What Happened to Health Care?

For John, BLUF:  Obamacare is a potential disaster coming down the road.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Memeorandum last evening talked about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  There were a couple of items of interest.  First up out of The Las Vegas Sun was this item, "Reid says Obamacare just a step toward eventual single-payer system".

So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is saying that the Democrat Party Controlled Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was just a way station on the railroad to a "Single-Payer" health care system.  At least that is what Reporter Karoun Demirjian tells us.

In just about seven weeks, people will be able to start buying Obamacare-approved insurance plans through the new health care exchanges.

But already, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is predicting those plans, and the whole system of distributing them, will eventually be moot.

Reid said he thinks the country has to “work our way past” insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas PBS’ program “Nevada Week in Review.”

“What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said.

When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”

So, when Senator Read and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were assuring us that they had to pass the bill so we could not what was in it, was it a case that they didn't know what was in it, or was it a case of them knowing good and well what was in it and just not telling us? Then over at Investors Business Daily we have this headline, " Sarah Palin Was Right—More Dems Ditch Death Panels".

ObamaCare: Some Democrats are signing on to bills repealing the powers of the Independent Payment Advisory Board to effectively ration health care for seniors.  So Sarah Palin was right about those death panels after all?

Palin was mocked by liberals when at a Tea Party rally in Reno, Nev., in late 2010, shortly before the GOP retook the House of Representatives, she told attendees:  "Don't be thinking that we've got victory for America in the bag yet. ... We can't party like it's 1773."

Leftist know-it-alls insisted that 1776 was the correct year, when in fact Palin was right:  The Boston Tea Party she referred to — a protest of British oppressive taxation — happened on Dec. 16, 1773.

Palin was right as well, and also took a lot of heat, when she referred to ObamaCare's Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) as a death panel whose decisions would result in health care rationing.

(Under ObamaCare, IPAB's board of 15 presidentially appointed "experts" will be empowered to make arbitrary Medicare spending-cut decisions with virtually no congressional oversight or control.)

Dr. Donald Berwick, who headed the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, admitted as much when he opined:  "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open."

Berwick also said: "We can make a sensible social decision and say, 'Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit (new drug or medical intervention) is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.'"

In an op-ed last month in the Wall Street Journal that Palin could have written, Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee, called IPAB "essentially a health care rationing body" and said he believes it will fail.

That was Governor (and Medical Doctor) Howard Dean mentioned in that last paragraph.  Former candidate for the Democrat Party nomination for President and former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

There you are.  I bet it hurts when Governor Sarah Palin turns out to be prescient.  You didn't doubt her, did you?

Then there is Professor Paul Krugman, trying to fill in the holes with an OpEd, Death Panels and the Apparatchik Mindset. Here are some extracts:

…the Wall Street Journal, which is outraged, outraged, at the prospect that Oregon’s Medicaid system might seek to limit spending on treatments with low effectiveness and/or patients who aren’t going to live much longer in any case. Death panels!

And yes, we’re talking about taxpayers.  Nobody at all is talking about rationing the care you may choose to buy for yourself; if Rupert Murdoch wants to spend $100 million on a treatment that probably won’t work, but might prolong his life by a few weeks, he’s perfectly free to do so.  The real policy question is simply whether taxpayers should be obliged to do the same for everyone — and the answer is obviously no.

Now, the Journal isn’t really confused on this point.  Surely it understands the difference between rationing care and limiting public spending on care.  The point, however, is to confuse readers, and make them think that spending controls on Medicaid are the same thing as having bureaucrats pronounce death sentences on the middle class.

Surely Professor Krugman remembers the little book, The Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life.  Of course there are limits to what we can and will do, but the question is the limits.  The question is where we will place those limits.  What some worry about is a sort of T-4 Program, secret and overreaching.  Given the actual lack of transparency in the current Administration, including with regard to surveillance of Americans, just adds to the concerns.  One concludes that as long as it isn't George W Bush as President, Professor Krugman is prepared to give near total faith to the Executive Branch of the Government.

Remember then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously saying Congress has to "pass the bill so you can find out what's in it".

So we can find out what is in it?  Or so the Congress-critters can find out what is in it?  Was Senator Reid our secret Aneurin Bevan, setting up a secret path to a single payer national health service or was he just grossly ignorant.  What did Speaker Pelosi know and when did she know it?

That is the stark question.  Did the Hill Staffer crowd give us this complex and hard to understand bill that could be going anywhere or was this planned by Congressional leaders Reid and Pelosi?

Yesterday I thought anyone thinking of voting to defund the PP&ACA was dump.  Why take on the heat of shutting down government?  Now it seems that Senator Reid and Representative Pelosi either passed a health care bill that is sending us directly toward to a single payer system or they were duped and befuddled by their staffs.  Neither is a good outcome.  Neither is acceptable.  It is time to rethink this whole thing.

Regards  —  Cliff