[vaudine]

He doesn't fail to recognize--he fails to care. If it is what he wants, then by d@#n it is Constitutional or he will change the Constitution.--Oh! He will change the Constitution, anyway.

vaudine

[ryan71]

You mean the plan he wants to go into effect in 2013 so we don’t see how badly we’re screwed before he gets reelected?

[Diogenesis]

Carpetbagger, GOP-backstabber Romney:
"Me. I was first to impose this unconstitutional demand.
Me. I was first to make a death panel. Me. Me. "

"British Death Panel IBD Editorials September 10, 2009
Single Payer: In Britain, where the public option is about all most patients get,
a newborn has died because national guidelines recommend that the baby not be treated."

---

"Obama health care plan projected to cost 5.2 million jobs
In an interview on Fox News on August 27th Mark Wilson of Applied Economic Strategies
made the economic case against the current plan for health care reform.
He said the current idea for mandating employers to insure employees or pay a fine in the form of a tax would cost employers
$49 billion dollars and cause the loss of 5.2 million jobs. In addition wages would be “stunted” for another 10.2 million wage earners."

---

"Is This The Obamacare Future? Overworked Doctors in Australia Worried They Are Killing Patients
Australia has a health care system which is similar in some aspects to what the Democrats are proposing.
In a short time (the system was set up in 1983) the country became divided into one group that gets good medical care
(private insurance) and the group whose insurance is not as good.
there are long waiting lists for orthopedic surgery (median wait for total hip replacement is 88 days;
10% of patients waited over 345 days in 1999 to 2000), and cataract surgery (median is 73 days; 10% waited more than 316 days)."

---

"Bay State Insurance Premiums Highest in Country - Boston Globe August 22, 2009
Massachusetts has the most expensive family health insurance premiums in the country,
according to a new analysis that highlights the state’s challenge in trying to rein in medical costs
after passage of a landmark 2006 law that mandated coverage for nearly everyone...
The report by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care foundation,
showed that the average family premium for plans offered by employers in Massachusetts was $13,788 in 2008,
40 percent higher than in 2003. Over the same period, premiums nationwide rose an average of 33 percent..."

---

"Bed shortage forces 4,000 mothers to give birth in lifts, offices and hospital toilets
Thousands of women are having to give birth outside maternity wards because of a lack of midwives and hospital beds."

---

"Oregon Offers Terminal Patients Doctor-Assisted Suicide Instead of Medical Care
PORTLAND, Ore. — Some terminally ill patients in Oregon who turned to their state for health care
were denied treatment and offered doctor-assisted suicide instead, a proposal some experts have called a "chilling" corruption of medical ethics.
"It dropped my chin to the floor," Stroup told FOX News. "[How could they] not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life?"

"Sentenced to death on the NHS
In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients,
they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

---

"Massachusetts: the laboratory for ObamaCare
Cato Institute looks a little farther down the coast to Massachusetts, where the state began its own health-care reform complete
with individual mandates and a government plan.
Cato calls it an “almost perfect” mirror of ObamaCare, complete with promises of reducing cost and extending care — that failed in both respects:
Massachusetts shows that such a mandate would oust millions from their low-cost health plans and force them to pay higher premiums. …

---

"Obama Health-Care Would Drive Up Inflation and Health-Care Costs
ObamaCare would shrink the economy, drive up health-care costs and inflation,
and increase the deficit,
Overall, total federal expenditures will be 5.6 percent higher than otherwise by 2019, adding $285.6 billion to the federal deficit in 2019.
An increase in national health care expenditures by an additional 8.9 percent by 2019.
An increase in medical price inflation by 5.2 percent above what it would have been otherwise by 2019.
A doctor shortage [4] is looming, but the AMA has successfully lobbied Congress to artificially restrict [3] the number of doctors in America,
ObamaCare is full of special-interest giveaways and constitutionally-dubious provisions [9]
like racial preferences and set-asides, which has led to ObamaCare being criticized [9] by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

---

"Pushing Veterans Toward the Grave
The Obama administration now seems to have our nation's veterans in the crosshairs.
Perhaps you've heard about the booklet Your Life Your Choices-also known as the Death Book for Veterans.
This book is particularly alarming, so I want to share some detail you may not have heard.
I have the book on my desk.
The "instructions" that follow sent a chill up my spine. If the veteran more than once checked the column called "worth living, but just barely,"
he or she is asked what combination of those would it take to make his or her life "not worth living"?
The Veterans Administration might as well abandon all subtleties, dig a grave and push our nation's heroes into it.

