"I am not going to have sex with that woman. Period!"

What “Death Panels” means is – The government decides who delivers care, what care is allowed, where it can be delivered and what you pay for it.

There may not yet be official “Death Panels,” but the Obama Administration has no moral or philosophical objection. Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) Tweeted this:

The Real Reason That The Cancer Patient Writing In Today’s Wall Street Journal Lost Her Insurance thkpr.gs/1hHgZjp via @TPHealth—Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) November 04, 2013

Pfeiffer is Assistant to the President of the United States and Senior Advisor to the President for Strategy and Communications. The Tweet was from his official White House account.

Already, Democrats are calling for doctors to be forced to deliver the health care the government permits you to have, at the price the government wants to pay. That was the point all along. First, though, individual access to health insurance would have to be destroyed.

The spin is just making it worse, guys. It’s as if Bill Clinton had said, “I’m not going to have sex with that woman. Period!” Then, (after having sex with that woman) he would say “And the sex I did not have was better sex and vastly more affordable sex than Hillary any American has ever delivered experienced!”

Then, the Progressives would chant in unison that fellatio is not having sex, and seek to redefine the meaning of “is.”

Oh, wait. That’s exactly what they are doing, again, just with different nouns and verbs.

Canard, it is not

Jesse Singal at The Daily Beast (link included for completeness, but not recommended) is reviving the idea that Obamacare contemplates no elite panel of experts who will judge what treatments will be available to Americans.

Desperate Measures: Paul Ryan Tries To Revive the “Death Panel” Canard, contains Singal’s complaint that when Paul Ryan said,

“Obama’s health care law “puts a board of 15 unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of Medicare who are required to cut Medicare in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.””

…Ryan has shown mendacity, ignorance or both. The Liberal objection to Ryan’s point is that nowhere in Obamacare is there any required government judgment regarding what treatments a given individual may have. True, but irrelevant. The pretense that a bunch of bureaucrats prohibiting certain treatments for everyone does not constitute a “death panel” is belied by years of exactly such decisions made by Britain’s NHS and, topically, by Ontario’s Health Ministry.

Last-hope prostate drug not funded

There are two tiers of men with advanced prostate cancer in Ontario: Those who get access to a remarkable drug through private insurance, and those who get a death sentence.

The grim news is often delivered at the London Regional Cancer Program to men whose shoulders sag and jaws drop when told Ontario’s Health Ministry has for 15 months refused to pay for a medication covered by every other Canadian province.

For a more comprehensive examination of the question, see this article at The Heritage Foundation:
Comparative Effectiveness Research Under Obamacare: A Slippery Slope to Health Care Rationing

Abstract: One element of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is the advancement of “comparative effectiveness research” (CER). Intended to compare available treatment options, CER can benefit patients if used for informational purposes only, but it could also be harmful in practice. The expansion of the Medicare bureaucracy under the PPACA will allow the use of CER for more government micromanagement of personal medical decision making—hurting patients, doctors, and the practice of medicine.

…The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) has created a quasi-governmental entity, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), to advance CER and its use by doctors, patients, and others.

There are several links in that article which document US government health care “best practice” advice which has already killed people.

If you believe the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute will live up to its Orwellian moniker, I have an almost new solar-panel manufacturing plant I’d like to sell you.

Politicians and the consequences of lying

From The Belmont Club, The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes.

Robert Reich has been widely quoted in the news and blogs lately, citing a 2007 speech he delivered at UC Berkeley in which he is supposed to have said of health care reform that:

  • Younger people should pay more
  • Healthier people should pay more
  • Older people should just die- they’re “too expensive”
  • There should be “less innovation” in medical technology
  • You should not expect to live longer than your parents.

That is largely going to be interpreted as the “hidden truth” that the MSM doesn’t want you to know and to a certain extent it is, but not in the way the casual reader may understand it. Robert Reich was once my teacher and I knew there had to be more to it than that, and so I went to the source: …

RTWT You’ll need to to appreciate the following.

The post suggests that what Reich was saying was “telling the truth is electoral suicide.” I think this is demonstrably naive. The idea that telling the truth is electorally irrelevant seems a lot closer to reality.

Put it this way, Barack Obama told us the truth over and over again and it was much clearer and starker than a thousand page cap-and-tax bill; “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” Other truths he told us: “The Supreme Court, tragically, never spoke on redistribution.” or, “Judge me by the people who surround me.” or, “What I really favor is a single-payer health care system.”

Even now, when he says, “If you want to keep your health care plan, you can,” it’s true. The unspoken implication that makes that so is, “It’s just that it will bankrupt you or your employer.”

On the evidence, I’m afraid politicians telling the truth actually doesn’t matter much. Most American voters don’t listen.

The very definition of a modern major death panel

Brought to you directly from the Kevorkian annex of the UK’s National Health “Service.”

Sentenced to death on the NHS

Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors have warned.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

RTWT