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Authors: David Limbaugh
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little on healthcare as he wishes. But under a government-run plan—for which ObamaCare lays the groundwork—the government will reduce, deny, and ration care based on a compassionless bureaucratic chart designed by “compassionate” liberals. So while ObamaCare may marginally decrease the numbers of uninsured—though that’s not guaranteed—it will greatly reduce access to quality care.
All government-run healthcare systems ration care, either directly, by denying or limiting certain types of treatment, or indirectly, by imposing cost constraints through budgets, waiting lines, and/or limited technology. One million British people are awaiting admission to government-run hospitals at any given time, and shortages result in the cancellation of some 100,000 operations annually. New Zealanders experience similar troubles. Swedes can wait for heart surgery up to twenty-five weeks, and 800,000 Canadian patients are on waiting lists. 62
Moreover, an Investors Business Daily poll found ObamaCare will cause up to 45 percent of doctors to retire early. Similarly, the National Center for Policy Analysis reported that ObamaCare “could impact physician supply in such a way that the quality of health care would suffer. The reality is that there may not be enough doctors to provide quality medical care to the millions of newly insured patients.” Why? Because it would make practicing medicine “more trouble than it’s worth.” This reduction in the physician workforce, according to the doctors surveyed, could “result in a significant decline in the overall quality of medical care nationwide.” 63
Perhaps the most ominous predictor of rationing in ObamaCare involves so-called end-of-life counseling. Sarah Palin took a lot of flack for arguing that various provisions in the healthcare bill, including end-of-life counseling, could establish “death panels.” Regardless of whether ObamaCare would lead to death panels, one is entitled to ask why such a provision is in the bill at all. What business does the government have insinuating itself into intimate, end-of-life matters? The answer is quite clear: it has no business at all making such decisions, but as the government takes over more and more of the healthcare system, it gains a bigger interest in containing costs in every part of the system.
Furthermore, ObamaCare, as noted above, also expands the role of the CMS over healthcare decisions. These provisions, together with the fact that a number of the bill’s architects, such as Obama’s close advisers on the matter, Tom Daschle and Ezekiel Emanuel, firmly believe in rationing care to the elderly, makes speculation about death panels more than plausible. But there’s more.
Before ObamaCare was passed, Democrats slipped into the stimulus bill a provision to establish a $1.1 billion fund for a Federal Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, a brainchild of former Democratic senator Tom Daschle. Former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey warned about this panel when the stimulus bill was being considered. According to McCaughey, the council was based on ideas Daschle had sketched out in his 2008 book Critical: What Can We Do about the Health Care Crisis , in which he explained that such a panel is meant to empower an unelected bureaucracy to make hard decisions about healthcare rationing that elected politicians might lack the courage to make. He suggested Americans would be better served if they passively accepted “hopeless diagnoses” like Europeans do. Daschle’s argument, said McCaughey, was that “seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.” Yet Obama claims conservatives are hyperventilating over this issue. 64
Joseph Ashby, in the American Thinker , wrote that Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, is on this council. Emanuel’s credo concerning rationing to the elderly is: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by
All government-run healthcare systems ration care, either directly, by denying or limiting certain types of treatment, or indirectly, by imposing cost constraints through budgets, waiting lines, and/or limited technology. One million British people are awaiting admission to government-run hospitals at any given time, and shortages result in the cancellation of some 100,000 operations annually. New Zealanders experience similar troubles. Swedes can wait for heart surgery up to twenty-five weeks, and 800,000 Canadian patients are on waiting lists. 62
Moreover, an Investors Business Daily poll found ObamaCare will cause up to 45 percent of doctors to retire early. Similarly, the National Center for Policy Analysis reported that ObamaCare “could impact physician supply in such a way that the quality of health care would suffer. The reality is that there may not be enough doctors to provide quality medical care to the millions of newly insured patients.” Why? Because it would make practicing medicine “more trouble than it’s worth.” This reduction in the physician workforce, according to the doctors surveyed, could “result in a significant decline in the overall quality of medical care nationwide.” 63
Perhaps the most ominous predictor of rationing in ObamaCare involves so-called end-of-life counseling. Sarah Palin took a lot of flack for arguing that various provisions in the healthcare bill, including end-of-life counseling, could establish “death panels.” Regardless of whether ObamaCare would lead to death panels, one is entitled to ask why such a provision is in the bill at all. What business does the government have insinuating itself into intimate, end-of-life matters? The answer is quite clear: it has no business at all making such decisions, but as the government takes over more and more of the healthcare system, it gains a bigger interest in containing costs in every part of the system.
Furthermore, ObamaCare, as noted above, also expands the role of the CMS over healthcare decisions. These provisions, together with the fact that a number of the bill’s architects, such as Obama’s close advisers on the matter, Tom Daschle and Ezekiel Emanuel, firmly believe in rationing care to the elderly, makes speculation about death panels more than plausible. But there’s more.
Before ObamaCare was passed, Democrats slipped into the stimulus bill a provision to establish a $1.1 billion fund for a Federal Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, a brainchild of former Democratic senator Tom Daschle. Former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey warned about this panel when the stimulus bill was being considered. According to McCaughey, the council was based on ideas Daschle had sketched out in his 2008 book Critical: What Can We Do about the Health Care Crisis , in which he explained that such a panel is meant to empower an unelected bureaucracy to make hard decisions about healthcare rationing that elected politicians might lack the courage to make. He suggested Americans would be better served if they passively accepted “hopeless diagnoses” like Europeans do. Daschle’s argument, said McCaughey, was that “seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.” Yet Obama claims conservatives are hyperventilating over this issue. 64
Joseph Ashby, in the American Thinker , wrote that Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, is on this council. Emanuel’s credo concerning rationing to the elderly is: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by
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