Showing posts with label reform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reform. Show all posts

Friday, August 14, 2009

Time Magazine's Dr. Death Spin






The article in Time Online, “Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s ‘Deadly Doctor’, Strikes Back,” by Michael Scherer, August 12, 2009, seems like a spin control piece by an Obama supporter. If Mr. Scherer would read Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s book, The End of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity, he would know that Dr. Emanuel has very radical views not aligned with main stream America.
Emanuel’s statements and writings have not been taken out of context. That’s the standard defense of anyone who’s been caught by the truth. Case in point, the YouTube video of Obama in 2007 stating that he favors a single-payer health care system in America. He has no defense. He’s caught. He can’t say that he didn’t say it, so he shifts to, “I was taken out of context.” That’s the usual defense when caught.
America should ask the question, “Why does anyone have to decide what kind of care and how much care any other human being is allowed to have?” There’s no need. Keep the government out of our most personal decisions. We’ll make them for ourselves. Then it won’t matter how radical Emanuel is or isn’t.
And as for those awards that are supposed to validate Emanuel’s statements, well, just remember that Yassar Arafat, father of modern day terrorism, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize! Awards mean very little now days.
BTW, Americans should know that Chicago politics has moved to the White House. “No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views. Nor have most people heard about the arm-twisting, Chicago-style tactics being used to force support. In a Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch column, Emanuel explained how business should be done: “Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”
Do we want a “reform” that empowers people like this to decide for us? Betsy McCaughey, New York Post, http://www.nypost.com/seven/07242009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/deadly_doctors_180941.htm?page=2 Betsy McCaughey is founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former New York lieutenant governor.





Thursday, August 13, 2009

Obama's Health Care Advisor: Dr. Death



Just a thought. Many of these agencies and offices will be staffed by political appointees. What if ACORN, radicals, SEIU, and Chicago politicos (read that “thugs”) are appointed to run these powerful agencies? What if these positions are held by members of Jeremiah Wright’s America-hating, white-hating church? What if these positions are held by radical professors like Bill Ayers or Henry Louis Gates, both close friends of Obama?

Would you be comfortable if a powerful health care office was held by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emmanuel – Obama’s Chief of Staff, who has used strong tactics to force others to fall in line with Obama’s objectives? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel has written the following:


“Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel (Lancet, Jan. 31).


Think it could never happen? Think it’s not likely? Think again!


Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel has already been appointed by this administration to two KEY POSITIONS: Health Policy advisor at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.


The “comparative effectiveness research” position has me worried. Is he researching how the government would decide whose treatment is cost effective and whose is not? Is he researching which treatments get the best bang for the buck? Will his research determine whether or not a citizen can have new cutting-edge treatments or drugs before they are backed up with years of success, but hold promise for those with few options?


“Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).


Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).


Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ‘96).” http://www.nypost.com/seven/07242009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/deadly_doctors_180941.htm Read the full article above for more details about Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.


What if these kind of people have the power to decide who gets what kind of health care and who doesn’t? IT IS HIGHLY LIKELY, IF NOT CERTAIN, THAT THEY WILL!


Do some internet research on the radical, dangerous doctor of death, Ezekiel Emanuel. He and Dr. Kovorkian could be BFF’s.


Visit http://www.muckety.com/Ezekiel-Emanuel/103185.muckety to see his relationships with people and organizations and universities. He was a member of the Clinton Health Care Task Force that was killed in the 90’s. Nothing new here, like Obama promised.

To learn more about the possible effects of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s influence on the proposed health care reform laws read his won writings in his book, The End of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity, Printed in the United States of America Second printing, 1994 First Harvard University Press. I found his book on Amazon.com and Google Books, where I took some excerpts that we all should be aware of. They follow.

The End of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity, by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Excerpts -
(on Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Ends-Human-Life-Medical-Liberal/dp/0674253264#reader)


Page 8


In Chapter 6 I will sketch a model showing how the liberal communitarian vision might be practically implemented in the area of medical care. This model proposes thousands of community health programs (CHPs). Each individual would be given a voucher and permitted to join a CHP. Through democratic deliberations of its members, the CHP would have to define its own conception of the good life and the resultant particular health care policies. For example, a CHP would have to delineate which medical services it would pay for and which services would be left to individual payment. By considering historical precedents and accepted traditions, I will show that this model is both politically practical and justifiable.


Page 212


In Chapters 3 and 4 I suggested that by appealing to specific conceptions of the good life, it would be possible to create a framework for addressing these medical ethical issues. And within the liberal communitarian vision, CHPs are granted the financial resources and political authority to deliberate on and formulate policies over the whole range of medical ethical issues by appeal to particular conceptions of the good life. For instance, we might imagine a CHP with members committed to the relational conception of the good life. This CHP would then consider what type of specific policies to have for terminating medical care and allocating resources by appeal to this conception. The members might agree to have a strict age limit, say 72, for the provision of medical services. Those under this age would receive all medically necessary treatments, but those 72 or over would not receive hospital admissions and the provision of all acute medical services, except inexpensive ones such as antibiotics. Conversely, there would be extensive home nursing and social services and devices to assist in daily living for those over 72. All patients in a persistent vegetative state would be denied all forms of medical treatments; primitive and receptive patients (see Table 3.1) might receive nursing care, while interactive patients would be eligible for acute medical services. The CHP might also contribute to a fund for research into new devices to assist the handicapped and might offer to test such devices for companies.




