10 July 2009

In Retooled Health-Care System, Who Will Say no? - washingtonpost.com

Probably won't be Doctors. Obviously won't be the eeevvviiilll healthcare companies. I'm betting on my fellow bureaucrats. "I'm sorry to tell you that granny's going to die because a GS12 doesn't like the ROI on the proposed medical plan".
In Retooled Health-Care System, Who Will Set Limits? - washingtonpost.com

Money quote:
"The question came from a Colorado neurologist. "Mr. President," he said at a recent forum, "what can you do to convince the American public that there actually are limits to what we can pay for with our American health-care system? And if there are going to be limits, who . . . is going to enforce the rules for a system like that?" President Obama called it the "right question" -- then failed to answer it."
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Here's Mickey Kause of Slate on the same subject:

"WaPo's Alec MacGillis notes that Obama's health care reformers

are clearly spooked by the notion that they could be accused of denying, for example, hip surgery to an 80-year-old.

If so, they largely have themselves to blame. They brought it up! It wasn't the Republicans who billed health care reform as a cost saving, budget-balancing measure that would start to deny payments for treatments deemed "ineffective," or (as one acolyte put it) when "a person's life, or health, is not worth the price." And to think when they heard that people started to worry about rationing! Fancy that."[Yes, the emphasis is mine]

The 'acolyte' is Ezra Klein from www.prospect.org, arguably the most progressive of modern progressivists. This gets more distasteful, if this quote attributed to Justice Ginsburg,
AJSCOTUS, is correct:
"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of." --Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

If it is, the modern progressives are getting closer and closer to traditional progressives. Eugenics. Who'da thunk.



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