Amy Ridenour is the president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. She and her husband David, the vice president of the National Center, are the parents of three third graders. David's comments, like those of other National Center staff members, directors, associates and fellows, often appear in this blog.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Health Care Monsters
"Pelosi and Reid's health care monsters" is the theme of an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun today by National Center Policy Analyst Matt Patterson.
Matt examines the scary goblins in the liberal health care proposals; namely, the Medicare cuts, the economic harm, and the loss of freedom we can expect if the left's proposals win the day.
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Quote of Note: The Core Problem With Government-Run Health Care
"The core problem with government-run health care is that it doesn't make decisions in the best interests of patients, but in the best interests of government."
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I am often critical of the quality of care offered by government-run health care systems, but the emergency medical care received by this very stoic British truck driver after he was impaled by an eight-foot pole seems almost miraculous.
You have to see the picture. A description wouldn't do it justice.
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Report Questions Quality of Care Dementia Patients Receive in British Government Hospitals
A British government report is questioning the quality of care dementia patients receive in hospitals run by the British government-run health system.
Among other things, the report says such patients often are not properly fed.
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Canadian Patient Flies to India for Immediate Care
An ailing hip caused Canadian Raghav Shetty so much pain that he could barely walk. Instead of being one of 25,000 patients in Calgary waiting up to two years for surgery or a scan, Shetty traveled to India, his native country, for immediate partial hip replacement surgery.
An ailing hip caused Canadian Raghav Shetty so much pain that he could barely walk. Instead of being one of 25,000 patients in Calgary waiting for surgery or a scan (up to a two-year wait), Shetty traveled to India, his native country, for immediate partial hip replacement surgery.
Flying to a faraway country for medical care did not seem too outrageous an idea for Canadian Raghav Shetty - at least, in comparison to the alternative. The 61-year-old Calgary, Alberta man's bum hip had effectively immobilized him. Yet he faced several years of waiting in distress for surgery in Canada's "universal" Medicare health system.
Shetty had developed severe osteoarthritis in his left hip joint. He was in so much pain that, even with the aid of painkillers, each step was tormenting.
"I'm in extreme pain," he admitted. "I'm stuck at home, I can't work. It is difficult for me to provide financial support to my family and the quality of my life is very bad."
"He can barely walk. He drags his legs everywhere he goes," added daughter, Shilpa Shetty.
Shetty, a 20-year resident of Calgary, discovered the wait for partial hip replacement surgery would be up to two years. At the time, in 2004, some 25,000 patients were on waiting lists for surgery or diagnostic scans in Calgary's hospitals.
Facing a bedridden wait on Medicare, Shetty and his wife, Prema, looked elsewhere for quicker treatment. They discovered a private facility in Chennai, India offering immediate care. The entire out-of-pocket cost for the operation and for both to fly to India would be $15,000 (CAD), but the couple believed waiting up to two years for care locally was not a realistic option.
"I had no choice but to try elsewhere for my surgery due to the long waiting period and severe pain in my hip joint," Shetty said. "I could not walk more than a few meters. Under these conditions, waiting for one to two years was simply not possible for me."
In September 2004, the Shettys traveled to Apollo Specialty Hospital for a successful five-hour surgery. Shetty, an Indian immigrant, said returning to his native country for a medical procedure was not something he would have considered had it not been for the excessive wait.
"Of course, my first choice would have been always Canada," he said. "However, in recent years, the waiting period for major surgeries is too long for patients suffering from severe pain and serious medical conditions."
Daughter Shilpa objected to the tedious wait her father would have endured if he stayed in Canada. "We've given up on our health care system. Why don't they understand that some people are in so much pain that they just can't wait?" she asked. "We don't have any options and can't wait anymore."
Though the long wait forced Shetty to look outside Canada, the health department in the province of Alberta rejected his claim for reimbursement for his care in India. Generally, the government reimburses only such patients who go abroad when treatment is unavailable locally or if the patient's life would be in jeopardy while waiting.
As published in a 2007 Fraser Institute survey, an estimated 5,029 people in Alberta were waiting for hip or knee replacement surgery as of March 31, 2007. According to the same report, nationwide some "estimated 523,600 Canadians had difficulties getting to see a specialist, 200,000 had difficulties getting non-emergency surgeries, and 294,800 had difficulties getting selected diagnostic tests."
Learn the truth about government-run medicine from the National Center for Public Policy Research's new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care, by Amy Ridenour and Ryan Balis. Complete PDF copies are available free or you can buy a copy now at Amazon.com.
Grandma Got Run Over by Her Health Care Music Video
"They say there's no such thing as free health care, and now me and Grandpa, we believe."
This video is a couple of months old, but it's pretty funny, as warnings about the death-dealing potential of government-run health care go.
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Britain's National Health Service Denied Sight-Saving Medicine to Its Own Employee
Despite her 18 years of service to Britain's government-run health system, Sylvie Webb had to fight her employer for sight-saving drugs.
An employee of Britain's government-run National Health Service was denied medication that could save her from going blind in one eye.
Sylvie Webb, a widow from Salisbury, England, worked for 18 years as a secretary at Salisbury District Hospital. Yet, despite her situation, Webb discovered that medical treatment under the public health service is anything but universal.
In February 2007, doctors diagnosed Webb, then 58, with the "wet" type of age-related macular degeneration (ARMD) in her left eye. If not treated in a timely manner, wet ARMD "can lead to blindness in as little as three months and people need prompt treatment if they are to minimize the risk of permanent sight loss," according to a statement by the Royal National Institute of Blind People in London.
As such, Webb's medical consultant sought rapid treatment for Webb because her sight was "deteriorating 'day by day,'" as Webb explained, and an infection in one eye can spread to the other good eye.
But to Webb's dismay, for nearly a year her local public health authority, Dorset Primary Care Trusts, refused to provide Webb with the expensive "anti-VEGF" drugs she desperately needed to save her sight. Though two such effective drugs, Macugen and Lucentis, are licensed for general NHS use, the Dorset Trust, which controls funding prescriptions, dragged its feet. Dorset Trust said it has yet to formulate a policy in a "fair and equitable way" to treat Webb's condition and thus it could not provide her with the VEGF drugs.
As Webb explained at the time, "At the time, the PCT [Dorset Primary Care Trusts] said it hadn't got a policy and it would address the situation in April [2007] - but it has now postponed this until June. I'm extremely worried that time is running out for me and other patients."
The prospect of going blind terrified Webb:
"I'm a young woman and want to carry on working, and then I'd like to do all the things I had planned for my retirement. I'm also worried about the health of my other eye. I know I'm at increased risk of getting wet AMD in that eye and this could mean I end up losing my sight. The women in my family live into their 90s; I can't accept the possibility of being blind unnecessarily for the next 35 years."
In May 2007, the Trust agreed to review Webb's case on an urgent basis. But for Tom Bremridge, CEO of the Macular Disease Society in Andover, UK, there is no excuse for Webb being without the available sight-saving drugs she needs. "It is outrageous that in this day and age Mrs. Webb faces losing her sight owing to bureaucratic idleness," he said.
Steve Winyard of RNIB echoed Bremridge's outrage:
"This is disgraceful... It's little comfort for Mrs. Webb that she can't get treatment simply because her PCT has yet to decide a policy. The PCT needs to get its act together and ensure these drugs are available to patients now and without a struggle... There is a moral imperative to save the sight of people where we can."
Finally, in 2008 new health guidelines permitted Dorset Trusts to prescribe Lucentis for Webb. The guidelines published by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the government's health advisory authority, allow for funding for the first 14 injections of Lucentis once wet ARMD is diagnosed in one eye. If additional injections are necessary, the drug's manufacturer, Novartis, will pay for additional treatment.
Webb was delighted that she would at last receive the sight-saving drug. "I'm so relieved that Dorset PCT has finally realized the long-term benefit to me of this treatment and has agreed funding," she said. "I only hope that all patients are given treatment to help save their sight because while this is good news for me, there may be hundreds of others with wet AMD who cannot get the funding they desperately need."
Learn the truth about government-run medicine by reading true stories, such as the one above, from countries with a government-run health care system in the National Center for Public Policy Research's new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care, by Amy Ridenour and Ryan Balis. Complete PDF copies are available free or you can buy a copy now at Amazon.com.
Project 21's Deneen Borelli on "Hannity" on Friday Night
Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli will appear on the "Great American Panel" on the Fox News Channel's "Hannity" program at 9:30 PM eastern on Friday, November 13.
Deneen will discuss the progress of health care reform in the Senate, the track record of Obama's "stimulus" spending and how Jim Carrey can't seem to say nice things about capitalism despite being one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood.
Check your local listings for Fox News Channel on cable. Fox News is available on channel 118 on Fios, channel 205 on Dish Network and channel 360 on DirecTV.
This post was written by David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. Please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private.
Government Health System Penalized Woman for Supporting Her Own Cancer Treatment
Summary: The British National Health Service refused to provide the advanced cancer drug Avastin to Colette Mills, who was willing to pay for it herself. Mills was told that if she paid for the drug the NHS didn't cover because if its cost, the NHS would stop paying for her cancer treatment altogether.
Colette Mills of North Yorkshire, England was up against a rigid National Health Service policy that at the time would have taken away her taxpayer-provided health care if she purchased a life-extending cancer drug beyond the dosage the government provided for her.
Mills fought breast cancer for over a quarter century. Though the last roughly 20 years were "blissfully" clear of cancer, she says, it returned in 2003 and spread throughout her body. The 58-year-old former NHS nurse was given Taxol, a chemotherapy drug, as part of her publicly-financed health care. But, following the advice of her hospital specialist, Mills decided to spend her own money to boost her treatment with the so-called wonder drug, Avastin.
