Posted on 08/09/2013 11:33:53 AM PDT by Morgana
Oregon rations healthcare to Medicaid recipients. Terminal cancer patients are denied chemotherapy to extend life–and now the Oregon rationing board wants to go deeper into the weeds.
From Hope Landsem’s Wall Street Journal blog:
Liberal states often preview health-care central planning before the same regulations go national, which ought to make an Oregon cost-control commission especially scary. On Thursday a state board could change Oregon’s Medicaid program to deny costly care to poor patients who need it most.
Like most such panels, including the Affordable Care Act’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, the Oregon Health Evidence Review Commission, or HERC, claims to be merely concerned with what supposedly works and what doesn’t. Their real targets are usually advanced, costly treatments. That’s why HERC, for example, proposed in May that Medicaid should not cover “treatment with intent to prolong survival” for cancer patients who likely have fewer than two years left to live. HERC presents an example to show their reasoning for such a decision: “In no instance can it be justified to spend $100,000 in public resources to increase an individual’s expected survival by three months when hundreds of thousands of Oregonians are without any form of health insurance.”
Let us not forget that Oregon Medicaid happily pays for assisted suicide–and indeed, has offered terminal cancer patients that option while denying life-extending treatment.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
Also, Vermont–which legalized assisted suicide recently–as a single payer plan the state can’t pay for. And guess what: Using assisted suicide and rationing are both on the table as means of paying for the program. No question: Centralized control, mixed with culture of death values make for a toxic brew.
As for the eventual push to turn Obamacare into single payer: As I wrote at length, health care rationing is central to the operation of single payer systems. Obamacarians want more!
“In no instance can it be justified to spend $100,000 in public resources to increase an individual’s expected survival by three months”
I can’t disagree with that.
I’d hate to be in the nursing home business under ObamaCare. Maybe they can be turned into drug treatment centers because God knows we’ll need plenty of those.
Bump
Next they will put illegal foreign invaders to the front of the line.
At the risk of being slammed, is it really so evil - or wrong at all - to withhold expensive treatment when it will only prolong life a few months? Whatever happened to the idea that when God decides it’s your time, then it’s time?
That is why we should have private insurance, private hospitals and people paying their own bills. BUT the person who said that doesn’t agree with me.
” I can’t disagree with that.”
Until its you or your grandmother on the receiving end of that decision.
I agree. No one should have unlimited “free” healthcare.
Seriously, how many people would spend the money on these end-of-life expensive treatments if it were their money?
When your parents get old and sick, there comes a time when many people are asked to make that choice. It is not uncommon for many people to sign the DNR form for their own parents.
“Until its you or your grandmother on the receiving end of that decision.”
Oh no, even then. I’m not a hypocrite - you’ll find those primarily on the left.
The key is ‘public resources’, which shouldn’t be involved.
We’ve got to get away from this idea that we are being callous if we don’t spend huge sums of money to prolong life a few months; that is not “putting a dollar value on life,” it is recognizing reality.
They gave my mother in law 6 months to live 5 years ago after being diagnosed with a lung cancer. Intermittent chemo treatments have kept it under control. She still mows the lawn, washes the windows enjoys her great grandkids. Statism is a killer..
Healthcare now equals
You have cancer - no chemo
You have heart problems - no stint or bypass for you
You are pregnant and don’t want to be - yes we will pay to murder your child
You are gay and have HIV - you are special and deserve special treatment we will do everything we can for you no matter what the cost
You got HIV from a blood transfusion but are not homosexual - how did you vote in the last election ?
Pretty soon hospitals will be little more than a local health clinic where you see nurses who dispense aspirins
because they will be using the insurance money to pay for more bureaucratic jobs for their people whose sole job is to decide if you can get anything more than an aspirin and God help you should you have to spend any time at all in that clinic because those bureaucrats will be deciding if you eat and drink too.
Basically leftists lie about wanting healthcare for all since they always ration healthcare to the sick.
Yours is an emotional response to a logical statement, which is the common friction between the Conservative argument and the Liberal response.
It’s the decision makers who are the problem. Try this on for size. You’re a 65 year old out of work living on SS and your coronary artery plugs. Without treatment you’re dead in three months. Should the “state” approve your stent?
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