Tag: Death Panels

Storm Clouds Surround Sebelius

On By kingsjesterIn Politics2 Comments

sebilius kissing obamaHealth and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius finds herself at the center of two controversies today, as the truth about the Obama Administration slowly bubbles to the surface.

On May 13, 2013, wsj.com posted the following article…

Leaders in Congress are questioning Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s solicitation of funds from private businesses and charities to help pay for public outreach on Obamacare to get prospective enrollees signed up for health exchanges.

Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, ranking Republican on the Senate Health committee, told the New York Times he plans to ask the Government Accountability Office to check the legality of Sebelius’s actions, done after Congress denied the administration funds for public outreach in the 2014 budget. The Washington Post also said that Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, top Republican on the Finance Committee, questioned the legality of the action.

The Times said Sebelius obtained $10 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and $500,000 from H&R Block for the effort. HHS officials said that Sebelius’s efforts would continue, after first denying they were soliciting funds for the effort. But a spokesman for Sebelius said a section of the Public Health Service Act allows her to encourage others to support those working to help carry out public health activities.

Sebelius reportedly has sought donations for Enroll America, a private non-profit group that is working to get the uninsured covered under the 2010 health-care law.

While that issue continues to percolate, Secretary Sebelius finds herself in the middle of another controversy.

Politico.com reports…

The plight of a dying 10-year-old girl in urgent need of a lung transplant has been taken up by some GOP lawmakers, and it’s shining a light on what critics say is a questionable policy that puts children further down the waiting list.

The family of the Pennsylvania girl, Sarah Murnaghan, has garnered the media spotlight, on cable news and in other outlets. And some GOP congressmen have joined the fray, quite literally “begging” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to intervene and save the girl’s life. Both Pennsylvania senators — a Democrat and a Republican — have also written on the child’s behalf.

“I’m begging you,” Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) told Sebelius at a House hearing Tuesday morning, asking her to suspend the transplant rules until they can be revisited. “Sarah has three to five weeks to live. Time is running out.” The child has cystic fibrosis.

At the hearing, Sebelius called the situation “agonizing” and said she had talked to the girl’s mother. She has ordered a review of the policy, which she acknowledged would take too long to have any impact on this girl’s situation, but said it wasn’t her place to pick and choose transplant recipients.

“I can’t imagine anything worse than one individual getting to pick who lives and who dies,” she said. Sebelius said putting Sarah next in line would disadvantage other young people who have also been waiting for transplants — including three in the same area. Helping one child could possibly hurt another.

Some experts agree that the lung allocation policy may need to be revisited; it has been for kidney and liver transplants. But they say no snap decisions should be made because of the media glare.

Remember when Sarah Palin warned Americans about the Death Panels that were coming with Obamacare?

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, 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 America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.

That was posted on her Facebook Page on August 7, 2009. Yesterday, on her Facebook Page, Former Governor Palin wrote

The government will bend the rules left and right to harass targeted taxpayers, conservative patriots, selected journalists, etc., but it will strictly exercise inconsistent and subjective rules to deny a child a shot at life. And they called us liars when we spoke of “death panels” – faceless bureaucrats coming between you and your doctor to make life and death decisions about a loved one’s survival. It doesn’t sound so far fetched anymore, does it? – Sarah Palin

No, ma’am. It most certainly doesn’t.

Sec. Sebelius once remarked,

A healthy state encourages many voices – and lots of listening.

What she didn’t mention was the cold condescension and callous dismissal that follows “lots of listening”.

The members of this corrupt Administration have forgotten that they serve at our pleasure. It is time to remind them.

And, please…remember Sarah and her family in your prayers.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Obamacare: The GOP Vs. the Death Panels

On By kingsjesterIn Christianity, Politics6 Comments

obamadoctorDo you remember when Former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin warned us about the upcoming Death Panels in Obamacare?

She wrote the following on her Facebook Page on August 7, 2009,

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, 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 America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.

All of “the smartest people in the room” laughed themselves silly, all the while assuring us that Gov. Palin was terribly wrong.

They lied.

The Independent Patient Advisory Board, a part of Obamacare, is set up to be a 15-member panel. Three members are to be chosen by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate, with the remaining three chosen by Obama and the executive branch. All of the members then have to be confirmed by the Senate.

The IPAB comes into play if Medicare costs are projected to go beyond economic growth plus an additional percentage point in any given year.

