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Get this, from Breitbart:
[C]heck out this juicy morsel to the trial lawyers (page 1431-1433 of the [House healthcare] bill):
Section 2531, entitled “Medical Liability Alternatives,” establishes an incentive program for states to adopt and implement alternatives to medical liability litigation. [But]…… a state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys’ fees or imposes caps on damages.
So, you can’t try to seek alternatives to lawsuits if you’ve actually done something to implement alternatives to lawsuits. Brilliant! The trial lawyers must be very happy today!
Finder’s fee: Drudge
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We don’t want it. We can’t pay for it. Yet the health-care juggernaut continues. If it is not stopped, our country faces financial disaster. John Ellis explains why the Democrats’ claims that there will be cuts to offset costs are baloney:
The context within which all of this takes place is that Medicare is headed for insolvency, and that the nation is running a ruinously large deficit. Cuts in Medicare were always going to be needed to deal with that program’s looming bankruptcy, and the political difficulty of making them guaranteed that they could never be large enough to solve the problem. As to the deficit, a search for new sources of revenue was always on the cards, and there too the political difficulty of enacting tax increases would also rule out anything large enough to solve that problem. And so in a context of impending Medicare insolvency and a massive deficit, whatever Medicare cuts and new taxes might turn out to be politically feasible, they were already spoken for.
The Medicare funding crisis and the deficit have a prior claim on them, and for that reason they can’t be thought of as offsets to the Baucus bill’s spending at all. Baucus claimed them for his bill’s balance sheet, but the mere fact that he put them there doesn’t make it right to do so.
Think of it this way: imagine that your household is living beyond its means and has run up a very large debt. You think up some ways of cutting your household expenses and earning some more money so that you can accumulate cash to pay off your debt and begin to live within your budget.
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Roger Simon wonders:
Which do you think is more nourishing?
Hmm, Proust or Pelosi? Kind of a toss, isn’t it?
Finder’s fee: Instapundit
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces her new, 2,000-page health-care bill with such confidence that it will do all good things—yet can anybody really imagine that “negotiations” that yielded a humongous, unreadable piece of legislation portend anything but disaster? To understand what is going on, I believe you have to grasp one important idea: It’s not about health care, Stupid.
We could reform health-care incrementally, in a way that, if wrong, can be turned around and set on a safer course. But that is now what we’re seeing. Kyle-Anne Shiver of The American Thinker understands what is really at stake:
Purely mad social engineers — Obama, Pelosi, & Reid — are on a determined march toward nationalizing one sixth of the entire American economy. Their scheme will have far-reaching effects on one hundred percent of the men, women and children in this country. The whole idea is patently ridiculous, especially in light of the host of other impending disasters.
But the fact that these Democrat power-mongers are attempting to foist upon us a system already tried-and-failed so many times in so many places pushes the current national healthcare debate into the realm of pure lunacy.
As one of Einstein’s most oft-quoted bits of genius reminds us, doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, is insanity.
I would maintain that what is going on now is tantamount to a second Constitutional Convention—it will change that much in American life. Along the way, it will change health-care. But not in any way any of us will want to live with (live with—literally).
Shiver refers readers to Shattered Lives, case studies of people who have suffered under the kind of health-care systems the Democrats want to impose on us: you know, older people refused routine cataract operations, hospitals without clean linen and do-it-yourself dentistry.
Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are lucky—they are rich enough, or blessed with special health-care from “serving” in Congress, and so they will never experience the full-force results of their social engineering.
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Bloomberg reports:
House leaders are facing criticism from business groups and wading through contentious issues such as abortion and undocumented immigrants as they try to secure votes for legislation overhauling U.S. health care.
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Because government money would be used to help buy insurance, critics said some might go toward abortions. House members are still discussing whether to allow undocumented aliens to use their own money to purchase private insurance sold on the so-called exchange, a regulated market to be set up in 2013
Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak contends that 40 members would unite to block House consideration of the legislation unless the abortion issue is resolved or they are given a chance to introduce an amendment during floor debate.
Another controversy may be waiting because of provisions that call for end-of-life counseling. During the summer, critics charged that Democrats planned to set up “death panels” that would decide who got care. The new bill says nothing in it would “presume the withdrawal of treatment.”
Well, that’s a relief.
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The Weekly Standard’s Mary Katharine Ham finds the following in Nancy Pelosi’s 1,990-page healthcare monstrosity:
Pg. 1516 regulates vending machines: In the case of an article of food sold from a vending machine that ‘‘(I) does not permit a prospective purchaser to examine the Nutrition Facts Panel before purchasing the article or does not otherwise provide visible nutrition information at the point of purchase; and ‘‘(II) is operated by a person who is engaged in the business of owning or operating 20 or more vending machines, the vending machine operator shall provide a sign in close proximity to each article of food or the selection button that includes a clear and conspicuous statement disclosing the number of calories contained in the article.
That should make Grandma feel better about the Medicare cuts.