Drug trials show Taxol is perhaps twice as effective when combined with Avastin, and, when coupled, the drugs could slow advanced breast cancer.
Mills believed that combining the drugs "would probably give me a longer life and a better quality of life." She added, "Avastin may only increase your lifespan by six weeks or six months but, believe me, when it's your life, you're not picky."
The rub at the time was even if Mills paid out-of-pocket to supplement her care, the NHS would begin to bill her for the entire cost of treatment because she would be considered a private patient.
"If a patient chooses to go private for certain drugs they elect to become a private patient for the course of their treatment for that condition. That is trust policy," said a statement by South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust, Mills' local health care provider.
Though Avastin was publicly available elsewhere in the UK, South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust would not fund Avastin because of its high cost. In Britain, the wide disparity of drugs and services made available depending on locality is informally termed the NHS 'postcode lottery.'
Mills was willing to pay the estimated £4,000 a month to get the expensive drug and have it administered - but she did not want to be stuck with the tab for her entire treatment. "The costs would increase from £4,000 a month to about £10,000 to £15,000 for all my care. I would need to pay charges for seeing the consultant, for the nurses' time, for blood tests and scans," Mills explained.
Thus, by doing what she thought necessary to improve her chances of survival, Mills would be responsible for paying some £15,000 (~$24,400) to the government. "The policy of my local NHS trust is that I must be an NHS patient or a private patient," said Mills. "If I want to pay for Avastin, I must pay for everything. It's immoral that the drugs are out there and freely available to certain people, yet they say I cannot have it."
The rationale for the bizarre policy that restricted how citizens spent their own money for health care was rooted in the NHS's belief that care should be equal and not based on a patient's ability to pay. "The Government is committed to a publicly funded NHS, free at the point of use and available to all regardless of income," explained a spokesman for Britain's Department of Health. "Co-payments would risk creating a two-tier health service and be in direct contravention with the principles and values of the NHS."
The health care provider, therefore, rejected Mills' request because it considered her buying an extra drug to be an "add on" to her existing NHS treatment. Mills' pleas to the NHS health trust were rejected, and she and husband, Eric, abandoned their challenge.
"I can't go private..." said Mills. "This decision is totally unjust... this drug would prolong my life."
Mills recognized there naturally may be cost prohibitions for some care. But, she argued, "The whole concept of the NHS is that it's free at the point of need. Why should that stop because I want to pay for something?" She also pointed out the NHS's apparent double standard. "It is already a two-tier NHS," said Mills. "I'd had a scan privately when there was a two-week wait on the NHS... If I go to the dentist I can mix my NHS and private treatment."
Professor Karol Sikora, a medical expert who advises the World Health Organization, sided with Mills. "For health bosses to say Mrs. Mills cannot top up her NHS treatment is ideology gone mad. It is medical communism and utterly immoral," she charged. "This is unfair to taxpayers who are entitled to NHS care. If this patient wishes to pay for another drug, that should be her choice."
After considerable public disapproval and an official Department of Health Review, the NHS reversed its supplemental treatment policy in November 2008. Alan Johnson, the then-Health Secretary, announced new guidelines that purchasing private treatment will not mean that patients forfeit their entitlement to NHS services.
Reacting to the policy change, Mills said, "This move by the Government is exactly what I've been fighting for - but it has been a long time coming."
Although the government's change of policy was welcome news for patients like Mills, it came too late for Mills herself - four months after her unsuccessful effort to purchase Avastin herself, her cancer spread to such an extent that it will no longer respond to the treatment.
Learn the truth about government-run medicine by reading true stories, such as the one above, from countries with a government-run health care system in the National Center for Public Policy Research's new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care, by Amy Ridenour and Ryan Balis. Complete PDF copies are available free or you can buy a copy now at Amazon.com.
President Barack Obama is often likened - and clearly sees himself as spiritual successor - to presidential luminaries like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But he is fast on track to following the footsteps of a less celebrated predecessor - George H.W. Bush.
Candidate Bush accepted his party's nomination at the 1988 Republican National Convention with the immortal, Peggy Noonan-penned promise "Read my lips: no new taxes." When President Bush later agreed to raise taxes as part of the 1990 budget negotiations, he wrecked his re-election chances and became a one-termer.
In September, 2008, candidate Obama promised, "I can make this firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making $250,000 will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."
Oops. The health care bill the House passed on Saturday, for which Obama personally lobbied members of Congress, contains - new taxes. Lots of them. New taxes that will effect earners of all income levels, but which will especially hurt small-business owners.
Of course this bill, like all of the health care proposals recently debated by Congress, was instigated by, and created at the behest of, Barack Obama, who promised in his February joint address to Congress, "quality, affordable health care for every American." That he could promise such a bauble while simultaneously vowing not to raise our taxes "one dime" betrays either a stunning economic ignorance - or deep mendacity.
Obama has clearly studied the greats, Lincoln and F.D.R. But he should also have made an examination of the less successful presidents, like George H. W. Bush, lest he repeat their mistakes and suffer their fate in political purgatory.
Written by Matt Patterson, policy analyst at the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
Fourteen Hospitals Turn Away Critically-Injured Elderly Man
Summary: Instead of whisking a 69-year-old Japanese bicyclist who collided with a motorcycle to the emergency room, paramedics called 14 hospitals trying to find a facility that at last accepted the critically-injured man. The hospital at which he was taken attempted to transfer him to a better facility, but by this time the man was in such poor condition that he died of hemorrhagic shock.
Rescue workers in Japan called fourteen hospitals before finding one that would take an elderly bicyclist who collided with a motorcycle.
The accident, which occurred at 10:15 pm in the Japanese city of Itami, left the 69-year-old bicyclist, who was not identified, in critical condition with back and head injuries. Paramedics arrived on the scene five minutes after the crash and administered first aid. Yet, for about an hour, they were unsuccessful at locating a hospital to treat the man.
Helpless, the elderly man waited in the ambulance at the accident scene as hospital after hospital rejected treating him, citing unavailable beds, staff shortages and a lack of equipment and specialists. All told, fourteen hospitals in the neighboring prefectures -- i.e., governing districts -- of Hyogo and Osaka refused his entry.
"There were four other emergency calls in the same time frame of that night," explained Mitsuhisa Ikemoto, the fire department spokesman. "[A]s a result, we were unable to find a hospital."
It took a second round of calls for rescue workers to find a hospital. Finally, at 11:30 that night -- 75 minutes after the accident -- they took him to a hospital in Itami, which had initially declined to accept him. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that the hospital's resources that night were unsatisfactory.
At the time of his arrival at the hospital, the elderly man was already in critical condition from the accident and post-accident delay. When his condition suddenly deteriorated, hospital staff scrambled "to transfer him for better treatment," according to the Associated Press.
Two hospitals rejected that transfer request. By the time a third hospital agreed to take the man, his condition was too poor to permit him to be moved.
He died of hemorrhagic shock at about 1:15 the next morning.
The Associated Press reported that the man "initially showed stable vital signs," and, attributing the assessment to Ikemoto, reported the man "might have survived if a hospital accepted him more quickly." Ikemoto was quoted saying, "I wish hospitals are more willing to take patients..."
Rescue workers also had trouble finding a hospital to treat a 29-year-old motorcyclist who also had been involved in the crash. Despite the motorcyclists' severe injuries, the first two hospitals contacted refused to admit him. The third try succeeded, and the man was taken to a university hospital in Hyogo. Fortunately, two weeks after the accident, he was recovering.
The frustrating, and in one case, tragic experiences of the two accident victims initially denied medical care are not unique in Japan's universal health insurance system.
According to a government survey conducted by the country's Fire and Disaster Management Agency, Japanese hospitals denied admission to some 14,387 emergency patients in 2007. All 14,000-plus patients identified on paramedics' reports were rejected at least three times. Moreover, at least 3.5 percent of these victims had serious conditions, which the survey defined as requiring more than three weeks of hospitalization.
Learn the truth about government-run medicine by reading true stories, such as the one above, from countries with a government-run health care system in the National Center for Public Policy Research's new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care, by Amy Ridenour and Ryan Balis. Complete PDF copies are available free or you can buy a copy now at Amazon.com.
Quote of Note: Government-Run Health Care Results in Fewer Doctors
"Long waits and shortages result from government control of the health sector. There are only so many hospitals, only so many doctors. When government promises that everyone will be treated (ostensibly) gratis, it does not simultaneously conjure more doctors into existence. Instead, doctors face more patients, who are now likely to seek treatment more often because they perceive it to be free. The result is long lines, long waits, substandard care.
But it's worse than that. Not only does the socialization of medicine fail to produce more doctors, it actually shrinks the pool. In our free-market system, being a good doctor can be financially rewarding. This matters, because becoming a good doctor is a long, arduous, expensive proposition. Remove the profit incentive and you are guaranteed to have fewer doctors."
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Max Pappas of FreedomWorks sent over some pictures of today's rally at the Capitol in opposition to liberal efforts to have the federal government take over our health care system.
I'm posting the pictures because this is a tremendous turnout (especially in mid-week, with little notice, on a dank and intermittently-rainy day), and I have no faith whatsoever that the mainstream media will accurately report the full size of the crowd.
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I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
When asked if there "is any concern at all about whether it is constitutional for Congress to impose a mandate [that individual Americans must obtain health insurance]," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "no." He also said he had no reason to believe White House lawyers had ever considered the issue.
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British Government Health Service Locks Man in Ambulance
The British government's National Health Service has apologized to a patient and his family after an NHS ambulance driver drove him to an ambulance station and, as the BBC put it "went home and forgot about him."
The man was found five hours later after a search commenced following his failure to return to his place of residence.
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1,990 pages of budget busting, mind numbing legalese! (cue my eyes scream)
Read, if you dare: H.R. 3962, the scariest thing to slither out of Capitol Hill... since the Baucus Proposal.
Written by Matt Patterson, policy analyst at the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
I'm having another of what I call "radio days," in which I do a lot of radio interviews -- in this instance, on the latest developments in the health care debate.
If you care to tune in, I will be on the following stations (please note, all times given are Eastern):
KURV McAllen, TX 7:11 AM ET
WFLA Tampa, FL 7:23 AM ET
KTRH Houston, TX 7:34 AM ET
WTVN Columbus, OH 7:45 AM ET
WSYR Syracuse, NY 8:06AM ET
KIDO Boise, ID 8:20 AM ET
KVI Seattle 8:35 AM ET
KCOL Fort Collins, CO 9:17 AM ET
WHLO Akron, OH 9:40 AM ET
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Looks like the lobbying profession, taken as a group, couldn't be happier that the feds are messing up our health care system so badly.
Notice that the lobbyists quoted in the The Hill story by Jeffrey Young that I linked to above apparently did not want to be identified by name. I guess they still have enough pride to be ashamed of themselves.
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I'm a little confused. Maybe you can help me out. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus wants to cut $500 billion from Medicare to cover about 30 million uninsured. That's over 10 years. Handing the entire amount out to the uninsured would work out to about $6,666 annually for each family of four.
That should be sufficient for a health care plan of some kind. Presumably the resultant reduction in cost shifting would lower costs, too. So why does he plan to spend an additional 330 billion?
Hmm... Couldn't be about control, could it?
Written by David A. Ridenour, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
Obama says the damage from Katrina was caused in part by a "breakdown of government." If gov't came make a hurricane worse, why would we want it to run health care?
E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow the National Center for Public Policy Research on Twitter. | Download our book Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow the National Center for Public Policy Research on Twitter. | Download our book Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
Andrew Breitbart is wondering why a guy named Conor Friedersdorf, who writes for the Atlantic and the Daily Beast, keeps writing about Breitbart but refuses to interview him.
C'mon! Friedersdorf works for the Atlantic, which this month is running a very long cover story complaining about U.S. interrogation techniques without giving roughly equal consideration to the question of how many lives may have been saved by these techniques.
This is the logical equivalent of complaining about the U.S. dropping atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without examining the possibility that these horrific attacks may have saved more lives than they cost. Did no one from the Atlantic even notice that the other side of the question was entirely missing from its cover story?
(Lest readers think it unfair of me to drag Andrew Sullivan -- who wrote the cover story -- into this, be aware that he injected himself by putting an approving piece on his own Atlantic magazine blog about what Conor Friedersdorf has written about Breitbart.)
MSM writers often fail to fact-check. Just ask Slate's Timothy Noah, or better, the White House staffers who relied on Noah's research when crafting President Obama's recent health care speech to a joint session of Congress.
(Not that the White House speechwriters have the slightest excuse for not checking the original sources themselves.)
When Conor Friedersdorf writes about Andrew Breitbart without giving Breitbart the courtesy of a phone call to give his side of the story, it's really just business as usual for the MSM.
And that, ironically, is in part why so many people choose get their news from Breitbart.
(As a very off-the-subject side note, the Atlantic cover story on torture contains this sentence, intended as part of its condemnation of U.S. interrogation techniques: "But 48 days and nights with no more than four hours' sleep every 24, combined with stress positions, hypothermia, and forced nudity, push these nuances over a line any decent person would acknowledge." Aside from the hypothermia, this is a precise description of the two-month period during which I gave birth to twins.)
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Jules Crittenden: Intelligence without experience is like knowing how roller skates work without ever having skated. (One guess who he's talking about.)
PhRMA spends $9.4 million more promoting left-wing health care "reform"; forgets left-wing health care means drugs gets rationed.
Patterico tries to get a Washington Post correction. Good luck with that.
Quote of Note: In 2007-08, 16.5% of Deaths in Britain Came After Terminal Sedation
"Rarely has the Atlantic seemed as wide as when America's raw debate on the future of health care provoked a near unanimous response from Britain's politicians boasting of the superiority of socialized medicine delivered by the country's National Health Service. Prime Minister Gordon Brown used Twitter to tell the world that the NHS can mean the difference between life and death. His wife added, 'we love the NHS.' Opposition leader David Cameron tweeted back that his plans to outspend Labour showed the Conservatives were more committed to the NHS than Labour.
"This outbreak of NHS jingoism was brought to an abrupt halt by the Patients Association, an independent charity. In a report, the association presented a catalogue of end-of-life cases that demonstrated, in its words, 'a consistent pattern of shocking standards of care,' providing details of what it described as 'appalling treatment,' which could be found across the NHS. A few days later, a group of senior doctors and health-care experts wrote to a national newspaper expressing their concern about the Liverpool Care Pathway, a palliative program being rolled out across the NHS, involving the withdrawal of fluids and nourishment for patients thought to be dying. Noting that in 2007-08, 16.5% of deaths in the U.K. came after terminal sedation, their letter concluded with the chilling observation that experienced doctors know that sometimes 'when all but essential drugs are stopped, 'dying' patients get better' if they are allowed to -- words that put a different complexion on Gordon Brown's August tweet."
For more on life and death on the NHS, download a free PDF copy of our new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
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Doctors in Australia's government-run hospitals are killing patients because they're exhausted, says an Australian doctors' union.
The government's response? Doctors should drink more coffee, and a different branch of government should run the hospitals.
From Reuters:
Exhausted Australian doctors have been told to drink up to six cups of coffee a day to stay awake during extended shifts, building pressure on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to seize control of state-run hospitals.
A document on fatigue management released by health officials in Queensland state recommended doctors ingest 400 milligrams of caffeine to stay awake on the job, or the equivalent of six cups of coffee, after warnings that patients were dying.
"For management to just say go and have a cup of coffee and get over tiredness, it cheapens the whole issue," Australian Medical Association Vice President Steven Hambleton told Reuters.
"We are talking about serious issues here, and this is not just a serious suggestion at all. It can't be a weakness to say you're dog tired," he said.
The recommendation followed warnings from a union representing Queensland doctors this week that public hospital patients were dying because dangerously tired medics were being forced to work up to 80 hours without a break...
You can read the rest here, but before you do, contemplate the following two concepts: "doctors' union" and "strike." Yikes.
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British MP Charges Some Parents Have Been Threatened for Questioning Health System
A Liberal Democrat Member of the British Parliament is charging that some parents in Britain have been told they could lose legal custody of their children because they complained about the British government's National Health Service.
From the Times (UK):
Parents are being threatened with having their children taken into care after questioning doctors' diagnoses or objecting to their medical care.
John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP, who campaigns to stop injustices in the family court, said:
"Very often care proceedings are used as retaliation by local authorities against 'uppity' people who question the system."
Cases are emerging across the UK: The mother of a 13-year-old girl who became partly paralysed after being given a cervical cancer vaccination says social workers have told her the child may be removed if she (the mother) continues to link her condition with the vaccination.
A couple had all six of their children removed from their care after they disputed the necessity of an invasive medical test on their eldest daughter. Doctors, who suspected she might have had a blood disease, called for social services to obtain an emergency protection order, although it was subsequently confirmed that she was not suffering from the condition. The parents were still considered unstable, and all their children were taken from them.
A single mother whose teenage son is terminally ill and confined to a wheelchair has been told he is to become the subject of a care order after she complained that her local authority’s failure to provide bathroom facilities for him has left her struggling to maintain sanitary standards...
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In his speech tonight, the President told the stories of several Americans who have had struggles with the American health care system, and unflatteringly compared the U.S. health care system to systems in other 'advanced democracies.' But people who live in those other advanced democracies would love to have the quality and quantity of care Americans routinely take for granted. And the stories the President shared in his speech, touching as they are, are not by any means worse than the stories Ryan Balis and I collected about the trials faced by people in Canada, Britain, Australia, Japan, Sweden and other nations with public systems.
The White House released a guest list of people who were to sit with the First Lady during the speech that included a gentleman whose insurance company delayed a colonoscopy for several months. A few months' delay is commonplace in countries with government medicine. In our collection, we tell the story of a man on Australia's public system who was told he had to wait TWO YEARS for a colonoscopy.
In the section of his speech about Senator Kennedy, the President evoked the sad hypothetical case of an American having to tell a loved one, 'there is something that could make you better, but I just can't afford it.' In Britain, it is estimated that 25,000 people die prematurely every year because the British government-run health care system 'can't afford' cancer drugs Americans take for granted. Surely the President knows this.
A few weeks ago, the President famously claimed that a noteworthy expense of the U.S. health system occurs when doctors unethically try to make money by performing tonsillectomies unnecessarily. Although the President's allegation was preposterous, this wouldn't even be a credible lie in many countries with government-run systems, where it can be difficult to even get a tonsillectomy. In one of the stories we've collected and made available for download, a small child in a public health system abroad waited TWO YEARS for a tonsillectomy.
The President complained in his speech that people oppose his public option because of 'politics.' He's just wrong. People oppose his public option, including triggers and government-backed co-ops and any other back door route to government-run health care, because they fear what government-run health care always brings: pain, misery and death. Anyone who doubts this should download a free PDF of our new book and read for themselves what President Obama's co-called 'public option' would really be like.
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100 Stories of Personal Struggles with the Health Care System You Won't Hear from President Obama
As the White House has announced that the First Lady will watch the President's health care speech tonight with two people who have had what the White House terms as "struggles" with the U.S. health care system, I remind everyone about our new book, "Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care."
Shattered Lives tells of the struggles 100 people in countries that previously adopted the so-called "public option" (read: government option) on health care have had getting health care services. These are the kind of stories I think we can be confident the President won't reference during his speech tonight.