---

"NHS blunders allowed cannibal Peter Bryan to kill two
A catalogue of systemic failings and blunders allowed a schizophrenic killer,
Peter Bryan, to murder two more people, including eating parts of the brain of one, two inquiries have found.
It found a "systematic failure" because he was looked after by an inexperienced social worker and a psychiatrist who had never worked with a convicted killer.

---

"Massachusetts' Obama-like reforms increase health costs, wait times [RomneyCare]
"If you are curious about how President Barack Obama's health plan would affect your health care, look no farther than Massachusetts.
In 2006, the Bay State enacted a slate of reforms that almost perfectly mirror the plan of Obama and congressional Democrats.
.... Premiums are growing 21 to 46 percent faster than the national average
in part because Massachusetts' individual mandate has effectively outlawed affordable health plans."

---

"Massachusetts' Obama-like reforms increase health costs, wait times [RomneyCare] "If you are curious about how President Barack Obama's health plan would affect your health care, look no farther than Massachusetts.
In 2006, the Bay State enacted a slate of reforms that almost perfectly mirror the plan of Obama and congressional Democrats.
.... Premiums are growing 21 to 46 percent faster than the national average
in part because Massachusetts' individual mandate has effectively outlawed affordable health plans."

---

"Mass. Pushes Rationing to Control Universal Healthcare Costs (RomneyCare)
A 10-member Massachusetts state healthcare advisory board unanimously recommended
that the state begin rationing healthcare to keep the state’s marquee universal health care program afloat financially.
The July 16 recommendations, the Boston Globe explained, would result in a situation where “patients could find it harder to get procedures they want but are of questionable benefit if doctors are operating within a budget.
And they might find it more difficult to get care wherever they want, if primary doctors push to keep patients within their accountable care organization.”
The Globe stressed that the recommendations would “dramatically change how doctors and hospitals are paid, essentially putting providers on a budget as a way to control exploding healthcare costs and improve the quality of care.”
"Budget" is a more politically acceptable word for rationing.
The Globe also noted that “consumer advocates said patients are going to have to be educated about the new system.” Yes, apparently they will have to get used to having their healthcare rationed.

---

"1,000 cancer patients 'refused treatment'
Charities warned that patients with less common forms of cancer were being discriminated against, while others condemned the system as a “scandal”.
Patients and their doctors can appeal for the NHS to pay for drugs not currently licensed for that type of the disease.
But one in three applications were turned down in the last three years, leaving patients having to pay up £20,000 for the medication themselves."

---

"Mass. Pushes Rationing to Control Universal Healthcare Costs (RomneyCare)
A 10-member Massachusetts state healthcare advisory board unanimously recommended
that the state begin rationing healthcare to keep the state’s marquee universal health care program afloat financially.
The July 16 recommendations, the Boston Globe explained, would result in a situation where “patients could find it harder to get procedures they want but are of questionable benefit if doctors are operating within a budget.
And they might find it more difficult to get care wherever they want, if primary doctors push to keep patients within their accountable care organization.”
The Globe stressed that the recommendations would “dramatically change how doctors and hospitals are paid, essentially putting providers on a budget as a way to control exploding healthcare costs and improve the quality of care.”
"Budget" is a more politically acceptable word for rationing.
The Globe also noted that “consumer advocates said patients are going to have to be educated about the new system.” Yes, apparently they will have to get used to having their healthcare rationed.

---

"Massachusetts Universal Healthcare System Breaking Down Already
When Governor Mitt Romney instituted a universal healthcare plan for Massachusetts in 2006 he proclaimed it a conservative idea.
But has it worked? Has it been successful?
For a time, many thought it might but cracks in the system are already being seen.
These cracks are instructive as a lesson on how Obamacare will crash and burn just like Romneycare is now in the process of doing.

One of the early claims that helped push Romneycare through to law was the insistence by its supporters that Emergency Room visits would fall as more and more citizens became covered under healthcare insurance.
Since ER care is far more expensive than a doctor's care, it was thought that more people with insurance would ease the overcrowding of ERs as well as lower the overall costs of healthcare.
However, a flaw in this logic has been seen throughout the state. As more people became insured, more people demanded the care of doctors. These doctors became overloaded with patients and waiting lists for doctors got longer and longer.
As a result, ERs in Massachusetts have not seen a downturn in visits. On the contrary, it seems that ER visits are actually on the upswing in the Bay State. In fact, in 2007 they were higher than the national average by 20 percent...

