I am writing this as a candidate to be abandoned and delivered to death by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress with their health care bill. I am 77 years old, nearly 78 – I have diabetes, gout, osteoarthritis, had a heart valve replacement, bypass surgery, congestive heart failure, and just spent two months in the hospital and rehab from a stroke. Do you think they want to spend any money on me? I think not. There was a time when age was respected and revered, especially by the Asian countries where the elders ruled the roost. My value now is only to my family.
This small article is only a pin-prick to the Obama administration. I am sure they won’t miss me, so depriving me of health care will only please them. I am sure those old Senators and Representatives now in Congress, where 237 of them are millionaires, will not lack for health care to keep them alive. We need them… or do we? I think all you sickly people over 50 should start worrying.
Now, for all you women, the first shot has been fired at you by the Obama administration. Now you are encouraged to wait until 50 for a mammogram, and then only every two years. That will save you worry, they say. I say it will save them money.
See attached:

- NOVEMBER 15, 2009, 10:24 P.M. ET
The Rationing Commission
Meet the unelected body that will dictate future medical decisions.
APOn that last score, he’s right. Prominent health economist Alain Enthoven has likened a global budget to “bombing from 35,000 feet, where you don’t see the faces of the people you kill.”
As envisioned by the Senate Finance Committee, the commission—all 15 members appointed by the President—would have to meet certain budget targets each year. Starting in 2015, Medicare could not grow more rapidly on a per capita basis than by a measure of inflation. After 2019, it could only grow at the same rate as GDP, plus one percentage point.
The theory is to let technocrats set Medicare payments free from political pressure, as with the military base closing commissions. But that process presented recommendations to Congress for an up-or-down vote. Here, the commission’s decisions would go into effect automatically if Congress couldn’t agree within six months on different cuts that met the same target. The board’s decisions would not be subject to ordinary notice-and-comment rule-making, or even judicial review.
Yet if the goal really is political insulation, then the Medicare Commission is off to a bad start. To avoid a senior revolt, Finance Chairman Max Baucus decided to bar his creation from reducing benefits or raising the eligibility age, which meant that it could only cut costs by tightening Medicare price controls on doctors and hospitals. Doctors and hospitals, naturally, were furious.
So the Montana Democrat bowed and carved out exemptions for such providers, along with hospices and suppliers of medical equipment. Until 2019 the commission will thus only be allowed to attack Medicare Advantage, the program that gives 10 million seniors private insurance choices, and to raise premiums for Medicare prescription drug coverage, which is run by private contractors. Notice a political pattern?
But a decade from now, such limits are off—which also happens to be roughly the time when ObamaCare’s spending explodes. The hard budget cap means there is only so much money to be divvied up for care, with no account for demographic changes, such as longer life spans, or for the increasing incidence of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions.
Worse, it makes little room for medical innovations. The commission is mandated to go after “sources of excess cost growth,” meaning treatments that are too expensive or whose coverage will boost spending. If researchers find a pricey treatment for Alzheimer’s in 2020, that might be banned because it would add new costs and bust the global budget. Or it might decide that “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller,” as President Obama put it in June.
In other words, the Medicare commission would come to function much like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which rations care in England. Or a similar Washington state board created in 2003 to control costs. Its handiwork isn’t pretty.
The Washington commission, called the Health Technology Assessment, is manned by 11 bureaucrats, including a chiropractor and a “naturopath” who focuses on alternative, er, remedies like herbs and massage therapy. They consider the clinical effectiveness but above all the cost of medical procedures and technologies. If they decide something isn’t worth the money, then Olympia won’t cover it for some 750,000 Medicaid patients, public employees and prisoners.
So far, the commission has banned knee arthroscopy for osteoarthritis, discography for chronic back pain, and implantable infusion pumps for pain not related to cancer. This year, it is targeting such frivolous luxuries as knee replacements, spinal cord stimulation, a specialized autism therapy and MRIs of the abdomen, pelvis or breasts for cancer. It will also rule on routine ultrasounds for pregnancy, which have a “high” efficacy but also a “high” cost.
Currently, the commission is pushing through the most restrictive payment policy in the nation for drug-eluting cardiac stents—simply because bare metal stents are cheaper, even as they result in worse outcomes. If a patient is wheeled into the operating room with chest pains in an emergency, doctors will first have to determine if he’s covered by a state plan, then the diameter of his blood vessels and his diabetic condition to decide on the appropriate stent. If they don’t, Washington will not reimburse them for “inappropriate care.”
If Democrats impose such a commission nationwide, it would constitute a radical change in U.S. health care. The reason that physician discretion—not Washington’s cost-minded judgments—is at the core of medicine is that usually there are no “right” answers. The data from large clinical trials produce generic conclusions that rarely apply to individual patients, who have vastly different biologies, response rates to treatments, and often multiple conditions. A breakthrough drug like Herceptin, which is designed for a certain genetic subset of breast-cancer patients, might well be ruled out under such a standardized approach.
It’s possible this global budget could become an accounting fiction, like the automatic Medicare cuts Congress currently pretends it will impose on doctors. But health care’s fiscal pressures will be even stronger than they are today if ObamaCare passes in anything like its current form. And that is when politicians will want this remote, impersonal and unaccountable central committee to do the inevitable dirty work of denying care.
The only way to take the politics out of health care is to give individuals more power to control medical dollars. And the first step should be not to create even more government spending commitments. The core problem with government-run health care is that it doesn’t make decisions in the best interests of patients, but in the best interests of government.
