DEATH PANELS & TAXES
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Obama wants you to die inexpensively.
For an administration that professes to believe that health care is a fundamental right, it's rather ironic that ObamaCare intends pay for itself by sending seniors to an early grave via DEATH PANELS a.k.a. the Independent Medicare Advisory Board and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
Government paid BureauDocs will play God, weigh the value of your life and render your final judgment. Here is how one commentator, Jane Chastain, columnist and political commentator at WorldNetDaily, put it in her Mar. 18, 2010 article "Fooling Granny," available at
www.wnd.com:
"This bill sets up an Independent Medicare Advisory Board, which is to recommend cuts for the sole purpose of limiting the amount of resources going to Medicare patients. Some have called it a 'Death Panel.' You may think this is harsh, but if this bill passes, many seniors will die prematurely because the recommendations of these unelected bureaucrats will go into effect. Congress is not required to act on them!"
I know, I know, here we go again using scare tactics to get our point across, right? There is no such thing as Death Panels, right? After all AARP, Obama and the Liberal Media went FAR out of their way to "Expose the Myths of ObamaCare" from the opponents of Government-run health care, right? AARP would never betray seniors for profit, would they? RIGHT!
The world under ObamaCare truly has been turned upside down. For months they lied to us about death panels. "Death panels, you're exaggerating." Now that ObamaCare is law, the statists and social engineers are brazenly promoting Death Panels that target America's seniors and boomers as essential to "bend the cost curve down," right onto the backs of America's most vulnerable population.
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Doubt it? Consider this: Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's new director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, vocally supports the rationing arm of Britain's National Health Service, the UK's own version of a death panel, which goes under the Orwellian label the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE). NICE is responsible for determining whether or not the life-extending benefits a patient receives are worth the cost to the government.
Dr. Berwick calls this panel a "global treasure." One can just imagine the thrill up his leg Dr. Berwick feels at the mention of ObamaCare's version of comparative effectiveness to be carried out through the new death-research panel tagged the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute established to undertake comparative effectiveness research like NICE.
Additionally, Berwick's leg must tingle at the thought of the other death panel flying under cover of "efficiency and effectiveness", the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which will recommend spending and coverage cuts in Medicare to "improve clinical effectiveness," ways of slowing the growth of Medicare provider payments, reducing Medicare and Medicaid drug reimbursement rate and cutting other Medicare and Medicaid spending. In a word, RATIONING!
If you want to know what medicine in America will look like under ObamaCare, just examine how it operates under the strong arm of NICE where doctors are forbidden to prescribe vital drugs that prolong the life of cancer patients, such as Lapatinib and Sutent. NICE also heavily restricts Alzheimer's drugs for those in the early stages of the disease despite the fact that the early stages are when treatment can provide the most benefit.
Originally pitched as nothing more than a board to promote "best practices," NICE has become a rationing, death panel machine, and so will ObamaCare's various cost-control and clinical-effectiveness panels.
New York Times columnist and self-professed ObamaCare cheerleader Paul Krugman said recently on ABC's This Week –
"Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sale's taxes. Its going to be; we're actually going to take Medicare under control and we're going to have to get some additional revenue from a VAT."
Yeah, he actually said DEATH PANELS