Page 102


While many people have no insurance and are not receiving needed medical care, many others are receiving extremely “high technology” interventions which, in the opinion of many, have questionable benefits. Consider some interventions: Recently attempts to save very small infants, those weighing less than 750 grams (less than 1 pound 10 oz.), with neonatal intensive care interventions have resulted in the fact that “60 to 80 percent of infants died during the initial hospitalization, and the developmental outcome reflects a handicap rate approaching one third of all survivors.” Yet for infants between 500 and 999 grams, the cost per surviving child was in excess of $100,000 in 1978 dollars.” A similar phenomenon is occurring with AIDS patients for whom there is no cure, or prospects for a cure, only palliative treatments of secondary infections and tumors. On average, AIDS patients will consume approximately $50,000 in medical care services from the time of diagnosis to death. The Public Health Service estimates that in 1991 medical care for AIDS patients will cost between $10 billion and $25 billion, accounting for 1.2 to 2.4 percent of the total U.S. health care budget, for fewer than 0.1 percent of the population.”


And the future appears worse. Costs continue to rise, nearly 10 percent per year. Many complain that health care costs are an important factor in compromising American industrial competitiveness….


His writings discuss policy making and he’s been appointed “Health Policy Advisor” at the OMB. His writings deal with cost effectiveness of treatment to the elderly, newborn infants of different birth weights, AIDS patients, etc. and he’s been appointed to the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. Obama chose this doctor whose opinions seem to be putting a price tag on people and deciding if they are worth saving.


Help spread the word before Obama and the Democrats ram this through in September. Do your own research so that you can speak intelligently on this subject.

Monday, July 27, 2009

BIG FAT GOVERNMENT


While everyone’s debating the government take-over of America’s health care system, it should be noted that Obama appointed Nancy Ann DeParle as his health care czar. Who is she? Visit http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31566399. MSNBC is hardly a right wing news org. They’re the home of Chris Matthews who gushed that listening to Obama speak made chills run up his leg! TMI!!!
DeParle headed up corporations who were under investigation for engaging in illegal billing schemes, alleged kickbacks, serious violations of federal quality standards, including one company that failed to warn patients of deadly problems with an implanted heart defibrillator. She ran Medicare for Bill Clinton’s administration.
“Since leaving her government job running Medicare for the Clinton administration, DeParle built a lucrative private-sector career. Records show she earned more than $6.6 million since early 2001, according to a tally by the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
Much of that corporate career was built at companies that have frequently had to defend themselves against federal investigations. After leaving government, DeParle accepted director positions at half a dozen companies suspected of violating the very laws and regulations she had enforced for Medicare. Those companies got into further trouble on her watch as a director.
Now she’s back in government as a leading voice in deciding the shape of health care reform.

Named by Obama in March as director of the White House Office of Health Reform, making $158,000 a year, DeParle is the point person in pushing for the administration’s plans for changing health care and the ways Americans pay for it — changes in which her former companies have a great deal at stake.” Fred Schulte, Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University, MSNBC Online
Does Obama know ANYONE who is honest? Do you see a pattern here? Everyone he appoints to his cabinet or a czar position has a dishonest or shady past, didn’t bother to pay their taxes or is some kind of radical with beliefs that run afoul of American values. Perhaps he identifies with them more than with the rest of us honest, hard-working tax-payers.

He recently said in a televised press conference that he believes pediatricians choose to remove children’s tonsils when it isn’t really necessary, to make more money. (I don’t believe that.) Pediatricians don’t operate, so they won’t make the money, unless Obama was suggesting that they get kickbacks for every surgery they set up for a surgeon. DeParle would know more about kickbacks than our pediatricians.

It’s clear that Obama will use the health care overhaul or take-over to punish doctors and put them in their place, as he sees it. He has attacked insurance companies, placing blame on them for our health care problems, but didn’t he bail out AIG with millions? They supported his candidacy and Sen. Chris Dodd, Democrat., wrote the exemption in the bailout bill that allowed the huge bonuses to be paid to AIG executives.

Pay attention to all of the “studies” being done on obeisity and how it affects our health care costs. The government will use the Obama plan to affect people’s behavior and place extra tax burdens on those who are obese by his administration’s standards. That means that you will be scrutinized and records will be kept on your weight, what it should be, and what you must do about it. What will become of freedom, individual liberty and the right to privacy?

They will increase taxes on smokers, drinkers, race car drivers, athletes, people with dangerous jobs, people who don’t exercise, etc., etc., etc. They are now talking about unhealthy lifestyles costing our system much more. When they’re looking for ways to cut costs, they will use taxes to modify our behavior.

What kind of people will Obama appoint to police our lifestyles? I shudder to think. Doctors may be required to report unhealthy lifestyles. It’s the first line of knowledge and Obama health care is all about controlling costs.


“New research shows that medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for an obese person than for someone with normal weight, the journal Health Affairs reports.

The study by government scientists and the nonprofit research group RTI International says obesity-related health spending has doubled in the past 10 years to $147 billion, USA TODAY reports.

If you love freedom and individual liberty, you’d better fight to keep it, because there is a strong effort to snatch it away by power-hungry people who believe they are smarter than the average citizen. Don’t make the mistake of trusting these people, because they’ve already revealed the fact that they are unscrupulous. Just remember the past transgressions and beliefs of everyone Obama has appointed to office.

YOU should be controlling THEM. Oh wait! Isn’t that what the Constitution says?