"...once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, rationing care is inevitable, and those who have lived the longest will find their care the most restricted."
"Far from being a scare tactic, this is a logical conclusion based on experience and common-sense. Once health care is a "free good" that government pays for, demand will soar and government costs will soar too. When the public finally reaches its taxing limit, something will have to give on the care and spending side. In a word, care will be rationed by politics."
"Mr. Obama's reply is that private insurance companies already ration, by deciding which treatments are covered and which aren't. However, there's an ocean of difference between coverage decisions made under millions of voluntary private contracts and rationing via government. An Atlantic Ocean, in fact. Virtually every European government with "universal" health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn't pretty."
"The British system is most restrictive, using a black-box actuarial formula known as "quality-adjusted life years," or QALYs, that determines who can receive what care. If a treatment isn't deemed to be cost-effective for specific populations, particularly the elderly, the National Health Service simply doesn't pay for it. Even France—which has a mix of public and private medicine—has fixed reimbursement rates since the 1970s and strictly controls the use of specialists and the introduction of new medical technologies such as CT scans and MRIs."
And,
"In Britain, the NHS decides, and under its QALYs [1] metric it generally won't pay more than $22,000 for treatments to extend a life six months."If you plan on becoming a senior citizen some day, you might want to think about the current form of government insurance: Medicare. Medicare will be pillaged of hundreds of billions of dollars to help pay for the new, government care plan. This is the Obama vision of fixing the health care "problem" that he tries to terrorize the country about: eviscerate the existing plan for your later years.
But the real focus of the statist Left is to seize control of the 17% of the national economy that is available to them through the nationalization of health care. It's the proverbial camel's nose under the tent: the camel cannot be kept out if it gets that far. If he gets nationalized health care, what will Obama's second act be?
Obama has handed over huge corporations to the unions that were choking them to death; now he wants to hand over health care to the Chicago-cronies-now-called-federal-"czars" with which he has infested the U. S. Federal Administration. What part of the economy would he attack next in his war to redistribute wealth and destroy corporations?
It is possible that Obama chose the wrong battle as his first and most visibly desperate. The legions of blue haired retirees just might lead to his defeat, in more ways than one. If he loses out on health care grab, his humiliation might be a serious enough blow to re-open the doors of the congress to more rational heads in '10 and '12.
Go grannies, Go!
[1] For a discussion of QALY's, their calculation and use, go here. QALY's are only one way to calculate the "benefit" part of the cost/benefit decision on rationing and allocating health care. The point is that not only is cost an issue, so is the relative benefit to be obtained. The human value curve published by Obama's advisor Ezekial Emmanuel is another method. When you are evaluated for your potential benefit to society vs. the cost of your treatment, Ezekial has control of your fate. This is, pure and simple, eugenics; anyone who denies that is deceived or deceiving.
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