Evidently, San Fran Nan was right. Those idiots had to pass Obamacare so that they could see what was in it.

And now that they’ve seen it, Death Panels are perfectly acceptable, at least according to Anthony Mirhaydari, in an article he wrote for MSMMoney.com, posted on March 20th of this year:

If we’re going to end this slide into the fiscal abyss and stop the intergenerational heist, we need to address both the cost of care and the fact that so much goes to giving a few more days of low-quality life to the terminally ill. These resources could be better spent preparing the way for those just starting in life, while still providing our seniors with a more dignified end.

Bipartisan support does seem to be coalescing around means-testing for Medicare benefits, so that those who can afford it pay more. That’s great, but we also we need to encourage increased use of hospice care while discouraging repeated and outrageously expensive hospitalizations.

Think that’s inhumane? This heartbreaking New Yorker story by surgeon Atul Gawande about the current state of end-of-life care will change your mind.

And consider what you’d do if you had to pay those expenses out of pocket, as so many young families have to. Death is inevitable. Would you impoverish your family in an ultimately unsuccessful fight against it?

We need to celebrate our mortality, appreciate how delicate the balance between life and death is, and understand that a better life and a longer life aren’t necessarily the same thing — especially if it consumes resources desperately needed by the generations to come.

Didn’t I see that scenario in the classic movie “Lifeboat” (1944), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Talullah Bankhead and William Bendix?

In the movie, a chic writer, a stoker and others drift with the U-boat captain who has sunk their ship. Through cruelty and debasement, a deadly survival of the fittest scenario unfolds, until only a few are left to be rescued as the movie ends.

Is this what America is headed for? “A survival of the fittest”?

The Republican Leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives do not want to play that game.

Yesterday, Sen. McConnell and Speaker Boehner sent a letter to President Obama to inform him that they would not be participating in the nominations for the IPAB.

The following is an excerpt from the letter they sent:

In order to allow supporters to claim that the law’s Medicare cuts would be realized in the future, it tasked IPAB with reducing payments to providers or eliminating payments for certain treatments and procedures altogether. These reduced payments will force providers to stop seeing Medicare patients, the same way an increased number of doctors have stopped taking Medicaid patients. This will lead to access problems, waiting lists and denied care for seniors.

The unfortunate result is that decisions which impact America’s seniors will be made in the absence of the democratic process, without the system of checks and balances that would normally apply to important matters of public policy. Yet your recent budget called for expanding IPAB by tasking it with making even larger cuts to Medicare than those called for in the health law, even though the trustees of the Medicare program have told us that IPAB’s provider cuts would be “difficult to achieve in practice,” because of the denied care that seniors would experience.

You know, I had heard the Democratic Party called “The Party of Death” before, due to their heinous adoration of the murder of babies, still in their mothers’ wombs. However, it really hit home for me when they passed the monstrous legislation known as Obamacare.

Now, I am not saying that every single Democrat is a heathen, but why did the majority of them oppose putting references to God in their Party Platform at their 2012 Convention?

And, the cold, calculating rationale of those Liberals like Mirhaydari, just boggles the mind.

I know that it will never happen, but all those whose laughed when Gov. Palin warned us about the Obama Death Panels, owe that lady an apology.

And, Obamacare needs to be repealed…STAT.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Bloomberg Limits NYC Hospitals Use of Pain Pills. Palin Was Right.

On By kingsjesterIn Politics13 Comments

palin-newsweekRemember when Sarah Palin warned Americans about the Death Panels that were coming with Obamacare?

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, 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 America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.

That was posted on her Facebook Page on August 7, 2009, and the Libs are still arguing with her! For instance, here is an article published Wednesday in the Washington Post:

Nearly three years after the Affordable Care Act passed, the law’s non-existent “death panels” are still alive and well. Search Google News and you’ll find more than 8,000 recent news articles, with headlines like “More evidence of “death panels” in Obamacare” and “Democrats crank up death panel talk.”

The health care law does have a board that recommends ways to cut Medicare spending. It does not have any board, as former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin suggested, that would decide whether certain Americans are “worthy of health care.”

Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan has new research that looks at why the death panels won’t die. He finds that providing readers with a corrective information to dispel an Obamacare myth can actually strengthen belief in death panels.