---

"Hospital patients 'left in agony'"
"Patients were allegedly left screaming in pain and drinking from flower vases on a nightmare hospital ward.
Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust over three years, a damning Healthcare Commission report said.
The watchdog's investigation found inadequately trained staff who were too few in number, junior doctors left alone in charge at night and patients left without food, drink or medication as their operations were repeatedly cancelled.
Patients were left in pain or forced to sit in soiled bedding for hours at a time and were not given their regular medication, the Commission heard.
Receptionists with no medical training were expected to assess patients coming in to A&E, some of whom needed urgent care.
Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS, said there had been a "gross and terrible breach" of patients' trust and a "complete failure of leadership".
The Healthcare Commission's chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said the investigation followed concerns about a higher than normal death rate at the Trust, which senior managers could not explain.
He said: "The resulting report is a shocking story. Our report tells a story of appalling standards of care and chaotic systems for looking after patients. These are words I have not previously used in any report.
"There were inadequacies in almost every stage of caring for patients. There was no doubt that patients will have suffered and some of them will have died as a result."
Julie Bailey, 47, was so concerned about the care being given to her 86-year-old mother Bella at Stafford Hospital that she and her relatives slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks.
She said: "We saw patients drinking out of..."

---

"Paramedics told: 'Let accident victims die if they want to' in new row over patient rights (UK)"
Health Service paramedics have been told not to resuscitate terminally-ill patients who register on a controversial new database to say they want to die.
It has been set up by the ambulance service in London for hundreds of people who have only a few months to live so that they may register their 'death wishes' in advance.
It is believed to be the first in the country, but other trusts around the country are expected to follow suit to comply with Government guidelines which state that patients' wishes should be taken into account, even at the point of death.
Patients' groups and doctors have welcomed the scheme, but it has met opposition from pro-life groups who say it violates the sanctity of life.
The system would come into play if a cancer patient, for example, was in serious pain and rang 999 for help to alleviate the suffering.
But if the paramedics arrived and the patient was close to death, he or she would not be resuscitated if such a request was registered on the database.
This would also be the case if a patient on the database was being transferred between hospitals, and had a heart attack.
Dominica Roberts from the Pro-Life Alliance said: 'This is very sad and very dangerous. It's another step along the slippery slope, at the bottom of which is euthanasia as we see in Holland. 'Paramedics should be there to save lives. They should not be there to let patients die. The medical profession should not agree with someone's belief that their life is worthless.'"

---

"National Health Preview - The Massachusetts debacle, coming soon to your neighborhood."
"Three years ago, the former Massachusetts Governor had the inadvertent good sense to create the "universal" health-care program that the White House and Congress now want to inflict on the entire country.
It is proving to be instructive, as Mr. Romney's foresight previews what President Obama, Max Baucus, Ted Kennedy and Pete Stark are cooking up for everyone else.
In Massachusetts's latest crisis, Governor Deval Patrick and his Democratic colleagues are starting to move down the path that government health plans always follow when spending collides with reality -- i.e., price controls.
As costs continue to rise, the inevitable results are coverage restrictions and waiting periods. It was only a matter of time.

They're trying to manage the huge costs of the subsidized middle-class insurance program that is gradually swallowing the state budget.
The program provides low- or no-cost coverage to about 165,000 residents, or three-fifths of the newly insured, and is budgeted at $880 million for 2010, a 7.3% single-year increase that is likely to be optimistic.
The state's overall costs on health programs have increased by 42% (!) since 2006.

What really whipped along RomneyCare were claims that health care would be less expensive if everyone were covered.
But reducing costs while increasing access are irreconcilable issues.
Mr. Romney should have known better before signing on to this not-so-grand experiment, especially since the state's "free market" reforms that he boasts about have proven to be irrelevant when not fictional.
Only 21,000 people have used the "connector" that was supposed to link individuals to private insurers."

---

A Very Sick Health Plan; Bay State’s ‘Grand Experiment’ Fails [RomneyCare]
"The Daily News Record, Harrisonburg, Va. - 2009-03-31 "
"For folks increasingly leery of President Obama’s plan to radically overhaul America’s health-care system,
or 17 percent of the nation’s economy, all this could hardly have come at a better time —
that is, fiscal troubles aplenty within Repubican Mitt Romney’s brainchild, Massachusetts’ “grand experiment” in “universal” health care."

