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“

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

Here’s the take from Investors Business Daily:

By presenting the CBO with incomplete, inaccurate and misleading data, the Democrats in Congress were finally able to come up with a cost score they like: $940 billion.

That’s the estimate the CBO arrived at. Like a used car dealer pricing a car at $9,999 instead of $10,000, the hucksters in Congress were anxious to get the official cost below the scary $1 trillion level at which things suddenly sound very unaffordable.

Using the rigged $940 billion estimate, Democratic leaders now hope to force a health care bill through as early as Saturday, seizing 17% of the U.S. economy by simply “deeming” the bill is passed — rather than actually passing it in an up-or-down vote.

In fact, the real cost of this health care takeover is more like $2.5 trillion over 10 years — not $940 billion. That’s off by, oh, 166%.

Here’s a better idea: KILL THE BILL. Cost? …. ZERO

If Senator Reid, Speaker Pelosi, and President Obama get their way, soon our country will be changed forever. Using every partisan parliamentary trick in the book (including some they invented just last week), Washington’s Left intends to ram through their takeover of our health care system regardless of the consequences.

The latest twists and turns in the Obamacare drama seem almost surreal. One minute the Democrat leadership is trying to amend a bill before the president has even signed it into law, and the next minute they’re trying to draft a new rule that will allow the House to “deem” a bill passed without actually voting on it! They’re determined to use the Senate reconciliation process as a parliamentary trick to bypass the regular voting procedure (and by the way, to add insult to injury, they’re now going to ram through federalization of America’s student loan industry with this same reconciliation vote). Is there any other wildly unpopular legislation they’d also like to sneak in? Perhaps the anti-energy-independence policy “Cap and Tax” (aka Cap and Trade) is next?

And make no mistake, the Obamacare bill is wildly unpopular. The Democrats’ own pollsters warn of an “unmitigated disaster” for them in November if they don’t abandon their plan and start over with real incremental health care reform. Incredibly, at this point, they don’t seem to care. Speaker Pelosi thinks Congress must pass the bill so that the American people can then “find out what’s in it.” We know what’s in it. We don’t want it. The Democrats will take short-term electoral losses in exchange for long-term radical change of the United States of America. They assume we’ll come to accept this new intrusion of government once we’re stuck with it. That’s why we can’t concede this battle. Americans must stiffen our spines and stand against this action that violates the will of the people with centralized government mandates and crippling costs.

Republicans in Congress are holding the line, and some Democrats are standing with them. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) said he won’t vote for the Senate bill if federal funding of abortion is included. Last Friday, he told National Review Online that some Democrats have told him that if abortions aren’t covered in Obamacare then “more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more…Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America?” As I wrote in my first post on this topic, human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion. Government health care will not reduce the cost of medical care; it will simply refuse to pay it. And who will get left behind when they have to ration care to save money?

Please ask yourself: who will be left behind? And who will decide – what kind of panel will decide – who receives the health care that government will obviously have to ration?

There’s a great deal of pressure being put on Stupak’s pro-life Democrats. They’re already dwindling in number. Their party is threatening them, and so are powerful SEIU labor union bosses. The Democrats respecting the sanctity of life have every incentive to buckle under the pressure, so they need to know that we’ll support them if they do the right thing and vote no on Obamacare.

Please take the time to get involved in the debate this week. There are many grassroots efforts under way. There will be a march on Washington on Tuesday, March 16th (see here for details). Rep. Michele Bachmann has a “Kill the Bill” online petition that you can sign here. Most importantly, contact members of Congress and offer your support if they do the right thing.

We know we’ll beat them at the ballot box, but we have to kill this bill before November. This is the final push. We must stand up and stand together one last time to insist on true market-oriented, patient-centered health care reform that reflects America’s values and the will of the people.

- Sarah Palin

Screw the kids, it’s the RETIRED teachers our tax dollars are supporting: “…The [school] board will cut band and sports, and increase class size, to make the pension payments.”

The ACORN Crime Family is shutting down and ReNaming is Underway. But wait! If they aren’t around to launder money, how will politicians pocket billions of taxpayer dollars for themselves?

Gallup’s daily measure of U.S. employment reveals that 19.9% of the U.S. workforce was underemployed last month, translating to close to 30 million Americans who are working less than their desired capacity.

Unintended consequences: Fearing Obamanomics, Obamacare, and Obammunism states loosen gun laws.

Limbaugh: Romney’s endorsement of McCain is suicidal.

Sarah Palin

Vouchers.

She observes the bleeding obvious, that if you force health insurance companies to stop denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, it will spell disaster: under Obamacare a single person can simply pay the gov’ment fine of $750 a year and not buy insurance. Then, when you fall smash into a tree when skiing, you sign up for health care after you’ve been treated. You hand the insurance company a check for the first month’s premium, say $300, they hand you a policy, and you hand them a bill for $20,000.  We all know that’s how it will be with this plan as written, but it won’t work. Obamacare is a disaster waiting to happen.

Governor Palin points out that Tort Reform should be the first step:

Americans want health care reform because we want affordable health care. We don’t need subsidies or a public option. We don’t need a nationalized health care industry. We need to reduce health care costs. But the Senate Finance plan will dramatically increase those costs, all the while ignoring common sense cost-saving measures like tort reform. Though a Congressional Budget Office report confirmed that reforming medical malpractice and liability laws could save as much as $54 billion over the next ten years, tort reform is nowhere to be found in the Senate Finance bill.

Her next three points are also dead-on: allow individuals to purchase insurance across state lines; tax deductions for taxpayers who purchase their own plans; give Medicare recipients vouchers so that they can purchase their own plans.

Go to Palin’s Facebook page to read her piece, “Good Intentions Aren’t Enough With Health Care Reform“. We needs this woman. She fights.

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