Category: Health Care

Buried on pages 425-431 of  the 1018 page ObamaCare health bill are mandates for end-of-life counseling. The wording is very reasonable but don’t kid yourself — the idea is that people dependent on government compensation are going to try sell you something and, given human nature, that something is going to be guided by their own convenience and not your or your loved ones’ benefit.

To get an idea as to what the convenience would be rent Soylent Green and imagine yourself as Edward G. Robinson on that last conveyor belt.

If you are more heroically inclined rent Logan’s Run and think of yourself as leading Jenny Agutter to freedom.

That those who provide service can’t be harmed financially if you fail to use it is the big problem with government programs that for some reason is not taught in our government-run schools, which, coincidentally I’m sure, are staffed by people who can’t be harmed financially if you don’t use the service.

The entire 1018-page bill can be found at http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf

Care facilities in Pennsylvania – citing English Common Law — have been suing the children of parents unable to pay the debts they incurred for services they provided.

If only the health care facilities that treated the late Ann Dunham — President Obama’s mother — had been aware of this.

Ms. Dunham would not have had to fear the inability to pay her bills — as Barack “My Son, the Harvard Grad” Obama, so advertised during his campaign — and young couples in Pennsylvania and other states would not have had to feel guilt over Ms. Dunham’s plight.

Investor’s Business Daily noted that physician-owned hospitals are endangered by the various medical-care reforms being considered in D.C.

According to IBD, traditional hospital groups last week reached a deal with the Obama
administration and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus,
D-Mont., to reduce their Medicare and Medicaid payments by $155 billion
over 10 years with the stipulation that physician-owned hospitals be required to have a Medicare provider agreement — necessary to see Medicare patients — retroactive to last Jan. 1.

There are about 200 physician-owned hospitals in the country with 110 under-construction.

Traditional hospitals claim that competition from physician-owned
rivals is unfair since they don’t have to take money-losing Medicaid or
uninsured patients.

So it seems the object of health-care reform is to stop physicians from providing health care.

A neighbor was charged over $1,000 for a 5-mile ambulance ride from Delaware County Memorial Hospital on Lansdowne Avenue in Drexel Hill to Harlee Manor on Sproul Road, Springfield.
Was she told the price before they chose to transport her? If they did, I suspect she might have had her daughter drive her  and just as effectively.
Someone is going to use this an example as to why we need Obamacare. What the control-everything fans fail to understand is that adding more layers of bureaucracy  is going to increase cost and decrease service. There will be more i’s to dot, t’s to cross and palms to grease. Politicians and government administrators don’t place catheters, empty bedpans or invent drugs, but politicians and government administrators and their friends will be where the money goes under whatever plan the Obama and his fellow Dems cook up.
To cut cost and save our healthcare system all that’s needed is a little more honesty and a little less fear of liability.