"Initiated on Mr. Romney’s gubernatorial watch in 2006, this “experiment” has fallen on hard times, and predictably so.
Even though the Bay State commenced its program with a far smaller percentage of uninsured residents than exists nationwide,
“RomneyCare” is threatening to bankrupt the state. Budgeted for Fiscal Year 2010 at $880 million,
or 7.3 percent more than a year ago, this plan, aimed at providing low- or no-cost health coverage to roughly 165,000 residents,
has caused Massachusetts’ overall expenditures on all health-related programs to jump an astounding 42 percent since 2006.

So what does Mr. Romney’s successor, Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, propose as a remedy for these skyrocketing costs?
Well, whaddya think? The standard litany of prescriptions (no pun intended) — price controls and spending caps, for a start, and then, again predictably, waiting periods and limitations on coverage.
As in Europe and Canada, so too in Massachusetts. And, we feel certain, everyone from Mr. Romney to Mr. Patrick said, “It would never happen here.”
But then, such things are inevitable when best-laid plans, with all their monstrous costs, run smack-dab into fiscal reality.

---

"Dem Congresswoman Admits Obama Health Care Plan Will Destroy Private Health Insurance Industry"

---

"Romney’s mistreatments a sick man, as Gov. Mitt Romney meets a medical marijuana patient"

---

Thousands of patients with terminal cancer were dealt a blow last night after a decision was made to deny them life prolonging drugs.
The Government's rationing body said two drugs for advanced breast cancer and a rare form of stomach cancer were too expensive for the NHS.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is expected to confirm guidance in the next few weeks that will effectively ban their use.
The move comes despite a pledge by Nice to be more flexible in giving life-extending drugs
to terminally-ill cancer patients after a public outcry last year over 'death sentence' decisions."

---

"Patients Forced To Wait Hours In Ambulances Parked Outside A&E Departments
"An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has found that thousands of 999 patients are being left to wait in ambulances in car parks and holding bays, or in hospital corridors – in some cases for more than five hours – before they can even join the queue for urgent treatment.

Experts warn that hospitals are deliberately delaying when they accept patients – or are diverting them to different sites –
in order to meet Government targets to treat people within fours hours of admitting them."

---

"Cancer survivor confronts the health secretary on 62-day wait (UK Socialized Medicine)
WAITING times for cancer treatment need to be cut, the Scottish Government was told yesterday.
..Cancer experts later said that patients elsewhere in Europe would be "outraged" by having to wait two months to start treatment, with most being seen within two weeks.

The current target of 62 days from urgent referral by a doctor to starting treatment has still not been met in Scotland, despite that originally being the target figure for 2005."

---

"Hospital patient so shocked at dirty ward she climbed out of bed to clean it herself
After 12 years cleaning care homes and private houses, no one is better qualified than Tereza Tosbell to say whether a room is spotless.
So hospital bosses should take heed of her opinion after she spent four days on a 'filthy' ward.
The mother-of-one said during her stay there was a single, brief visit from a cleaner who left dusty curtains, dirty bedframes and a messy floor.
Disgusted at the conditions, she grabbed the antibacterial fluid dispenser at the end of her bed and some hand towels from the bathroom.
She then set about cleaning her four-bed ward, at one point dropping to her hands and knees to sanitise the floor as she dragged her drip trolley behind her.
'It was shameful to see how sloppy the cleaners were while I was there. I was not prepared to put up with such conditions,'
said Miss Tosbell, a 48-year-old divorcee who was admitted to Colchester General Hospital in Essex with an abscess in her neck.."

---

"Kidney cancer patients denied life-saving drugs by NHS rationing body NICE (UK Socialized Medicine)
Thousands of kidney cancer patients are likely to lose out on life-prolonging drugs.
The NHS rationing body, NICE, has confirmed a ban on three out of four new treatments.
.. 'Families will be denied time together and doctors will be unable to give patients the best treatment.'."

---

"Girl, 3, has heart operation cancelled three times because of bed shortage (UK Socialized Medicine)
A three-year-old girl awaiting heart surgery has had her operation cancelled three times this month because of a shortage of beds.

... A hospital spokesman said that procedures would be reviewed, but the case highlights a growing problem of cancelled operations in the NHS.
More than 57,000 surgeries were postponed for non-clinical reasons, including a lack of beds, last year – 10 per cent more than the previous year."