Why not download a copy now, and email it to any of your friends or family or are on the fence about the impact of increasing government control over our health system? Or post a link to the book's free downloads page on your Facebook page or blog?
Remember, folks: Government-run health care guarantees you health insurance -- it doesn't guarantee health care.
E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow the National Center for Public Policy Research on Twitter. | Download our book Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow the National Center for Public Policy Research on Twitter. | Download our book Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
President Obama is saying he won't sign a health care bill that adds "one dime to the deficit":
"There are some principles that, if they are not embodied in the bill, I will not sign it," Obama said in an interview with ABC News' Robin Roberts aired on "Good Morning America" today.
Yet the president declined in the interview to draw a line in the sand on a so-called "public option," offering government-run health insurance to those who cannot find coverage privately.
Asked if the must-sign elements include that option, the president said: "I will give you an example -- if it's adding one dime to the deficit, if it's not fully paid for," then he will not sign the legislation...
Nice words, but if he means them, why has he been working for months for the trillion+ dollar House health care bill?
Surely even a man who spends tax dollars as easily as does our president considers a trillion dollars to be real money.
Or perhaps he's signaling an intention to cut even more from Medicare?
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Project 21's Bob Parks to Critique Obama Health Care Speech on BET
Update on post below: BET has decided to schedule Bob for a different panel discussion to be recorded at another time, so he will not be appearing on BET this evening.
Project 21 member Bob Parks is scheduled to appear as a commentator during Black Entertainment Television's coverage of President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, September 9.
President Obama is going to Capitol Hill to push for his foundering socialized health care agenda.
BET's coverage of Obama's speech is scheduled to begin at 8:00 PM and continue until 9:00 PM or 9:30 PM, depending on the length of the speech. Its coverage will be broadcast from the Newseum.
BET is available as a basic service on most cable TV systems. Check your local listings for the channel. On national services, it is channel 329 on Direct TV, channel 124 on Dish Network and channel 270 on FiOS.
This post was written by David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
Outrage of the Day: ObamaCare Would Tax Some Workers So Others Could Retire Early
James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation highlights once again a genuine travesty included in the President's health care reform proposal, a $10 billion bailout of labor unions.
Sherk writes, in part:
...The most obvious benefit President Obama's health care plan provides to organized labor is a $10 billion taxpayer bailout for underfunded retiree health benefit plans. Many unions negotiate benefit packages that allow workers to retire early and collect health benefits until they qualify for Medicare. Many of these plans they are underfunded because unions mismanaged them.
The healthcare legislation transfers $10 billion to these accounts, in the form of a reinsurance program that pays most of the cost of claims for workers in these plans. Like the GM and Chrysler bailouts, the health care legislation requires all taxpayers -- including low income workers without retirement plans--to pay for benefits for already well-compensated union workers...
To recap:
1) The bailout is intended not for poor or disabled people, but people with jobs who would like to retire before reaching age 65;
2) The bailout would be paid for by taxpayers, most of whom will not enjoy the leisure and other benefits of retiring before 65. Many will not be able to retire even at 65;
3) The unions had funds available to pay for these benefits, but they mismanaged them.
Pathetic.
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The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, has developed a health care proposal that would cost taxpayers at least $900 billion while making health insurance less affordable.
The plan includes new taxes on health insurance companies. These would, of course, be paid by customers.
Our federal government taxes gasoline heavily as a conservation measure, that is, to reduce the amount of it we choose to buy.
Taxing health insurance makes sense only if you want to deter the purchase of it. It makes no sense whatsoever as a cure to the problem of too many uninsured Americans.
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Tom Blumer: "How crazy is it that Ford has to 'negotiate' a new contract with the United Auto Workers union, even though the union has ownership interests in two of its principal competitors...?
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ABC Won't Air Anti-ObamaCare Ad, But a Double-Standard is in Play
ABC and NBC are refusing to air a commercial critical of Obama's vision to remake health care as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Uncle Sam, but ABC's reasons for doing so don't stand up to scrutiny.
The ad, created by the League of American Voters, features neurosurgeon Dr. Mark J. Cuffe warning about threats posed by government-run health care such as rationing and limits on medical innovation. The commercial can be viewed above or by clicking here.
For reasons of full disclosure, be advised that League executive director Bob Adams is a former National Center for Public Policy Research employee. He did not, however, solicit this posting and my discovery of his link to the organization came after I was already appalled by ABC's duplicity.
According to a report posted on FoxNews.com, both ABC and NBC are refusing to run the ad nationally in its present form. In particular, ABC spokeswoman Susan Sewell said in a statement: "The ABC Television Network has a long-standing policy that we do not sell time for advertising that presents a partisan position on a controversial public issue... Just to be clear, this is a policy for the entire network, not just ABC News." NBC might accept a revised version of the ad.
The ad is running on local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.
Former Clinton Administration political advisor Dick Morris, who is now helping out the League of American Voters, disputed ABC's assertion of impartiality. He said: "It's the ultimate act of chutzpah because ABC is the network that turned itself over completely to Obama for a daylong propaganda fest about health care reform... For them to be pious and say they will not accept advertising on health care shuts their viewers out from any possible understanding of both sides of this issue."
In fact, during ABC's June 24 White House event in which Obama was able to lay out his health care agenda with virtually no opposition from a small and select audience, the network did air an ad from PhRMA - the pharmaceutical lobby group that is a strong proponent of ObamaCare. It also ran an ad from Health Economy Now, a coalition made up of PhRMA, labor unions and special interest groups that is also backing ObamaCare.
It seems there is a double-standard at ABC as to what constituted partisan activity. And yet they insist they are being objective.
The National Center has been tracking national advertisers of ABC's daily "World News" program all summer as well as its specials on health care and oil. You can find a list of these sponsors and their contact information here. Write or call those sponsors. Tell them what you think of a network that restricts the ability of both sides of an issue to make their case.
In the commercial, Dr. Cuffe warned that what he feared might happen here under Obamacare is already happening in places such as Canada and England. The National Center recently published a compilation of stories of people denied proper and efficient care under government-run health care schemes abroad that can be downloaded for free by going here.
This post was written by David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
A National Health Service: Costly, Yes, and Powerful, Too
Professor Jacobson over at the Legal Insurrection blog has a good post up on the cost of the British National Health Service, based on a recent article from the London Times.
Something the good professor does not address, at least in that post, are the political repercussions of creating such a large government workforce. By the time a public health system has 1.5 million employees, as Britain's NHS does, the politicians become afraid to enact reforms that affect even some of these workers adversely -- even desperately-needed reforms with plenty of support from the general public.
The U.S. has five times the population of the United Kingdom. Had we made the same decision Britain made 50 years ago and created a National Health Service of our own, all other things equal, it would have 7,500,000 employees today.
Anyone imagine that, had we done so, that either the Republicans or the Democrats would be willing to speak truth to a power block that large?
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Don't Let Health Care 'Reform' Rain on Your Picnic
The National Association of Manufacturers has a released a new video using a picnic analogy to succinctly illustrate ways we can improve our health care system -- and warning us of the dangers of the so-called "public option."
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If you followed with interest our articles from August (here and here) about how the U.S. Postal Service has been rationing stamps, you may want to check out Meredith Jessup's followup to it on the TownHall.com blog, and the comments to her post there.
I find amusing the people who -- on the TownHall.com blog and elsewhere -- complained that the real problem is that we wanted to buy 3,000 stamps in the first place.
C'mon, people! The post office makes its money by selling stamps. Plus, 3,000 letters is a miniscule amount of mail to the postal service.
As noted earlier, at least no one relies on the post office for health care.
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Making Dan Rather look good: Swedish newspaper admits it had no evidence when it claimed Jews steal organs from Palestinian children, then defends article making the claim.
Unions get a handout in the health care bill. Cheer up: Only $10 billion. (H/T @BridgettWagner)
Betsy McCaughey on Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, friend of 15-to 40-year-olds everywhere.
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Examiner: If Americans were getting an average of 20 miles to the gallon before Cash for Clunkers, they are getting 20.0046 mpg after it. In a best-case scenario.
The perpetually non-serious (despite his grim look) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed on ABC's This Week that "the argument against the public option is sheer nonsense, we know that, it's nothing except the insurance lobby." (See the last few seconds of video, above.)
So the tens of millions of Americans who ardently oppose a public option (takeover) are insurance companies?
Gee, with millions of insurance companies out there, infesting Congressional town hall meetings, tea parties and whatnot, you'd think we wouldn't need the so-called "enhanced competition" of Krugman and Obama's public "option."
Earlier this month, ObamaCare opponents were racists. Now we're insurance companies. What will we be in September -- potted plants?
Download a pre-production PDF of The National Center for Public Policy Research's upcoming new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Stories of Government Health Care, for more on the way waiting lists affect the lives of people living in countries with government-run medicine. Feel free to email a free copy to Krugman.
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Join me in urging our President and every Member of Congress to read the article "How American Health Care Killed My Father" by David Goldhill in the September issue of the Atlantic.
Sample paragraph:
I'm a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America's lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system - largely problems of incentives - our reforms won't do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government's role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.
Read it all here, pass the link (or this post) on to your Congressman, the White House and to others you know.
Outrage of the Day: A Rockefeller Questioning Profits
Senator John D. Rockfeller IV (D-WV) has sent a letter to the top 15 health insurance companies asking them to report how profitable they are. In part because Rockefeller is a Senate Committee chairman, the letters carry with them the threat of an implied subpoena if the companies don't respond.
The day he had the letters sent, Rockefeller said in a statement, "Too often consumers are not getting a fair deal for what they pay, they are not getting the protections they deserve, and the insurance companies are awash in profit."
How does he know? He can't have received any replies yet.
As the Senator's condemnation of the replies before he received them implies, this is grandstanding, not research. Health insurance companies report their profits to various regulators.
