Really a quite serious matter.
And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
The funny thing about Sarah Palin’s “death panel” bullshit isn’t that it’s completely pulled out of the collective ass of the Republican party, no. The kneeslappingly hilarious punchline is of course that these “death panels” already exist:
Ensuring that everyone has access to care has become a full-time cause for Ms. Demko. She and her family have been without insurance since her daughter was born four years ago with what doctors say is Down syndrome. Her husband is a self-employed contractor so the family had relied on her job as a substance abuse counselor for their health insurance.
But Demko said she couldn’t keep working full time with an infant with special needs. When she quit, she didn’t realize that would result in her family’s being unable to get health insurance.
Ohio does not require insurance companies to cover children with disabilities considered to be preexisting conditions.
The fact that “Obama’s bureaucrats” are working overtime to pass legislation that would (ideally) prevent private health insurance coverage from being denied for precisely that is precisely why the right wing has desperately kicked out the bottom of the barrel and started clawing its way down through the earth’s crust.
The UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”
One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.
The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
—Investor’s Business Daily, “How House Bill Runs Over Grandma” [via]
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (but intends to retire from this post in 2009), a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and the distinguished research chair at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
“I realize,” said John Holbo, “it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back…”
