Say Anything Blog

I’ve been banging this drum since before the stimulus was even law, but this issue can’t get too little attention.

Dr. Erik Novack is a health policy fellow with the Washington, DC-based group Americans for Prosperity (AFP). He believes healthcare plans being drawn up by the Obama administration will only serve to strengthen federal government involvement with vital healthcare decisions.
“[T]he so-called ‘stimulus bill’—which was passed by Congress even though not a single member of Congress read the bill—...created a Comparative Effectiveness Research Board.  This is a de facto rationing board,” Novack says.
The AFP spokesman explains the purview of that panel. “It is going to be given the authority not to compare whether…for example, one treatment versus another is better for a broken wrist, but it has been designed with the ability to determine…for the ‘public good’ [if] it is worthwhile treating somebody who is 80 [years old] who might get breast cancer versus somebody who is 60 [years old] with diabetes.”
According to Novack, an amendment was introduced that would have revoked the board’s ability to ration healthcare, but 54 Democrats voted against it.

Let’s keep in mind that Obama has already set the stage for this.  Remember that a little-discussed part of Obama’s “stimulus” spending spree bill (which nobody in Congress actually read before voting it into law) created a new federal bureaucracy called the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology which reportedly will “monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective” with a goal to “reduce costs and ‘guide’ your doctor’s decisions.”

And just the other day Obama’s chief economic adviser was talking about all the money the Obama administration was going to save us on health care by stopping Americans from getting health care the government believes to be redundant or unnecessary.  Now, maybe many Americans do get redundant and unnecessary health care, but what business is that of the government’s?  Do we really want some bureaucrat making that decision for us?

Again, the end-game here is to have the government making your health care decisions for you.  Based on some bureaucrat’s assessment of how many tax dollars they feel you’re worth.