Why, if the Senator honestly wanted to know, he could have Googled it. I did.
'For every premium dollar that they take in, about 83 cents goes out in medical costs -- doctors, hospitals, and drugs,' says Carl McDonald, health insurance analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. The rest is spent on overhead. Net income comes to just a few cents per dollar of premiums.
More Google results here, here, and here, among many others.
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Quote of Note: Median Wait Between Referral to a Specialist and Treatment in Canada is 17.3 Weeks
"In 2008, the median wait time from general practitioner referral to treatment by a specialist was 17.3 weeks in Canada. Despite substantial increases in both health spending and federal cash transfers to the provinces for health care over the last decade or so, that wait time was 45 per cent longer than the overall median wait time of 11.9 weeks back in 1997. It was 86 per cent longer than the overall median wait time of 9.3 weeks in 1993.
"Canada's waiting lists are also, according to the available evidence, among the longest in the developed world. For example, a 2007 survey of individuals published in the journal Health Affairs found that Canadians, as compared to patients in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S., were most likely to wait more than one month for elective surgery, six days or longer to see a doctor when ill, and two hours or more for access to the ER."
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"Whenever anything has a zero explicit price associated with it, consumer demand will increase substantially, and healthcare is no exception. At the same time, bureaucratic bungling will guarantee gross inefficiencies that will get worse and worse each year. As costs get out of control and begin to embarrass those who have promised all Americans a free healthcare lunch, the politicians will do what all governments do and impose price controls, probably under some euphemism such as 'global budget controls.'
"Price controls, or laws that force prices down below market-clearing levels (where supply and demand are coordinated), artificially stimulate the amount demanded by consumers while reducing supply by making it unprofitable to supply as much as previously. The result of increased demand and reduced supply is shortages. Non-price rationing becomes necessary. This means that government bureaucrats, not individuals and their doctors, inevitably determine who will get medical treatment and who will not, what kind of medical technology will be available, how many doctors there will be, and so forth."
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Quote of Note: Under Socialized Medicine, Rationing is Inevitable
"As FA Hayek pointed out many years ago in his masterpiece, The Constitution of Liberty, if healthcare is paid for out of general taxation and delivered free at the point of delivery, then in a world of scarce resources - and healthcare is always constrained at any time by the supply of doctors, drugs, etc - then such care must be rationed by some form of bureaucratic/political rule...
...Now a socialist might respond that it is still better for health care to be rationed by some rule they consider to be 'fair' than by the supposed lottery of the market, although in fact, as I would respond, there is, due to the benefits of competition and entrepreneurship, far greater chance that all but the poorest will get better healthcare under a genuine free market in health than under the system of centralised, state-provided healthcare."
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Girl, 17, Faces Paralysis Thanks to Gov't Health Care Waiting List
A young lady in Ireland fears she may be paralyzed for life because Ireland's government-run health care service hasn't gotten around to putting her on the waiting list for the operation she needs -- and the waiting list is a year long.
A teenage girl will be left paralysed if she does not get urgent surgery on her spine.
Lauren Browne (17) told the Herald that, despite the seriousness of her situation, she is not even on the year-long waiting list for an operation.
Lauren suffers from idiopathic scoliosis and is struggling to get on the list for the life-changing procedure at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, due to severe budget cuts imposed by the HSE.
The operation would drastically improve Lauren's quality of life and the teen runs the risk of becoming paralysed without it.
"I'm not even on the waiting list. I'm on the waiting list for the waiting list. My surgeon told me that I cannot wait a year. My vertebrae is rotating so rapidly that I have the risk of being paralysed if I wait for the surgery that long."
Lauren's quality of life has deteriorated since the diagnosis and she hit out at the HSE for what she feels is its lack of concern.
Lauren said: "The HSE just don't seem to care. Our cases are not qualified as life threatening, but I have no idea how they don't consider this to be life threatening. They have no idea what it's like for me.
"When I was told I would have to wait at least a year, I nearly started crying. It was horrible to hear," she said...
Ah, well, she's 17. Her best years are already behind her, right?
Watch for The National Center for Public Policy Research's upcoming new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Stories of Government Health Care, for more on the way waiting lists affect the lives of people living in countries with government-run medicine.
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There's been a bit of a fuss in Britain the last few days. It's keyed to Americans taking a look at the performance of their government-run health care system, the National Health Service, or NHS, and finding it wanting.
It seems that more than a few Britons are taking this personally, as if our horror at seeing, for example, Britons routinely denied potentially-lifesaving cancer drugs because of their cost is a hostile, anti-Britain sentiment.
Quite the contrary: If we did not like you, we wouldn't be so horrified.
Beginning soon, we'll be running a story a day from the book in this blog. As we do, I expect I'll also be editorializing a good bit more about what our friends in Britain have said in defense of their own health system, and their attacks on our own.
In the meantime, I recommend this excellent post on the Classically Liberal blog, which contains several stories from Britain.
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Is Obama Really Dropping the So-Called Public Option? Not a Chance
The media is making much of the Obama Administration's hints that the President will no longer insist on a so-called "public option" in a health care bill he signs, but the idea of a government-started "co-op" alternative to private health insurance has not been abandoned.
What we have here is the left, finding a block on a road heading left, choosing another read, also heading left.
A closer look suggests that the only thing intriguing about the co-op alternative is whether it is a completely meaningless construct or simply camouflage for the "Public Plan" option...
...The new co-ops would presumably have to advertise like other insurance companies, build physician networks, pay competitive reimbursement rates, and in general act like, well, every other insurance company. It is suggested that the new federal co-ops would be nonprofits, and therefore would offer better service and lower costs. But many insurance companies, including "mutual" insurers and many "Blues," are already nonprofit companies. If the new co-ops operate under the same rules as other nonprofit insurers, why bother?
And there's the rub. Supporters of government-run health care have no intention of letting the co-ops be independent enterprises that operate by the same rules as other insurers. This is not really about creating more choices and competition. In fact, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) makes it clear, for example, that the co-op's officers and directors would be appointed by the president and Congress. He insists that there be a single national co-op. And Congress would set the rules under which it operates. As Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) says, "It's got to be written in a way that accomplishes the objectives of a public option."
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks likes a duck, it's probably a duck.
Moreover, several previous attempts by governments to set up co-ops have, in fact, failed. Perhaps the largest such failure was the Florida Community Health Purchasing Alliance, which was set up by the State of Florida in 1993, and at one time covered 98,000 people. It was unable to attract small business customers and ultimately went out of business in 2000. Does anyone really believe that a Congress that is busy bailing out banks and automobile companies because they are 'too big to fail" is going to sit idly by while one of these new co-ops suffers a similar fate?
If a "co-op" is run by the federal government under rules imposed by the federal government with funding provided by the federal government, it's simply government-run health insurance by another name. Opponents of a government takeover of the health care system should not be fooled.
A single national co-op with officers and director appointed by the President and Congress and set up to accomplish the objectives of a public option.
Sounds exactly like government-run health care to me.
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Want a Baby? Thanks to Government Health Care, In Britain Becoming a Parent May Depend on Where You Live
Everyone over a certain age knows what you have to do if you want to have a baby -- that is, except in Britain, where for some couples, the route to parenthood lies in changing their home address.
That's because Britain's government-run health care system, the National Health Service, or NHS, decides whether to provide in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures to couples based in part on their home address.
It's a situation known as the "postcode lottery" to ordinary Britons, who have long known that their ability to get knee replacement operations, cancer-curing drugs and other medical services and procedures may be granted -- or withheld -- from them simply because of where they live.
Now, thanks to a survey by a Member of Parliament, it's become clear that its not just quality-of-life and death that may be determined in the postcode lottery, but the opportunity to be born itself.
MP Grant Shapps found that the regional primary care trusts under which the NHS operates have widely divergent rules covering when couples are eligible to receive IVF services, despite the existence of uniform national recommendations set out by the British government's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE.
Under NICE recommendations, women under 40 should be eligible for up to three cycles of IVF on the NHS. Nonetheless, in some areas it was unavailable to women aged 23-39. In others it was available only to women aged 37-39.
In about half of Britain, the NHS declines IVF services to couples in which one partner already has a child. Likewise, in half the country couples are required to have been in a relationship with one another for at least three years before seeking treatment, while in other areas there is a shorter time requirement, or none.
In many parts of Britain couples who smoke are ineligible for IVF, although some regional trusts relent if only the man smokes.
Despite NICE guidelines calling for access to three cycles of IVF on the public NHS system for all women under 40, Britain's Department of Health said only 30 percent of regional primary care trusts provided three cycles, 23 percent provided two cycles and 47 percent one cycle.
Watch for The National Center for Public Policy Research's upcoming new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Stories of Government Health Care, for more on "postcode lotteries" and rationing in countries with government-run medicine.
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"Because I have traveled a great deal in my life, often recklessly so, alone, and to weird places in search of answers to topographical questions of the ancient Mediterranean world, and first-hand observations about battles and campaigns in out of the way places for several books— I have ended up over the last 36 years in a number of socialist hospitals: E-coli poisoning in Athens from tainted strawberries; a cut tendon on my index finger from a barbed wire fence in Sparta (with reaction to live tetanus vaccination); a severed ureter due to an impacted staghorn calculus kidney stone from dehydration of excavating at Corinth; a light case of malaria at Karnak, Egypt; an out of control, strep throat that turned into something more in Izmir, Turkey; a ruptured appendix, surgery, and peritonitis in Tripolis, Libya, and so on.
In each case, the care was terrible. A sole lonely doctor or maverick nurse in two cases saved my life, but on the average the facilities were filthy, and the employees akin to those in the government-run post office or bank. And a strange thing occurred as well: often the staff became mad at the patient: 'Why did you come here with an appendix problem?'; You should have not let your strep get out of control!'; 'If you don't drink water, what do you expect!'; 'See what happens when you don't take all your quinine pills!'."
