Obama’s One Man Death Panel
Sarah Palin warned people about this a year ago and was vilified for it. Now it has coming to pass – Obama has named a new head of Medicare, Harvard’s Dr. Donald Berwick, who thinks there is “better use” for funds than to spend it on lifesaving drugs and procedures for the elderly:
He [Berwick] has praised the U.K’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which he says has “developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn.”
Last year, the Orwellian-named NICE unveiled plans to cut annual steroid injections for severe back pain to 3,000 from 60,000. “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospital’s Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph…
If Berwick wants to imitate Britain’s model, perhaps he can explain why breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate while in Britain it’s almost double at 46. Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it; in Britain it kills 57% of those it strikes.
“Donald Berwick is a one-man death panel,” said David O’Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee. “While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama’s rationing czar.”
Berwick has opined: “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit (new drug or medical intervention) is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.”
Sounds like Death Panels to me. Read the full article at IBD: “The President’s One-Man Death Panel“
The Case Against Romney Builds
The Republicans have been desperate for leadership these past 14 months since Obama took office. While the GOP leaders may think former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is “next in line” to head the 2012 ticket, there’s is a growing awareness among the unwashed barbarians: If Romney is the de facto leader, why isn’t he leading?
It’s been Sarah Palin doing the interviews, writing articles & Tweets, making appearances, taking the grief from the left and MSM. Ditto Paul Ryan and Jim DeMint and Newt Gingrich. But Mitt? He kind of shows up weeks later and says, I’m your man, just tell me where you want me to lead you…
With the passing of Obama’s health care plan, Mitt can’t shake the fact that he was the author of Romneycare – the model for Obamacare that is bankrupting Massachusetts just 4 years after it was launched. (Although, Mitt says the plan is working well, despite the fact that it is costs over $2 billion more than what was budgeted”!)
For more on this, check out Say Goodbye to Mitt Romney
Palin Was Right. Again.
Alan Reynolds of the Cato Insititute wrote about the criticism that was leveled against Governor Palin’s term “death panel” and the ruckus it caused. Specifically, he took apart PolitiFact’s criticism and how the “death panel” term evolved in the MSM. He opines:
The claim that Governor Palin confused one-on-one counseling between doctors and patients with any sort of “panel” was always ridiculous on its face. Indeed, that claim should itself have been a leading candidate for “Lie of the Year.” Yet Palin’s critics kept on equating death panels with counseling throughout the year, as though they could not even begin to understand plain English….
The shameless hoax that Palin had confused individual consulting with rationing by a panel was repeated endlessly. By November, the Washington Post was treating this obvious canard as a established fact: “Proposed health-care reform legislation includes a provision that allows Medicare to pay for “end-of-life” counseling for seniors and their families who request it. The provision — which Sarah Palin erroneously described as “death panels” for seniors — nearly derailed President Obama’s health-care initiative.”
Palin wrote: “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.”
The horror of what Palin described is currently being enacted by the Congress – who wish to give us Death Panels in this mess of a health care “reform” bill that’s unconstitutional. Rationing for all, and end-of-life “consultations” for the elderly. Read Reynolds’ piece here.