Nyhan had 948 survey participants read an article from 2009 about Palin’s statement on death panels. Some had favorable opinions of the former governor of Alaska; others did not. The respondents ran the gamut in their knowledge of current politics.

All read a story about Palin’s 2009 statement, which brought death panels into the mainstream debate. Some had this correction appended to the end of the story:

Nonpartisan health care experts have concluded that Palin is wrong. The bill in the House of Representatives would require Medicare to pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions, but there is no panel in any of the health care bills in Congress that judges a person’s “level of productivity in society” to determine whether they are “worthy” of health care.

For Palin supporters and opponents alike, low-information voters’ belief in the death panels decreased after reading this correction.

But something different happened among high information voters. Those with cold feelings towards Palin acted like the low information voters, with their belief in death panels dropping.

For high information Palin supporters though, the correction backfired: They appeared more likely to believe in death panels after reading the appended information, and have less favorable opinions of the Affordable Care Act.

So, the high information voters sided with Sarah Palin? I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked!

How could they? After all, Obama and his cadre of Liberal sycophants know what’s best for us. Just ask them…or witness how they are proceeding to disassemble the second amendment, in preparation to confiscate law-abiding Americans’ guns. But, I digress….

Anyway…it appears that Obamacare was just the beginning. 

From the Mayor who banned Big Gulps in New York City…

Some of the most common and most powerful prescription painkillers on the market will be restricted sharply in the emergency rooms at New York City’s 11 public hospitals, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Thursday in an effort to crack down on what he called a citywide and national epidemic of prescription drug abuse.

Under the new city policy, most public hospital patients will no longer be able to get more than three days’ worth of narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and Percoset. Long-acting painkillers, including OxyContin, a familiar remedy for chronic backache and arthritis, as well as Fentanyl patches and methadone, will not be dispensed at all. And lost, stolen or destroyed prescriptions will not be refilled.

City officials said the policy was aimed at reducing the growing dependency on painkillers and preventing excess amounts of drugs from being taken out of medicine chests and sold on the street or abused by teenagers and others who want to get high.

“Abuse of prescription painkillers in our city has increased alarmingly,” Mr. Bloomberg said in announcing the new policy at Elmhurst Hospital Center, a public hospital in Queens. Over 250,000 New Yorkers over age 12 are abusing prescription painkillers, he said, leading to rising hospital admissions for overdoses and deaths, Medicare fraud by doctors who write false prescriptions and violent crime like “holdups at neighborhood pharmacies.”

But some critics said that poor and uninsured patients sometimes used the emergency room as their primary source of medical care. The restrictions, they said, could deprive doctors in the public hospital system — whose mission it is to treat poor people — of the flexibility that they need to respond to patients.

“Here is my problem with legislative medicine,” said Dr. Alex Rosenau, president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians and senior vice chairman of emergency medicine at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Eastern Pennsylvania. “It prevents me from being a professional and using my judgment.”

While someone could fake a toothache to get painkillers, he said, another patient might have legitimate pain and not be able to get an appointment at a dental clinic for days. Or, he said, a patient with a hand injury may need more than three days of pain relief until the swelling goes down and an operation could be scheduled.

Dr. Rosenau said that the college of emergency physicians had not developed an official position on the prescribing of painkillers in emergency rooms and that he appreciated Mr. Bloomberg’s activism in the face of a serious public health problem. But he said pain clinics in states like Florida and California, states where prescription drug abuse is rampant, as well as the household medicine cabinet, were probably a more common source of unneeded painkillers than emergency rooms.

How can Liberals be sooo stupid, and yet, believe that they are the smartest people in the room?

Evidently, it is an overestimation of their own intelligence, brought on by a misguided, egocentric view of reality.

In other words, don’t hold your breath waiting for Obama and his “Party of Death” to ever admit that Sarah Palin had it right the first time.

Until He Comes, 

KJ

Obamacare: “Soylent Green” Wasn’t So Far-Fetched

On By kingsjesterIn Politics4 Comments

lifeLife is precious. That’s what every American, in the past, anyway, was raised to believe. But now, as we approach the second 4 years under a president who seems all too content to follow the lead of our European neighbors, and who has already decided that gruesome partial birth abortions are entirely acceptable medical procedures, are the following two examples what we have to look forward to?

Belgium is considering a significant change to its decade-old euthanasia law that would allow minors and Alzheimer’s sufferers to seek permission to die.