-Victor Davis Hanson, "On Becoming Europe," Pajamas Media, August 12, 2009
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John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods, has eight suggestions for improving health care in today's Wall Street Journal.
They are, quoting Mackey:
Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems...
Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits...
Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines...
Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.
Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.
Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost...
Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.
Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
Mackey's op-ed is excellent. I strongly encourage folks to read the whole thing.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Vice President David Ridenour. E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow on Twitter.
Triumph of hope over experience: Pro-Georgian blogger asks Russian government to defend his free speech rights.
Got the flu in Britain? Need medical help? No problem! The government health service will put a 16-year-old on the phone with you.
President Obama claims U.S. private-care doctors remove tonsils too often. That's a problem the family of this 16-year-old in Britain wishes their government health service had.
The BBC wonders: Why do Hollywood movies about autistic people focus on the very few who have savant abilities? I wonder: Why is BBC surprised to find Hollywood being unrealistic?
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Egg on Face of Left, But It's Probably the Right's Fault Anyway
The left-wing Think Progress website reports that the situation of Kenneth Gladney, the "Don't Tread on Me" t-shirt salesman who reportedly was assaulted at a town meeting last week, "underscores the vital need for health care reform" because Gladney "has no affordable health care option available."
Another website the group quotes, the Moderate Voice, says, "If anything was more calculated to make the Right look foolish than this St. Louis incident then I'd love to see it."
But of course the Right is always defending the accuracy of the mainstream media, so the whole muck-up is probably still our fault.
To Think Progress' credit, it updated its blog post with the information that Mr. Gladney does have health insurance.
Nevertheless, something more needs to be said: this debate is not only, or even primarily, about access to health insurance. It is about access to health care. No one argues that Mr. Gladney got that, and promptly, too.
As a new book the National Center for Public Policy Research will soon release, "Shattered Lives: 100 Stories of Government Health Care" aptly demonstrates, prompt (or even any) access to health care is not something people in Britain, Canada, Australia or other nations with government-run health care systems can take for granted.
Insurance they got.
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Pelosi and Hoyer: "'Un-American' Attacks Can't Derail Health Care Debate"
Here's a link to the op-ed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD).
It's not very good, and not at all factual (haven't they read the bill?), but as its headline, helped along by Drudge, has made it notorious, I thought folks might like a link.
By the way, who agrees with me that "the promise of affordable health care for all" -- as the Representatives put it -- has not been the most debate domestic issue since the Lyndon Johnson Administration, as Pelosi and Hoyer claim? Just a guess, but I think the honor for that title would go to the abortion debate.
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Obama/DNC Health Care Operation Urges Congressional Visits
Someone who lives in Virginia but who did not mention that his name could be used sent me and others the attached two-page flyer from President Obama's health care operation.
(Open each photo in a new tab or window to enlarge it, or download a PDF of the entire document here.)
The person had signed up to be on the Obama email list when Obama was a presidential candidate and received this by email.
In this case, the operation was encouraging this person to visit the office of Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia to lobby Senator Warner in favor of what the flyer calls "the President's health care guarantees."
Notice the flyer bypasses the issue of which, if any, legislation the recipient -- or the Senator -- is encouraged to favor. Recipients are just supposed to ask the Senator for the vaguely good-sounding items listed on the flyer, and leave the details to their supposed betters in Washington.
(For myself, I would never lobby anyone for "no gender discrimination" in health care, as I never used health services more than when I was carrying twins, and I have never once had even a bit of prostate trouble.)
Notice also that Obama's operation wants people to report to them how office visits go (see the section entitled "After Your Visit" on the flyer) and how the staff responds.
I post these pages for informational purposes only. Do with them what you will.
Note: This post was edited after publishing to add the option of downloading a PDF of the flyer.
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Other than the ones in Congress, what is a pantywaist, anyway?
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Attention Paul Krugman: This Isn't About Obama Being Black
The New York Times' Paul Krugman suggests that the protesters against ObamaCare at townhall meetings are "reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing... than to who he is" -- a black man.
Really? If that's true where were all these protesters during the campaign last year? Has the president changed his ethnicity since then?
This isn't about Obama being black... it's about him being pink.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Vice President David Ridenour. E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow on Twitter.
Project 21 has also called on President Obama to condemn "this effort to stifle debate with race-baiting tactics"; as well as "all efforts to derail legitimate public debate."
Krugman's column drew the following specific comments from Project 21 members:
Mychal Massie (Pennsylvania):
"Paul Krugman is the one with race on the brain. Specifically, he is using race in the lowest and most repulsive declinations. He is using it because every other argument to stem the growing tide of condemnation for the proposed health care reform bill has failed. Ergo, when all else fails, parade out the race card and attempt to incite blacks into becoming the useful idiots.
"Opposition to the proposed health care bill isn't based on race. It is based on a people who are tired of Congress and the President spitting in their faces. It is the collective resolve of a people who are tired of being tread upon. One would think a Nobel prize-winner such as Krugman could figure that out."
Mychal Massie is chairman of Project 21.
Joe Hicks (Los Angeles, California):
"I must have somehow missed the articles from Krugman and other liberal and leftist members of the mainstream media that were critical of the activities of ACORN - the radical, leftist group Barack Obama once represented. Somehow, their heavy-handed activities - that many argue bent the boundaries of legality - were just considered to be the organized expression of disadvantaged communities.
"Now the same shameless, clueless writers are trying to convince us that those Americans who rightfully feel threatened by government-run health care and confront Obama's noxious scheme at public forums are somehow the acts of a 'mob.' Krugman reveals his bias by admitting that people are genuinely angry without bringing himself to understand exactly why they are mad. Smearing the rightful anger and concern of everyday Americans as collections of angry, old white folks - or part of the 'birthers' movement - shows the elitist disdain that liberal journalists such as Krugman have for democracy in action."
Joe Hicks is a Pajamas Television commentator and vice president of Community Advocates, Inc. of Los Angeles. He is a former executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission and former executive director of the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Deneen Borelli (East Chester, New York):
"Krugman's commentary shows he is as out of touch as many of our elected officials are with real Americans. What's happening at town hall meetings has nothing to do with race and everything to do with concern over the rapid expansion of government.
"Americans are frustrated that letters, phone calls and e-mails to their elected representatives have had no impact on significant pieces of legislation such as cap-and-trade and stimulus spending. Americans are taking the next logical step by directly voicing their opinions to their representatives at town hall meetings."
Deneen Borelli is a full-time fellow with Project 21. She serves on the board of trustees of The Opportunity Charter School in Harlem, New York and previously served as Manager of Media Relations with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Bishop Council Nedd II (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania):
"I have nothing to do with the 'birther' issue, but I do have concerns about health care. So do the people in my parishes and in the local diner where I eat every day. Living in central Pennsylvania, these truly are the people portrayed in the Norman Rockwell painting about freedom of speech that Krugman reference in his column. To imply these people are now racists is racist in itself.
"Approximately half of the U.S. population didn't vote for Obama in the first place. Why is Krugman shocked that there is opposition to the Obama health care plan, and that people dare to voice their concern at public meetings? The Obama plan inserts government officials into end-of-life decisions for seniors and those among us with the least. That is not a race issue, that is a privacy issue. The Obama plan has given a whole new meaning to the idea of government for the people. This health plan is a bitter pill shoved down people's throat against their will."
Council Nedd is an Anglican bishop, serving the Diocese of the Chesapeake.
Bob Parks (Athol, Massachusetts):
"Why is it when liberals want to make their points, their knee-jerk reaction is to go racial? Paul Krugman is supposedly a journalist. Before throwing out the race card while speculating, he should give us some attributed quotes. Minus that, what he thinks is irrelevant."
Bob Parks is a Project 21 member and media commentator, and operator of the Black and Right web site.
Jimmie Hollis (Millville, New Jersey):
"I knew the moment Obama became a presidential candidate that anyone disagreeing with him would be called a racist, and that any opposition to his political views would be seen as racism. The left has always played the race card because it works.
"But I am nonetheless happy to see that people on the right and many in the middle are now beginning to speaking out firmly and with passion against policies they oppose. President Obama should speak out and condemn Paul Krugman racial commentary."
Jimmie L. Hollis is a Project 21 member and is retired from the U.S. Air Force, in which he served from 1962-1987.
Geoffrey Moore (Chicago, Illinois):
"This is not about race. It is about government control. The system is not perfect, but there is no need to have the government take over control of the entire health care system. The government has not demonstrated the ability to efficiently control costs and provide good service.
"Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who are not up in arms about their insurance. There are people who are somewhat pleased with the coverage they have. The government getting involved will create enormous expense and waste, while creating more problems than they intend to solve."
Geoffrey Moore is a Project 21 member and a marketing analyst in Chicago.
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10 reasons the government should take over health care (NOT).
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Does a "DUI on a horse" charge mean the rider is drunk - or the horse?
Not all the ignorant kids are American. One in 20 British children believe singer Bob Geldof discovered gravity and that the classic book "Pride and Prejudice" was written by JK Rowling. (H/T Adam Smith blog)
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House Republicans to Introduce Health Care Plan Thursday
House Republicans will introduce a health care bill tomorrow.
For those with an interest, below is the text of a one-pager describing the bill that the conservative House Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Tom Price, M.D., is distributing on the Hill:
EMPOWERING PATIENTS FIRST ACT
A Solution from the Republican Study Committee for Access to Affordable, Quality Health Care for All Americans
Pillar #1: Access to Coverage for All Americans
Makes the purchase of health care financially feasible for all - Extends the income tax deduction (above the line) on health care premiums to those who purchase coverage in the non-group / individual market. And, there is an advanceable, refundable tax credit (on a sliding scale) for low-income individuals to purchase coverage in the non-group / individual market.
