Key Senate health bill's deadly fine print

Jewish World Review ^ | Sept. 23, 2009 | Nat Hentoff

[rhema]

There has been a sudden disclosure that, in the influential Senate Finance Committee's health care bill, there is a dangerous provision that could deny crucial health treatments for Medicare patients.

This is the much-publicized and debated Baucus bill, named for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. In its news section, the Wall Street Journal reported (Sept. 17) that this bill "breaks a logjam and is likely to form the core of a bill in the full Senate."

During the continuous, extensive coverage of this proposed legislation, there has been only very limited mention — and none I've seen in the mainstream press — of a section that penalizes doctors for Medicare patients who, for at least five years (from 2015 to 2020), authorize total treatments that wind up in the top 10 percent of national annual Medicare costs per patient.

The 1 in 10 Medicare doctors who spend beyond this limit will themselves lose 5 percent of their own total Medicare reimbursements. Considering the already low rates Medicare doctors get — and the president pledges they will get lower — this could be a heavy penalty.

As Burke Balch, director of the National Right to Life's Center for Medical Ethics, says: "This (part of the Baucus bill) means that all doctors treating older people will constantly be driven to try to order the least-expensive tests and treatments for fear they will be caught in that top 10 percent. Note that this feature operates independently of any considerations of quality, efficiency or waste. If you authorize enough treatment for your patients, however necessary and appropriate it may be, you are in danger of being one of the 1 in 10 doctors who will be penalized each year."

[rhema]

But Medicare doctors will not be the only losers. As the doctors struggle to keep abreast of the continually falling limit of the money they can authorize for their contingent of patients, consider what those patients will lose in the quality of their treatment. The bluntest assessment of this approach to health care "reform" is by National Right to Life Executive Director David N. O'Steen: "It takes the telltale fingerprints from the government: Instead of bureaucrats directly specifying the treatment denials that will mean death and poorer health for older people, it compels individual doctors to do the dirty work."

[BARLF]

When the revolution starts, put me on the front lines. I’m 80 years old, would rather die in defense of my country than sitting in a Doctor’s waiting room.

[chris37]

I am 38, and I will die next to you, because I will die on my feet fighting my enemy rather than on my knees begging mercy from a tyrant.

[BARLF]

I will die on my feet fighting my enemy rather than on my knees begging mercy from a tyrant.

Amen

[givemELL]

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/09/23/hr_3200_will_collapse_global_medicine_97423.html

The crossover from the House Bill to the Senate bill may give the same result.

[Semperfiwife]

A nice revolt by the physicians at Walter Reed would put these Senators in their place. Most of them are in the Medicare age bracket and if the doctors there refused to treat them or lower their treatments based on cost, all hell would break loose. We should target those physicians and get them to treat our leaders just like they are told to treat the masses.

[Naplm]

will someone knock on the closed door and let ole Marxist Max
to give it up

[BlueStateBlues]

Death Panel.

[cpforlife.org]

Pro-Life PING

Please FreepMail me if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.

"It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government"
--Thomas Paine

[chris37]

I think this is a wonderful idea, and it would be most effective.

Perhaps they should start by giving senator Byrd a pain killer, and nothing else.

[VOA]

“Key Senate health bill’s deadly fine print
Jewish World Review ^ | Sept. 23, 2009 | Nat Hentoff”

Good for Nat Hentoff.
I used to read his columns in “The Village Voice” at the university
library and was occassionally shocked at my agreement with some of
his point-of-view articles.

IIRC, he was actually anti-abortion; that might be one reason he’s
also skeptical about The Messiah’s (Obama’s) and the general Democratic
view of how to ruin healthcare in the USA.

Another liberal (well, he did used to work with Ralph Nader) that
I find myself suprised to agree with is Wesley J. Smith.
He was warning about the coming denial of healthcare treatment to
the old/weak/young/defenseless by the medical establishment years ago.

Wesley J. Smith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_J._Smith

[ArmyTeach]

My feeble mind seems to perceive that the number ‘top 10%’ will become a bar that is continually lowered, year by year.

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

I am eligible for Medicare because I am on dialysis. I haven’t taken any money for the treatments yet because I have private insurance. But dialysis costs about $110K per patient per year (largely because government has jumped in to cover it). Does this mean that nephrologists will avoid recommending other treatments (i.e., kidney transplants) because of cost? Their patients are likely to be among the most expensive ones on the spreadsheet.

I hate these people.

Thanks for posting this. I am going to print it and take it to the dialysis clinic on Friday.

[LauraJean]

I’ll be fighting along with you guys but in the words of Patten I’d rather some “SOB die for their cause” instead of me dying for mine.

[LauraJean]

I’ll be fighting along with you guys but in the words of Patten I’d rather some “SOB die for their cause” instead of me dying for mine.

[PapaBear3625]

Does this mean that nephrologists will avoid recommending other treatments (i.e., kidney transplants) because of cost? Their patients are likely to be among the most expensive ones on the spreadsheet.

You know the problems faced by people with "pre-existing conditions" regarding getting covered by health insurance? Good luck getting a doctor to accept you as a patient if you have chronic health issues.

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

I’ll go too. I had cancer already and the doctor told me I had less than five years to live. I’m on dialysis but I can learn to shoot straight and I can cook pretty good. Until my kidneys give out... bury me in Texas, please.

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

John Dingell is a good candidate too.

[hinckley buzzard]

I am eligible for Medicare because I am on dialysis

I wonder if you are aware that as recently as the 1960s's dialysis patients faced a death panel, an anonymous committee of community "leaders" not all of whom were physicians, by design, who would have ruled on whether you were to live or to die. Scarcity does that to a system. Artificially induced scarcity does the same thing as natural scarcity.