Your Future, Standing In Line, Paying For The Privilege

The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) House Republican staff, which earlier this year created a chart mapping the bureaucratic complexity of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s original health care proposal (H.R. 3200), has combined similar analysis by the House Republican Conference with the earlier chart.  The analysis details new additions to the health care bureaucracy contained in the new version of the Speaker’s bill (H.R. 3962) that were not previously listed.  Let’s just say the Speaker’s vision for government-run health care hasn’t gotten any simpler.

“This is the blueprint for a taxpayer-funded mega-bureaucracy,” said House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH).  “The new chart is an astonishing and unsettling glimpse of the future that awaits American health care, should H.R. 3962 be passed by the House and signed into law.”

The chart, completed at the direction of Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), the committee’s ranking House Republican Member, shows that the Pelosi plan has grown even more complex in the months since it was originally unveiled by congressional Democrats.  The new bill – expected to be brought to a vote in the House as early as Saturday – contains all of the bureaucracy of the original plan, plus a whole lot more, the chart illustrates.  The full chart can be seen here:

A bigger, readable version of the chart is here:

Tea Party Sign Of The Week

Perfectly describes people’s sentiments.

Anybody have any idea how this new Pelosi government rationed health care will cost less and deliver more?

Pelosi-Care $1.5 Trillion For The First Ten Years Is More Like It, Says Heritage

Nancy Pelosi has unveiled the new health care bill in the House after merging together three different versions of legislation. To appease moderate Blue Dog Democrats and to meet President Obama’s oft-stated promise that reform wouldn’t cost more than $900 billion in the first ten years, Speaker Pelosi sought to reduce the $1.5 trillion total cost of the bill. Newsflash: she failed.

The Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary score of the bill and while some in the media have been reporting its net cost of $894 billion, the total cost of health reform legislation is more like $1.5 trillion. So, Speaker Pelosi is essentially right back where she started—with a huge 2,000 page plan that carries a hefty price tag.

Donald Marron, former acting director of the Congressional Budget Office, calculates that through a variety of provisions there is about $217 billion in additional spending in the House bill. The additional spending in the House bill brings the total cost of the House bill to $1.273 trillion, or almost $1.3 trillion in a ten year budget window.

And let’s not forget the infamous “doc fix” which prevent cuts in Medicare payments to physicians that would otherwise automatically take effect under the “sustainable growth rate formula” (SGR). Despite the Senate’s unsuccessful attempt to pass a permanent fix without paying for it, the House legislation also attempts to pull out the same $245 billion dollar plus provision from the legislative package to create the illusion that the price tag of the legislation is lower than it really is. The American people saw this budget gimmick before when it was tried in the Senate, who do the House leaders think they are fooling?

The House bill costs more than the President’s $900 billion dollar promise and its costs are in excess of $1 trillion. All told, the cost of “reform” legislation is still more than $1.5 trillion.

Source:

H1N1, ‘Pig Flu’ Lies

The White House and the CDC are at odds over pig flu. The White House wants another ginned up crisis, the CDC wants the facts.

So the CDC held a press conference back on August 26, 2009 to answer questions: Head of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, disputes White House swine flu report …

Obama ReInstates The Death Book for Veterans

Sarah was right, the precursor — According to the WSJ:

If President Obama wants to better understand why America’s discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.

Last year, bureaucrats at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, “Your Life, Your Choices.” It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA’s preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated “Your Life, Your Choices.”

Who is the primary author of this workbook? Dr. Robert Pearlman, chief of ethics evaluation for the center, a man who in 1996 advocated for physician-assisted suicide in Vacco v. Quill before the U.S. Supreme Court and is known for his support of health-care rationing.

More here:

Poor Boy Gets His Murds Wixed Up

You have to wonder how long the State Run Media would go before pointing out the obvious — Obama can’t keep his story straight about Obamacare, or most anything. My guess is it’s reached ear splitting proportions in the media and they can’t hold it in any more. Probably since everyone who has actually listened to what he says already knows it.

Good with the teleprompter acting bit, not so good when trying to explain, just too many obvious lies. The real reason Obamacare is failing is because people are listening to Obama, and don’t like what they hear.

Every speech it’s what a disaster U.S. healthcare is, but if you like yours you can keep it. Talk about contradiction. People know that is just a bald faced lie, private healthcare will just disappear in a few years, as with his statement that he never said he supported ’single payer. Might work fine in Kenya, where there is no Internet, not so good in America where people are educated and there is an Internet.

Today, from the WSJ:

Something Obama may want to consider, trust is not a renewable resource.

USA Life Expectancy, Up Up and Up — To All Time High

Due to the USA free enterprise based health care system, free enterprise and the drive for excellence. The things that have made America great for the last 230 years.

Steady progress …

So tell me why would we want to destroy the best healthcare system in the world, to add a few who are uninsured? Why not just help them buy insurance.

Or better yet, just do a few cost reduction things, like stop the “Edwards ambulance chasers” — Tort reform, loser pays and allow people to buy their own health insurance plans or form their own private co-ops. Government intervention, it all has the same ending, crap for all, except the few who reside in Congress.

CDC report here. Data is only available through 2007.

Canadian Healthcare Rationing

More on the rationing of healthcare with the vaunted government run healthcare system in Canada:

Vancouver patients needing neurosurgery, treatment for vascular diseases and other medically necessary procedures can expect to wait longer for care, NDP health critic Adrian Dix said Monday.Dix said a Vancouver Coastal Health Authority document shows it is considering chopping more than 6,000 surgeries in an effort to make up for a dramatic budgetary shortfall that could reach $200 million.

“This hasn’t been announced by the health authority … but these cuts are coming,” Dix said, citing figures gleaned from a leaked executive summary of “proposed VCH surgical reductions.”

Government run healthcare, whatever you call it, involves reducing the amount of healthcare available by either rationing, allowing people to be forced to wait so long they die, or outright denying health care to needy people.

More here:

Canada Goes Private

Canada is figuring out what most Americans know, governments can run nothing successfully. Take cash for clunkers, yes take it, a disaster on near every count. But now, Canada, back into the breach, fixing their government run fiasco with ‘the private option’.

Yes you heard that right Canada is fixing their complete flop of a health care system by allowing for private health insurance. Well so much for the benchmark of government run hell-care. How many had to die before they figured it out?

The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country – who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting – recognize that changes must be made.

“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press. [...]

[Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA] has been saying since his return that “a health-care revolution has passed us by,” that it’s possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and “that competition should be welcomed, not feared.”

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

Oh my! Canada’s government-run healthcare system is in a state of disarray, so much so that they’re considering increasing competition by allowing folks to buy private insurance. Costs spiraled out of control, lines stretched across the land, the bureaucracies and all their death panels were unable to cope.

Canada-Care, Budget Cuts, Otherwise Known As Rationing Health Care

Supposedly, this is a good country to live, so you can have free, but rationed health care. Translation, you may die first, but hey it’s free.

According to the leaked document, Vancouver Coastal — which oversees the budget for Vancouver General and St. Paul’s hospitals, among other health-care facilities — is looking to close nearly a quarter of its operating rooms starting in September and to cut 6,250 surgeries, including 24 per cent of cases scheduled from September to March and 10 per cent of all medically necessary elective procedures this fiscal year.

The plan proposes cutbacks to neurosurgery, ophthalmology, vascular surgery, and 11 other specialized areas.

As many of 112 full-time jobs — including 13 anesthesiologist positions — would be affected by the reductions, the document says.

The good gone bad, or never was any good. You decide.

While you are at it, tell me why you would let Obama, Reid, Pelosi have control over whether you live or die? Just one good reason.

Read here: