verified warning about proposed cuts.53
Do you see how these gangster thugs in the Obama administration work?
First, they silenced the opposition and violate their free speech rights.
Then, when Humana had the nerve to inform its clients about the downside of ObamaCare, a pack of ravenous government hounds was immediately dispatched to make Humana’s life hell on earth. Representative Ryan rightly concludes, “The administration’s actions open an array of troubling questions about both the appropriateness and legality of such political intimidation.”54 If, however, you think that the Attorney General will look into this violation of free speech, guess again.
Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security Page 16