The proposed changes to the law were submitted to parliament Tuesday by the Socialist party and are likely to be approved by other parties, although no date has yet been put forward for a parliamentary debate.

“The idea is to update the law to take better account of dramatic situations and extremely harrowing cases we must find a response to,” party leader Thierry Giet said.

The draft legislation calls for “the law to be extended to minors if they are capable of discernment or affected by an incurable illness or suffering that we cannot alleviate.”

Belgium was the second country in the world after the Netherlands to legalise euthanasia in 2002 but it applies only to people over the age of 18.

Socialist Senator Philippe Mahoux, who helped draft the proposed changes, said there had been cases of adolescents who “had the capacity to decide” their future.

He said parliamentarians would also consider extended mercy-killing to people suffering from Alzheiner’s-type illnesses.

Euthanasia was allowed to an Alzheimer’s patient for the first time in the Netherlands last year.

In Belgium, some 1,133 cases — mostly for terminal cancer — were recorded in 2011, about one percent of all deaths in the country, according to official figures.

France is pushing for mercy-killings as well:

France should allow doctors to “accelerate the coming of death” for terminally ill patients, a report to President Francois Hollande recommended Tuesday.

Hollande referred the report to a national council on medical ethics which will examine the precise circumstances under which such steps could be authorised with a view to producing draft legislation by June 2013.

“The existing legislation does not meet the legitimate concerns expressed by people who are gravely and incurably ill,” Hollande said.

The report said physicians should be allowed to authorise interventions that ensure quicker deaths for terminal patients in three specific sets of circumstances.

In the first case, the patient involved would be capable of making an explicit request to that effect or have issued advance instructions in the event of him or her becoming incapable of expressing an opinion.

The second scenario envisages medical teams withdrawing treatment and/or nourishment on the basis of a request by the family of a dying patient who is no longer conscious and has not made any instructions.

The third would apply to cases where treatment is serving only to sustain life artificially.

The author of the report, Professor Didier Sicard, stressed that he did not support any measures which “suddenly and prematurely end life.”

“We are radically opposed to inscribing euthanasia in law,” Sicard told a press conference.

He also stressed that he was not advocating Swiss-style clinics where people are provided with lethal medication to enable them to end their own lives.

Dr. Mark G. Neerhof, in an article written in October for cnsnews.com, summarized the Independent Patient Advisory Board, a feature of Obamacare,  as follows:

IPAB is a board consisting of 15 unelected, appointed bureaucrats whose task it is to cut the growth of Medicare spending, and the cuts they are mandated to make will be deep.

The decisions IPAB makes behind closed doors can only be overturned by a supermajority of Congress, something almost impossible to achieve.

So, the politicians have set up a system where they can say to seniors, “It was those bureaucrats that cut your Medicare, not me.”

How does IPAB achieve these cuts? The supporters of the law say, “It says right in the statute IPAB cannot ration.” But what IPAB can do, and in fact is their only option for controlling costs, is to cut reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals. They decide what procedures are important, not your doctor, and they decide what Medicare will pay for them.

When services are no longer available to seniors because reimbursements for those procedures have been drastically cut, that’s rationing.

You have also been promised that “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

As a physician, I have watched reimbursement rates fall below cost and more and more of my colleagues are refusing to take on new Medicare patients, or they are getting out of medicine altogether. Seniors complain, and then Congress runs in with a temporary “doctor fix.”

But, with IPAB, there is no “doctor fix.” Physician reimbursements will be slashed to unsustainable levels. It is a simple fact that no doctor or hospital can offer services below cost and stay in business.

When government takes over health care, you become a budget item.

Medical decisions are made based upon the amount of money available – not on what is best for patients.

Beginning in 2013, the Chief Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will determine in particular years the projected per capita growth rate for Medicare for a multi-year period ending in the second year thereafter (the “implementation year”). If the projection exceeds a target growth rate, IPAB must develop a proposal to reduce Medicare spending in the implementation year by a specified amount. If it is required to develop a proposal, the Board must submit that proposal in January of the year before the implementation year; thus, the first proposal could be submitted in January 2014 to take effect in 2015.

palin-newsweekOn August 7th, 2010,  Sarah Palin posted the following on her Facebook page:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, 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 America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.

At the time, all the Liberals and the GOP Elite, as well,  laughed at Gov. Palin.

 I believe they owe her an apology. And, don’t forget…