Red Alert: Your Health is in Danger!

You know that overpriced stimulus Obama wants to shove down everyone's throat? It contains some healthcare information that should make even the most liberal among us prick their ears up!

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by
a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily
transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his
2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.

The bold is mine, but this entire segment of article found at Bloomberg should alarm you. This is creepy, and it goes on.

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

I thought our healthcare was broken because not everyone could get the best medicine, and some of us (like me) don't even have the insurance or the money to afford a doctor visit. I guess the problem all along was that our healthcare was too much?

Anyway, and this is the part that should scare you.

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should
be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating
them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464). The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s
book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular
degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get
a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public
protests before the board reversed its decision.

The article continues on, but just look at that for a minute. Chew on it, taste it, and I'm pretty sure you won't like it. Obama was supposed to show us how we can all get awesome healthcare for the elderly, the very sick, etc. Instead, it would seem that I could go to the doctor and get treated for cancer, but my elderly grandmother couldn't. Not that I trust mainstream medicine with cancer, but you get the idea.

On that note, I wonder how this affects the holistic medicine community. They are considered fringe, but are they subjected to the same kind of Big Brother treatment that conventional medicine is getting? Will naturopaths, nutritionists, etc. even be able to see patients? This could easily lead a flock of people to turning to alternative medicine and experiencing its wonders for themselves, or it could become illegal and we'll all die, unless, of course, it doesn't cost our new socialized government an arm and a leg to heal us. Given that the crooks up in Washington don't seem to mind spending billions of dollars on pork, a little thing like treating an elderly patient's osteoporosis should be nothing for them! *Checks the Stinge Meter*