Governor Sarah Palin has started her book tour allowing her entrance into the political arena. This has given purpose to the mainstream media. They didn’t hate Bush until he was elected. However, Sarah has generated hate from them because of the possibility she may run for President and they want to get started destroying her as soon as they can. I can imagine that would make Chris Matthews lose control of his kidneys. He has such trouble with his body!
E.J. Dionne Jr, of the Washington Post and Evan Thomas, of Newsweek, probably have been meeting regularly to perfect their plan to terminate the possibility of Sarah running for President. I wonder if their wives are real people with opinions of their own.
Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, has a vast influence with Obama because of him having his TV arms politicking for Obama – I mean NBC and MSNBC. What will happen to him when Sarah defeats Obama? I know if she was elected with a Republican majority, we would have an energy program where natural gas would be available for all our country’s needs and available even for exporting to South America. Also, there would be oil from our country available for export to other countries. Can you imagine how this would affect our balance of payments? It would also help the normal, average American citizen to have cheap energy for their auto use, electricity, and manufacturing.
We know most of the elitists live in cities and have use of private planes and airlines for their travel. They don’t have any need for commuting to work, shopping, doctors visits, children school affairs, etc.. Elitists don’t worry about these things. As you know, Obama and Al Gore want fuel for cars to be expensive to help with “global warming”, which in and of itself is a SCAM!
A few remarks I wish to make:
- At one time the magazines TIME, Newsweek, and US News and World Report were read by more people than any other news journal. But this is no more. They are just failing liberal rags that hardly anyone reads and are, fortunately, on their way out.
- I used to watch all three of the Law & Order programs, but a short time ago, about three or four months, they went political and lost entertainment value and I haven’t watched any of them since and never will. Anyone else for a boycott?
- Just want Fox to know we don’t have to see the Fort Hood terrorist’s picture on TV over and over. He is NOT THAT PRETTY TO ME! Also have been wondering how come Obama is seen hundreds of times daily on cable news programs? Also, how come they called President Bush Mr. Bush and said “the President” when referring to him but not “President Bush”?
- Have heard no one say how they are going to protect the jurors in this decision made by the Obama administration to move the terrorists trials to New York City, as in the case of the SEIU goons who told people “We know where you live!” Besides this, what person is going to want to be a juror for two to ten years? Also, who wants to be considered a peer of terrorists? The only terrorist that might reasonably have been tried here would have been the Fort Hood terrorist, Nidal Malik Hasan. The first Muslim terrorist to kill their own military companions was in Iraq, when he rolled a grenade into a shared tent. What ever happened to him?
- When will the Black Panther Muslims who refused to let people vote be tried? I don’t trust this Obama Justice Department and their Muslim friends.
- Eric Holder says he thought very carefully before bringing the terrorists to New York – I suppose the same way he let off the 16 FALN terrorists and Marc Rich, a well known international commodities thief. Frankly, I don’t believe a word Eric Holder says. He has been a Democratic hatchet man for years. How he was ever given the position of Attorney General is beyond me.
How Eric Holder fixed the FALN pardons
The Los Angeles Times, mirabile dictu, breaks from the Obamedia pack and does some digging into Attorney General nominee Eric Holder’s past history as a for the Puerto Rican FALN terrorists (hat tip – Debra).
Attorney general nominee Eric H. Holder Jr. repeatedly pushed some of his subordinates at the Clinton Justice Department to drop their opposition to a controversial 1999 grant of clemency to 16 members of two violent Puerto Rican nationalist organizations, according to interviews and documents…
…President Clinton’s decision to commute prison terms caused an uproar at the time. Holder was called before Congress to explain his role but declined to answer numerous questions from angry lawmakers demanding to know why the Justice Department had not sided with the FBI, federal prosecutors and other law enforcement officials, who were vehemently opposed to the grants.
Some religious groups and influential individuals, including President Carter, had endorsed the commutations. But Clinton’s decision outraged law enforcement officials, who had tried to contain a bombing campaign in New York, Chicago and elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s by groups seeking independence for Puerto Rico from the United States.
New interviews and an examination of previously undisclosed documents indicate that Holder played an active role in changing the position of the Justice Department on the commutations.
Holder instructed his staff at Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney to effectively replace the department’s original report recommending against any commutations, which had been sent to the White House in 1996, with one that favored clemency for at least half the prisoners, according to these interviews and documents.
And after Pardon Attorney Roger Adams resisted, Holder’s chief of staff instructed him to draft a neutral “options memo” instead, Adams said.
The options memo allowed Clinton to grant the commutations without appearing to go against the Justice Department’s wishes, Adams and his predecessor, Margaret Colgate Love, said in their first public comments on the case.
“I remember this well, because it was such a big deal to consider clemency for a group of people convicted of such heinous crimes,” said Adams, the agency’s top pardon lawyer from 1997 until 2008. He said he told Holder of his “strong opposition to any clemency in several internal memos and a draft report recommending denial” and in at least one face-to-face meeting. But each time Holder wasn’t satisfied, Adams said.
The 16 members of the FALN (the Spanish acronym for Armed Forces of National Liberation) and Los Macheteros had been convicted in Chicago and Hartford variously of bank robbery, possession of explosives and participating in a seditious conspiracy. Overall, the two groups had been linked by the FBI to more than 130 bombings, several armed robberies, six slayings and hundreds of injuries.



