Former Clinton adviser Dick Morris describes the impact of the Obama/Democrat health take-over program. Caution -- it ain't pretty....Obama will cut Medicare and that portion of Medicaid which serves the elderly in nursing homes (75 percent) in two ways:
(a) He will cut “hundreds of millions in waste and fraud and unwarranted subsidies in Medicare,” as determined by an executive branch commission, but largely in the form of lower payments to hospitals and doctors. Paid less, doctors will spend less time on each patient. Reimbursed less for MRIs or CT scans, they will order fewer of them. Getting less income, more doctors will retire and fewer will enter the profession, aggravating scarcity.
The president also plans to eliminate the Medicare Advantage program, an approach to managed care that permits the elderly a coherence and a coordination in their treatment that about one-third of them find valuable enough to sign up for.
(b) His newly established panel to cut Medicare will also “encourage the adoption of … common-sense best practices by doctors and medical professionals … [R]educing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan.”
These are code words for rationing. The panel will “encourage” doctors to adopt the “best practices” the panel recommends by limiting reimbursement rates or banning alternatives. Likely guidelines will govern who can get elective surgery like hip replacements or new knees based on the number of “quality adjusted remaining years,” the patient has.
In Canada, the drug Avastin is barred by such a panel despite its proven record as the most effective anti-colon cancer drug. The ban is due not to safety concerns but solely to its $50,000 annual cost. As a result, 41 percent of Canadians with colon cancer die, compared to 32 percent of Americans. These are the kinds of “best practices” that the panel will have to impose to pay for Obama’s plan.
The panel will likely recommend limits on testing and screening, worsening rather than improving preventive care. In Canada, there is an eight-month wait for colonoscopies, which leads to a 25 percent higher incidence of colon cancer...
The president’s plan is, essentially, a program to take medical care away from the elderly and give it to those who are younger, healthier and, in the main, richer.
Guys, if you haven't contacted your Senators and Congressmen in the last few days, please do it again. It's getting crunch time as the Dems plan to twist the rules and force this catastrophe on us despite American public opinion being dead set against the plan. Let them know you oppose it and that you'll remember their votes.