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House bill: Two Thousand
Pages. War and Peace: Thirteen
Hundred eighty-eight.
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Hey, at least the new 1,990 House bill, HR 3962, released by Speaker Nancy Pelosi at her pep rally today, is shorter than the old House bill, HR 3200, which was 2,454 pages.
So points out National Review Online’s Hanns Kuttner, who notes:
Speaker Pelosi wants to take HR 3962 to the House floor next week. A member of the House who wants to read the legislation before the debate begins would have to read 498 pages each day (allowing for a Sabbath rest). Those who aim only to read it before voting will need to read 221 pages a day if the Speaker keeps to her target of a vote before Veterans’ Day.
NRO’s Mark Hemingway adds this:
Fun Fact: Page 1255 of the bill makes veterinary students eligible for federal grant funding, including scholarships and loan forgiveness. There is $283 million in spending authorized under these sections – meaning we could be spending hundreds of millions to pay for veterinarians while we have a deficit of over $1 trillion.
Oh, but we’re finally doing something about those millions of uninsured cats.
Read the whole bill (if you can!) here.
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“Government is in the process of duplicating everything that managed care did for the last 15 years that was reviled by everybody and which we fought very hard to overcome.” So spoke Dr. David Fields, obstetrician and gynecologist, Lenox Hill Hospital, New York. He is one of the doctors health-care activist Betsy McCaughey quotes today in the Wall Street Journal. Here are a few chilling quotes to frighten you—just in time for Halloween:
Dr. Richard Amerling, nephrologist, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York: “The example that you give of valve surgery in an 85-year-old is just not going to happen under [White House health care adviser] Ezekiel Emanuel. He’s going to just say that that’s a nonstarter. That person has outlived their useful years, no matter how long they could live beyond that.”
Dr. Borer: “What we’re hearing from the president’s medical advisers is that what we have is good enough and we really shouldn’t be wanting or expecting any more.”
Dr. Seymour Cohen, oncologist, named to “America’s Top Doctors”: “When we went to medical school, people used to die at 66, 67 and 68. Medicare paid for two or three years. Social Security paid for two or three years. We’re the bad guys. We’re responsible for keeping people alive to 85. So we’re now going to try to change health care because people are living too long. It just doesn’t make very good sense to me.”…
Dr. Joel Kassimir, dermatologist, Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York: “We’re now being told by physicians advising the president that we take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously.”
Dr. Tracy Pfeifer, plastic surgeon, president, New York Regional Society of Plastic Surgeons: “When physicians graduate from medical school we take an oath, the Hippocratic Oath, to do no harm to our patients. It’s a very important philosophy to us and we uphold it and hold it very dear to our hearts. Plato, another philosopher, used to say things like ‘Those with a poor physical constitution should be allowed to die. The weak and the ill-constituted shall perish.’ These government programs that are being proposed I think are very scary in the sense that physicians could be induced to violate the Hippocratic Oath.
“There’s a limit to how much of a financial penalty each individual practitioner is going to be able to bear. . . . If the patient is sitting in the examination room with us and they’re wondering, ‘Is the doctor not ordering a test for me because he’s going to get penalized if he does it?’ This is a major, major problem for patients and physicians alike.”
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On the day that the House Democrats present a bill that includes the public option, Dr. Marc K. Siegel, an internist, looks at his roster of patients to see how many would be helped.
Siegel appears to have a pretty ordinary group of patients:
I have a varied practice, with patients ranging from rich to poor, from chronically ill to “worried well.” On any given day, I see at least one quarter of cases (including Medicaid patients) without charge; one or two come in without insurance and pay me cash. Most of the time, I accept the patient’s HMO or Medicare without looking closely at how much I get paid.
Siegel goes into particular cases (using pseudonyms for his patients), including Jeff, a part-time janitor who doesn’t quite qualify for Medicaid. Siegel sees him for high blood pressure and charges him a minimal fee. What would the public option mean for Jeff?
A bit of a hypochondriac, Jeff calls me often for reassurance, which I happily give. He’d likely qualify for a public option — and be liberated to go to the emergency room for a minor complaint whenever I was unavailable, which he’s reluctant to do right now. (After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, similar unnecessary visits to the ER rose.)
Celine is in favor of the public option, but it might not be helpful in the real world of daily medical attention:
My patient Celine is a 50-year-old administrative assistant at a small advertising firm. She can barely afford her share (about half) of the premiums for her basic, no-frills HMO coverage. With a troubling family history of breast cancer, she’s comforted by the idea that a public option would provide better, cheaper insurance than she has now. But I worry that her employer might be more inclined to “dump” insurance — and that the public-option insurance will prove unacceptable to the doctors she’s used to seeing, just as Medicaid is.
Do read Siegel’s article—it’s quite fascinating. He notes an already troubling problem that may get worse if we have the public option:
The biggest problem I’m having now is the shrinking network of doctors to refer my patients to for procedures or specialty evaluations. The public option won’t help here — and could make things worse.
