Not Letting The Crisis Go To Waste

Not Letting The Crisis Go To Waste

A while back, Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's chief of staff, made the observation, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Panic provides a wonderful opportunity for dramatic expansions of governmental power--look at the Reichstag fire. (And while I think the PATRIOT Act, overall, was a good thing, there were provisions to it that we were fortunate had a five year expiration date.) And it appears that the first steps towards government rationing of health care have been stuck into the porkulus bill:

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.
Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).
The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.
But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.
New Penalties
Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)
What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

For all the leftist screeching about Big Pharma, the major reason that American health care is expensive is because, for the vast majority of us that have health insurance, our medical care is extremely good.

My daughter has been part of a chat room group of expectant mothers in a number of different countries. She has been really impressed with the difference between the medical care that she and the other American mothers-to-be receive, compared to the British and Canadian women. Britain and Canada, the two models for nationalized health care that the left loves, both rely heavily on rationing to keep health care costs down.

So what's the reason for this pressure to keep health care costs down, even at the expense of quality health care? I suspect that the true believer leftists pushing some of this stuff are doing so because they want universal health care, and if they have to impair the health care for the 260 million of us that are covered, so that the 41 million who aren't covered get care, so be it. (Remember that many of those 41 million can afford to buy health insurance, but choose not, because they are young, and do not anticipate needing medical care. Many others are illegal aliens whose employers are socializing the costs of their labor force, while enjoying the benefits of individual capitalism.)

But the people that really matter when it comes to policy--the sorts who can afford to arrange for Tom Daschle to have a full-time limousine and chauffeur while working as a lobbyist--probably have more nefarious motives. So that the billionaires who fund the Democratic Party (George Soros, Bernie Madoff, the Sandlers who sold a subprime mortgage bill of goods to Wachovia) can continue to loot the taxpayers, even if it means that our health care declines.