Covers pre-existing conditions - Grants states incentives to establish high-risk / reinsurance pools. Federal block grants for qualified pools are expanded.
Protects employer-sponsored insurance - Individuals can be automatically enrolled in an employer-sponsored plan. Small businesses are given tax incentives for adoption of auto-enrollment.
Shines sunlight on health plans - Establishes health plan and provider portals in each state, and these portals act to supply greater information, rather than acting as a purchasing mechanism.
Pillar #2: Coverage Is Truly Owned by the Patient
Grants greater choice and portability - Gives patients the power to own and control their own health care coverage by allowing for a defined contribution in employer-sponsored plans. This also gives employers more flexibility in the benefits offered.
Expands the individual market - Creates pooling mechanisms, such as association health plans and individual membership accounts. Individuals are also allowed to shop for health insurance across state lines.
Reforms the safety net - Medicaid and SCHIP beneficiaries are given the option of a voucher to purchase private insurance. And states must cover 90% of those below 200% of the federal poverty level before they can expand eligibility levels under Medicaid and SCHIP.
Pillar #3: Improve the Health Care Delivery Structure
Institutes doctor-led quality measures - Nothing suggested by the Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research can be finalized unless done in consultation with and approved by medical specialty societies. It also establishes performance-based quality measures endorsed by the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI) and physician specialty organizations.
Reimburses physicians to ensure continuity of care - Rebases the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) and establishes two separate conversion factors (baskets) for primary care and all other services.
Promotes healthier lifestyles - Allows for employers to offer discounts for healthy habits through wellness and prevention programs.
Pillar #4: Rein in Out-of-Control Costs
Reforms the medical liability system - Establishes administrative health care tribunals, also known as health courts, in each state, and adds affirmative defense through provider-established best practice measures. It also encourages the speedy resolution of claims and caps non-economic damages.
Pays for the plan - The cost of the plan is completely offset through decreasing defensive medicine, savings from health care efficiencies (reduce DSH payments), ferreting out waste, fraud, and abuse, plus an annual one-percent non-defense discretionary spending step down.
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RedState reports: A top Democratic Congressional staffer says hospice is how the Democrats' health care bill controls health care costs.
MoveOn.org organized a rally in favor of Obama's health care reform legislation outside GOP Senator John Cornyn's Dallas office, but found itself outnumbered by Tea Party patriots as much as 20-1.
Midwives to be paid the same as doctors under the House Democrats' health care bill. America to follow Britain in giving up having a doctor present at births?
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus agree with President Obama about the Cambridge Police Department.
Put some tobacco in a pipe and smoke it, and your government health premiums go up. Put some crack in and smoke it and, hey, no problem!
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Apparently fearful the American people will see the chart Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) and GOP members of Congress' Joint Economic Committee released about the House Democrats' health care bill, House Democrats are reportedly blocking GOP attempts to mail it to their constituents.
The Democrats say (as far as I know, with a straight face) that they are blocking distribution not because they are censoring criticism, but because the chart is not precisely accurate.
For the record, the Republicans who created the chart say it is accurate. Meanwhile, we can expect the born-again accuracy czars of the House Democrat caucus to start admitting their health plan will lead to rationing, their cap-and-trade bill will kill jobs and that their stimulus bill was about pork and political payoffs.
Click on the chart to enlarge it
There's no copyright on this chart, so why not annoy a liberal Congressman today by emailing it to all your friends? Click the little envelope or one of the "share" options below to do so easily.
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Black Activist Speaks Out Against Proposed Unequal Allocation of Health Resources
For Release: July 23, 2009 Contact: David Almasi at 202/543-4110x11
An examination of the 1018-page "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009" (H.R. 3200) - the official Obama health care bill - finds several cases in which grant money for medical training can be awarded solely on factors of race and class.
Project 21 member Bishop Council Nedd II, an Anglican bishop and director of the Ecumenical Institute for Health Policy Research based at Valley Forge Christian College, is condemning the addition of racial preferences to the President's legislation.
"The U.S. Supreme Court just struck down racial preferences. So why does a newly-introduced bill want to perpetuate something that has just been declared unconstitutional?" asked Project 21's Nedd. "Racial preferences will not improve health care. They will increase tensions when some people are being unfairly put at the front of the line."
Between pages 878 and 909 of H.R. 3200, in an area related to grants for medical training, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is empowered to grant preference in awarding training grants. For the specialties of "family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics, geriatrics and physician assistantship" (pages 878-882); "medical residents on community-based settings" (pages 883-886) and "general, pediatric and public health dentists and dental hygienists" (pages 887-891), it is written that "the Secretary shall give preference to... entities that have a demonstrated record of... training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds."
Further, the bill amends the Public Health Service Act to give preferences in "advanced education nursing grants" to programs that "increase diversity among advanced education nurses" (pages 892-895). Grants for "enhancing the public health workforce" similarly give preference to "entities that have a demonstrated record of... training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds" (pages 907-909).
Nedd added: "By making racial preferences a shortcut to federal funding, schools will reduce their quest for the best and turn it into a hunt for the right racial numbers. This, in the long run, will hurt the quality of our nation's health care. We need to stop the social experimentation and focus on cost and performance."
Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, has been a leading voice of the African-American community since 1992. For more information, contact David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 x11 or Project21@nationalcenter.org, or visit Project 21's website at http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21Index.html.
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It seems the White House plans to re-write the health care bill after some version of it passes the House and Senate, then jam the re-written version through Congress before anyone in Congress -- or the public -- has a chance to see what's in it.
Is this the transparency candidate Obama promised?
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Paul Mirengoff says Walter Cronkite "didn't represent the victory of substance over style, but rather the victory of a style that implied substance over substance itself." I agree.
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), a doctor in the real world, gives a good description of the majority's health care destruction bill in these comments delivered to his fellow members of the House Education and Labor Committee. Following Price's sharp exchange with Committee Chairman George Miller (D-CA) over something Price says Speaker Pelosi said and Miller says she didn't, my favorite part is Price saying this: "You know what [the American people] will have access to? They have access to an opportunity to get in line. They'll be able to get in line."
Price also said, flatly, that the House Democrats' bill "will destroy health care in this nation."
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Speaking of the government letting people die, here's a story from Fox News last year about a 53-year-old cancer patient in Lane County, Oregon who wanted Oregon's public health plan to help him pay for chemotherapy.
Nothing doing, said Oregon, as the man's cancer was such that chemotherapy stood less than a 95 percent chance of guaranteeing the man would live an additional five years.
Two years or 4 years 11 months of life was not worth the cost of chemo to Oregon.
But don't think Oregon's government-run health plan lacked sympathy. It sent the man a letter offering to foot the bill for physician-assisted suicide.
And no, the letter was not a mistake. It was official policy.
House Health Care "Reform" Bill Bans Sale of Private Health Insurance Policies
Investor's Business Daily is reporting that page 16 of the House Majority's health care bill bans new health insurance policies from being sold after the bill becomes law.
The editorial says, in part:
It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised - with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers...
...It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It's scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we'll come across in the final 1,002.
There's more in the editorial; for copyright reasons I could only excerpt it. Please go to Investor's Business Daily and read "It's Not An Option" immediately. Then ask your friends to do so.
This isn't merely a smoking gun showing the liberals are making a hard push now for socialized medicine, folks. This is a forest fire.
Addendum, 9:30 AM: A private source is telling me that, under the legislation, individual private insurance policies would still be permitted for sale through the government's insurance exchange, but the current system for the purchase and sale of health insurance would be shut down. So, as Matt Drudge would say, developing...
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) and GOP members of Congress' Joint Economic Committee have released the following chart explaining how the House Majority's health care plan is structured.
Click on the chart to enlarge it
There's no copyright on this chart. Why not email it (or this post -- see options below) to a friend?
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The Government's Penalties for Success Are Running Into Its Subsidies for Failure
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) says today in an article by Matt Cover for CNSNews.com that small businesses don't make $280,000 a year, so new health care tax hikes at that level won't harm small business.
Oddly though -- as a commenter on the CNSNews.com website noted -- the Small Business Administration will provide financial assistance to firms making many times that.
If you manufacture cigarettes, for example, you are eligible for Small Business Administration assistance if you have a thousand employees. Setting aside the question of why Congress is subsidizing cigarette manufacturing while penalizing it with sin taxes, can we rationally assume a business with a thousand employees never clears $280,000 a year?
So we appear to have a case in which you are penalized for being rich at the same time you are subsidized for not being rich enough.
But there is a method to Congress' madness, says Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX), as reported by Adam Brickley and Fadia Galindo for CNSNews.com. The Congressional majority's health care tax plan is designed to harm small businesses sufficiently to force them to cut their employees' health care benefits, thus forcing those employees onto the public health care plan.
So when it looks like Congress is taxing and subsidizing the same people in a completely nonsensical way, we can rest assured that there is a purpose behind it after all -- the purpose of driving as many of us as politically-possible into a substandard, inevitably insolvent public health care plan.
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Have a Disabled Child? Mom Getting Forgetful? Expect ObamaCare to Let Them Die
Longtime conservative activist Foster Friess writes on his Campfire blog of Dr. Zeke Emanuel's plans to limit the health care expenses of "individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens..."
In other words, if you are getting old, or not all there mentally, bye bye to you if you need health services that cost money.
Is Dr. Emanuel some powerless nut? If only!
No, he's President Obama's Special Advisor for Health Policy, his brother is the White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, and Dr. Emanuel laid out these views in the influential British medical journal The Lancet.
Have a severely disabled child? Mom getting forgetful? If this kind of thinking becomes policy (beware: it could), expect ObamaCare to let them die.