[ntmxx]

You should expect nothing less, from a natural born sneak, cheat and liar! For that is the condition all Marxists operate within!

[Diamond]

What this bogus comparison of drivers liability insurance to a requirement to buy health insurance amounts to is the outrageous notion that the right to exist, to live and breathe comes from not from God, but from the government; that being alive is a government created privilege that requires a license.

In order for a contract to be valid, it must be voluntary. You cannot be compelled under threat or coercion to enter into a contract with anyone, including government. Obama seeks to turn contract law upside down.

A drivers license is simply permission from government to do something that would otherwise be illegal. When you ask permission from government to engage in a licensed activity, such as driving, you must comply with all the conditions imposed by government. So auto insurance (traditionally, at least, a requirement to have liability insurance, not to protect yourself, but to protect others from your possible negligence) is one of the conditions for obtaining a drivers license. There is no compelled contract because the individual voluntarily agreed to the insurance requirement as a condition of securing the license.

So Obama's attempt to compel everyone to enter into contract for health insurance not only violates the Constitution, as the Article point out, but it is also an attack on the natural right to enter into contract because it subverts the requirement that a contract, absent a license or some privilege granted by government, must be a voluntary act on the part of the parties.

Cordially,

[Rapscallion]

If 85% of us are satisfied with what we have, I asked myself "Why so much pressure of this national nightmare?"

I can only conclude there is a hidden reason.

I have found it. They want to unionize medicine, top to bottom. It is in the proposed bills!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Medicine will become like teachers in public schools, sorters and clerks in post offices, inspectors in airport security, assembly lines in auto plants, and other enterprises ruined by unionization. The last thing that will matter is you, the customer.

[xuberalles]

[TigersEye]

Health Care Reform (HCR) is a direct assault on individual liberties. I think that is its main purpose.

HCR is not just about rationing and wealth redistribution. It's about the end of all individual rights as the corrosive effects of the new collectivist basic human right to health care spreads throughout the legal and political system like a virus.

Congressman Anthony Weiner says that health care is not a commodity. If health care is not a commodity then doctors and nurses are not free and sovereign citizens. If health care is a right then health care workers are slaves to that right who must serve it. No health care worker could refuse to provide their services, for any reason, because that would violate the patient's basic human right to health care.

That means that health care providers have no individual rights. The collective right of the people to receive health care would supersede the provider's individual right to set their fees, their hours or change their occupational status or even decide how to apply their skills and knowledge. A collective right, by practical definition, is a state right because it is a right that is provided by the government to all not protected by the government as something possessed by each person. It is also a state right because it supersedes the individual rights of others when the two come into conflict.

It isn't stated in any of the bills that a patient's rights to care supersedes a provider's right to set fees and hours etc, but it doesn't need to. Rights are always adjudicated in the courts. The legislation simply establishes the foundation for the courts to rule in favor of the patient's collective right to health care.

Weiner’s view is collectivist, fascist and totalitarian. Collectivist because it is superior to an individual right. Fascist because it is overseen by one entity the Federal government. Totalitarian because the Federal government is the true possessor of this collective right and the administrator and enforcer of it as well.

Congressman Weiner's view is the underlying philosophy of the entire Health Care Reform legislation the House and Senate have put forth. Consider the setting up of community watch dogs to monitor various health parameters of citizens in the Senate version of the bill. Look at pages 382 - 393.

TITLE I—QUALITY, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL AMERICANS

Even the citizens themselves will be subject to state set regulations on their behavior in order to fulfill the human right of universal health care. It isn't the individual's liberty that is being protected by that it is the state's control over its health care system that is being guarded. How much clearer can it be that these bills abrogate the concept of individual rights?

Health Care is a Liberty Issue Conservative Underground - 18 August 2009 - Tim Dunkin

Second Bill of Rights aka FDR's economic bill of rights (An early attempt to embed collective rights into American politics and society.)

Another Stupid Argument: Heath Care is a Right

Involuntary Medical Servitude

[aruanan]

I'll quote myself again. This is a piece of something I wrote for a graduate class in human nutrition back in the mid-1990s. The teacher called it cynical:

Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that the government should fund them.

This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly (something of a diffuse divine right of kings).

This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they aren’t acting against society’s interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the πνευμα of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. It’s pathetically naive and dangerous.