Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Would Frank Lautenberg Be Alive Under ObamaCare?

Save Jersey asks the pertinent questions, as our 86 year old Senator gets some expensive treatment at Mt. Sinai:

Lautenberg is enjoying access to some of the best doctors and most advanced procedures in the medical world. Such wonderful treatment is made possible by his taxpayer-funded Cadillac health care plan.

Ah, the "Cadillac Plan" - you know, the one Obama intends to tax out of existence. And when we don't have them, just our own version of the "National Health"?

....it's cheaper to give painkillers to a cancer patient around Frank Lautenberg's age than petition the appropriate federal agency to pay for real medical treatment.

The elderly are always the first to suffer when government no longer allows citizens to purchase the care they could otherwise afford....


From the point of view of politicians with a limited budget, is it worth spending a lot on, say, a patient with late-stage cancer where the odds of remission are long? Or should they spend to improve quality, not length, of life? Or pay for a hip or knee replacement for seniors, when palliative care might cost less? And who decides?

In Britain, the NHS decides, and under its QALYs metric it generally won't pay more than $22,000 for treatments to extend a life six months. "Money for the NHS isn't limitless," as one NHS official recently put it in response to American criticism, "so we need to make sure the money we have goes on things which offer more than the care we'll have to forgo to pay for them."

And how long will Senator Lautenberg live? As I've said before, an 86 year old going through chemo is going to suffer, a lot, and will - at the very least - be missing a lot of Senate votes, if he can even move at all.

Will he make six months? A year? Maybe. And how much are we going to be on the hook for? That's a horrible question to ask, but like much of Obama's policies, his national health care takeover leads a lot of folk to look around them and see who is getting what, exactly, with their money. If we all have the right to private insurance, then it's a question I have no right to ask. But under government medicine, where I will be paying much more for much less, it is a question any citizen is entitled, if not obligated, to ask.

(to put this another way - why was the mortgage bailout unpopular with the very folks - homeowners - it was supposed to help? Because people saw their neighbors, with BMWs and swimming pools, getting taxpayer assistance to pay for their underwater homes while honest folk who played it straight got screwed. That is the result of redistribution - you watch everything your neighbor gets, and you wonders how much of it came out of your paycheck. Obama's policies inject an ugliness into American society that never existed before.)

Save Jersey asks Senator Lautenberg to:

...reflect on his near death experience, return to Capitol Hill, and immediately disavow his support for the ObamaCare bill. Every American deserves the same level of care available to Frank Lautenberg. How any politician could vote otherwise is simply unconscionable.

Sorry, S-J. Lautenberg can very easily vote for ObamaCare because of, not in spite of, his personal medical crisis. For no matter what the setup, Frank will always receive better medical care than you or I. So why not socialize medicine? Lautenberg then gets to ration our health care, will no concern that his will ever be affected. Win-win for the Senator.

Why? Because he will be, as long as he lives, a Senator, an Elite, a Person of More Importance than You or I, and will always - always - bump us out of line in order to get his own needs attended to first. That, too, is guaranteed when the government controls health care.

All the more reason, of course, why they shouldn't...

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