CNSNews.com's Monica Gabriel and Marie Magleby report today that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer actually laughed when asked by CNSNews.com if Members of Congress should read a government health care "reform" bill before voting on it.
"If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn't read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes," Hoyer told CNSNews.com.
If the bill is so unimportant it's not worth the trouble to read (by people who are paid well to read it, no less!), maybe we should just do without.
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Quote of Note: Do We Now Need Government for Big Ticket Items?
"Health is potentially a big-ticket item, but so is a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System -- or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America."
"When President Obama tells you he's 'reforming' health care to 'control costs,' the point to remember is that the only way to control costs in health care is to have less of it."
"Prevention of a disease, we all assume, should save us money, right? An ounce of prevention...? Alas, If only such aphorisms were true we’d hand out apples each day and our problems would be over.
It is true that if the prevention strategies we are talking about are behavioral things—eat better, lose weight, exercise more, smoke less, wear a seat belt—then they cost very little and they do save money by keeping people healthy.
But if your preventive strategy is medical, if it involves us, if it consists of screening, finding medical conditions early, shaking the bushes for high cholesterols, or abnormal EKGs, markers for prostate cancer such as PSA, then more often than not you don’t save anything and you might generate more medical costs. Prevention is a good thing to do, but why equate it with saving money when it won’t?"
This Associated Press report is a decent overview of where the health care debate is on the Hill right now, which is to say, no where. At this moment, anyway.
That said, I very much caution those of us who fear an advance of government-run health care with its attendant long lines and rationing not to relax one bit. We've seen with the stimulus package, among other things, that this President and Congress are willing to leap first and look after. That's a recipe for passing something, even if it's horrible, just so they can say they did so.
The left has wanted government-run health care for years and the left-wing of the Democratic Party will not be especially forgiving if this President and Congress don't deliver it. Furthermore, President Obama is aware that a failure to deliver something major for the left on health care will be attributed especially to him (and from what we've seen so far, rightly so, as he's been providing scant leadership to his side). The longer this drags on, the less the White House will care about passing a bill that actually works for America, and more about getting something, anything, approved.
That could be trouble for all of us.
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Obama Shouldn't Be Taken Literally, Says White House
Courtesy of the White House itself, we now know why President Obama was willing to break a health care promise before he even made it.
According to the White House, the Associated Press reports, Obama didn't really do that, because Obama's promises "shouldn't be taken literally."
"Promises shouldn't be taken literally" could be the Obama White House's version of the Clinton White House's "depends on what the definition of is is."
Just speak straight, people! (But thanks for warning us that we can't trust you.)
Roll Call reports that negotiations over climate legislation among Democrats on Capitol Hill blew up last night.
This mimics the disorder among members of the Congressional majority on health care. CNN reported today that that the Democrats' plans to advance government's role in health care may be "on the rocks"; that's our sense of things as well.
Believers in a free market should not become overconfident, however; the left still holds most of the cards, and it has shown in the past that it is willing to pass nearly anything, as long as it is left-wing and/or shovels tax money to groups and individuals allied with the left. The Congressional majority will gladly pass bad, even horrendous, bills on climate and health care (indeed, from what I can see, they are only considering horrendous bills), so the odds against our team remain high.
That said, I'm amazed at the incompetence and lack of discipline going on in leftist ranks on the Hill. Congressional liberals were mostly out of power from 1995-2007 (House liberals were the entire time). They wanted to curb our use of energy and increase government's role in health care decisionmaking during that entire period, so why did they not get together and make plans? Work out drafts and get those drafts scored?
The Republican majority in Congress had its problems, but it sure hit the ground running in 1995.
This makes no sense to me.
P.S. One possibility just occurred to me. Possibly the environmental groups, with their hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, did not expend enough effort to get folks together on their version of climate heaven because they figure, if a climate bill passes, they wouldn't be able to do fundraising on global warming anymore. That's just a guess on my part, though. Could be they've just been incompetent.
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Project 21's Borelli to Discuss MSM's ObamaCare Bias Monday on Fox
Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli is scheduled to appear on the Fox News Channel's online "Strategy Room" program on Monday, June 22 between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM eastern.
Deneen expects to discuss the President's seemingly unfettered access to a sympathetic mainstream media as President Obama promotes legislation to increase the role of government in individual health care decisions. In particular, Deneen plans to speak about ABC's hour-long "Prescription for America" program that will air this coming Wednesday.
To access the live Internet broadcast, click here and then click the "STREAM THIS NOW" headline in the center or the page under the photo.
This post was written by David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's decision to give up for now on a federal public health care plan has to be a blow to the Administration and the left.
Daschle, while retired from the Senate, remains an influential and respected voice in the Democratic party. This can't be happy news for the left.
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Obama Breaks Health Care Pledge... Before He Makes It
Everyone expects politicians to break their promises, but Barack Obama may have set a record yesterday by breaking one before he made it.
In his speech before the American Medical Association's annual meeting in Chicago Monday, President Obama pledged:
...no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period.
If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.
But Obama had previously unveiled a plan that would do just that: take health care plans away from millions of Americans who want to keep them.
In his 2010 budget, Obama calls for cutting federal outlays for Medicare Advantage plans by more than $175 billion over ten years. If he prevails, millions of seniors would face higher premiums, higher co-payments and reduced benefits.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the change would result in a decline in Medicare Advantage enrollment of seven million senior citizens.
A promise to the American people?
I guess it depends on what your definition of American people is.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Vice President David Ridenour. Write him at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
Quote of Note: How Big Would a U.S. Health Bureaucracy Be?
"The British National Health Service is the biggest employer not just in the United Kingdom, but in the whole of Europe. Care to estimate the size and budget of a U.S. health bureaucracy?"
CBO: Kennedy's Health Care Bill Would Increase Deficit by $1.0 Trillion from 2010-2019
The Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation staff released this evening (PDF) a "preliminary analysis" of Title I of the draft of the Affordable Health Choices Act, which was created by Democrats on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
...According to our preliminary assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. When fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million or 17 million.
These new figures do not represent a formal or complete cost estimate for the draft legislation, for several reasons. The estimates provided do not address the entire bill—only the major provisions related to health insurance coverage. Some details have not been estimated yet, and the draft legislation has not been fully reviewed. Also, because expanded eligibility for the Medicaid program may be added at a later date, those figures are not likely to represent the impact that more comprehensive proposals—which might include a significant expansion of Medicaid or other options for subsidizing coverage for those with income below 150 percent of the federal poverty level—would have both on the federal budget and on the extent of insurance coverage...
The price tag is obviously the big news in this item, but the CBO/Joint Committee estimate that 15 million people would lose their employer-provided health insurance deserves some note.
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A liberal crusade for decades has been the transfer of the U.S. health care system to government hands.
So when the liberals are about to make their most serious run at their cherished prize in 16 years, you'd think they'd leave the pork out of their bill, wouldn't you? Because pork in the bill is a turnoff for many voters, regardless of their position on government-run health care.
I thought so. I was wrong.
According to Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), who is Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the bill released by the Democrats of said committee last week has plenty of work.
According to Enzi, the bill includes:
A "Community Makeover Program" to spend billions to "beautify" streets, up to $10 per person in selected communities;
A federal government program to build new sidewalks and bike paths, and put up street lights;
Financing of new grocery stores and farmers’ markets;
Mandate that a new Washington health police bureaucracy dictate what local restaurants can offer their customers; and,
Subsidizing community projects such as jungle gyms in parks.
The big-spenders are so addicted to pork, they can't keep it out of anything.
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Outrage of the Day: The Max Baucus Proposal to Tax Our Health Insurance Benefits
The left says its move to expand the federal government's role in health care is spurred by a desire to make sure all Americans have health insurance coverage.
But Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is now suggesting that Americans should pay income taxes on the health insurance they receive from employers, with proceeds from the tax earmarked to pay for an expansion of government-run health care.
If you tax something, you get less of it.
So if your goal is to see to it that the amount of health insurance coverage Americans have is increased, the last thing you should do is impose taxes on health insurance benefits.
As Max Baucus is hardly an insignificant player in the left's effort to impose government-run health care, his proposal raises the question: When it comes to health insurance, is the left's real goal to expand the government's role while reducing the private one?
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Myth #1: There are 47 Million Uninsured Americans in Crisis Today Myth #2: Switching to Electronic Records will Save Lives Myth #3: U.S. Health Care is Inferior to the Rest of the World's
Today we have shown that, working together, we can address the enormous economic crisis affecting our country. I am particularly pleased that we have produced an agreement that has a top line of $789 billion dollars. That is less than either the House- or Senate-passed bills. It is a fiscally-responsible number that reflects our efforts to truly focus this bill on programs and policies and tax relief that will help turn our economy around, create jobs and provide relief to the families of our country.
I am also very pleased that we were able to increase the amount of funding for infrastructure. That is the most powerful component in this bill to create jobs. Overall, there is about a hundred and fifty billion dollars in infrastructure this bill when you add together transportation, environmental, broadband, and other projects.
Note that, 40 seconds into the video, just an instant after Senator Collins says "working together," the three Democratic Senators standing directly behind Collins crack up.
I have to agree with the Democrat Senators that any pretense of bipartisanship on bill this one was a joke -- a $789 billion dollar sick joke on the American people that definitely is not, Senator Collins, in any way, "fiscally responsible."
And, say what you will about Senator Specter (really, please do!), in this video he at least has the presence of mind to look absolutely grim. _____
As the White House has announced that the First Lady will watch the President's health care speech tonight with two people who have had what the White House terms as "struggles" with the U.S. health care system, I remind everyone about our new book, "
House Republicans will introduce a health care bill tomorrow. 
Project 21 issued 
Project 21 Fellow 