Shhhh… Don’t Tell Grandma We Have to Kill Her

Back in the early days of the Clinton Administration, Hillary Clinton undertook to bring about the most sweeping change in our health care system ever attempted.  It went down in flames, and Hillary faded into the background for a while.  Tom Daschle saw what happened and vowed that it would be different next time.  Tom Daschle had his own problems, but perhaps some of his ideas survived.

What’s Stimulus Got to Do with It?

What Daschle learned was not to try to do too much at once and not to include too many details.  So a couple of obscure provisions are included in the massive stimulus package that could radically change health care and your liberty.  Betsy McCoughey writes in Bloomberg.com

“The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (HR 1 EH, pages 445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors”

Strike One Against Your Liberty

Your medical treatments in an electronic format may reduce costs and make treatment more effective, but do you want every medical treatment that you receive tracked in a federal database?  Do you trust the federal government to protect your privacy?  But that’s not even the scary part.

“But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446).”

“Guide my doctor’s decisions?” Do I want some federal bureaucrat to be guiding my doctor’s decisions?  Some faceless wonk who has never seen me, let alone medically evaluated me?  What kind of guidance is he going to provide?  Let’s look at some cases in the U.K.

“The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.”

So, if grandma is diagnosed with a disease where the medicine to treat it is expensive, and some government board decides that the cost of the medicine is not justified by the number of years grandma has left, oh well.  Bye, bye grandma, it was nice having you around.

So, tell me again what this has to do with economic stimulus?