Thread: Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Second in a Series (Collect All 10!)

Originally Posted by pepperpot

It looked like the 'presidential' eagle to me.....

Riiight, that's not what you said before you edited your post. Does sound a little better the way you worded it this time though.

Originally Posted by hesnothere

Riiight, that's not what you said before you edited your post. Does sound a little better the way you worded it this time though.

Yes, I changed head (or lead?) to 'presidential'.........soon after I posted. Didn't change the substance, just verbiage. I agree, it does sound better, that's why I changed it.

Once again showing poor reading comprehension skills. First pic is a right wing.

Originally Posted by hesnothere

Just for the chits & giggles......I could be wrong....but it looks like a left wing to me!

(Your right, his (bird's) left - notice the curve inward - yeah - people peeing on the cheerios today )

Yup, it's been a looong week.....

See also http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-inf...rd-series.html

These Obamacare Agencies Have the Power to Ration Your Health Care
by Jennifer Popik, JD | Washington, DC | 5/7/14 9:56 AM

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlights how two related entities authorized by the Obama health care law – the Independent Payment Advisory Board and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation — both have the power to ration care. This April 23 op-ed by Lanhee J. Chen and James C. Capretta adds to the documentation provided by NRLC demonstrating that rationing of health care is built into the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) has remained one of the most controversial provisions of the Obama health care law since its passage. But Chen’s and Capretta’s op-ed focuses on a less widely known, but also dangerous provision of the Obama health care law–the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.

In the op-ed entitled, “The Other Stealthy ObamaCare Menace: The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation exists to impose price controls and limit payments to providers” Chen and Capretta write http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...15690799077728

“The Affordable Care Act’s Independent Payment Advisory Board has been so heavily criticized for being an unaccountable body with the power to effectively ration Medicare services that many congressional Democrats no longer support it. IPAB’s bureaucratic cousin—the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation—deserves the same treatment… Both institutions are in place to preserve rather than reform Medicare’s traditional, and broken, fee-for-service Medicare program. They both also embrace the ObamaCare technocratic mind-set.”

INDEPENDENT PAYMENT ADVISORY BOARD (IPAB)

First, some background on the IPAB and how it fosters rationing. Most of the public focus (as well as the op-ed’s discussion of IPAB) has been on its authority of the Board to cut Medicare with very limited Congressional authority to override or alter those cuts. But National Right to Life has been emphasizing a still graver concern – one at the core of rationing in the Obama health care law.

Integral to the Obama Administration’s stated mission to drive down what Americans choose to spend for life-saving and health-preserving health care, the IPAB is charged with a key role in suppressing not just governmental health care spending (such as that in Medicare) but also private health care spending by limiting what treatment doctors are allowed to give their patients.

The health care law instructs the IPAB to make recommendations to limit what all Americans are legally allowed to spend for their health care to hold it below the rate of medical inflation. The health care law then empowers the federal Department of Health and Human Services to implement these recommendations by imposing so-called “quality” and “efficiency” measures on health care providers. ( The documentation can be found in the endnotes at http://www.nrlc.org/uploads/communic...report2014.pdf )

What happens to doctors who violate a “quality” standard by prescribing more lifesaving medical treatment than it permits? They will be prevented from contracting with any of the health insurance plans “qualified” under the Obama Health Care Law. Few doctors would be able to remain in practice if subjected to that penalty.

This means that a treatment a doctor and patient deem advisable to save that patient’s life or preserve or improve the patient’s health–but which exceeds the standard imposed by the government–will be denied even if the patient is willing and able to pay for it. Repeal of IPAB is critically important to prevent this rationing of life-saving medical treatment.

CENTER FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID INNOVATION AND RATIONING

According to Chen and Capretta:

“The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation has flown below the political radar. That’s due to its seemingly innocuous mission: promoting new and more efficient ‘payment systems’ and ‘models of care.’ But this agency is just as dangerous as IPAB. It is a bureaucracy within the massive Department of Health and Human Services superstructure and therefore run by the president’s political appointees. But unlike most of the federal bureaucracy, the agency never has to go back to Congress to get an appropriation. ObamaCare provided it with $10 billion, upfront, to cover its costs for a full 10 years.

…

“The statute also gives the Center wide-ranging authority to alter the Medicare and Medicaid programs without further congressional action. It is supposed to be testing new ways to pay providers of medical services. Changes that are found through pilot programs to reduce costs without harming quality, or found to be budget neutral while improving quality, can be implemented nationwide through regulatory fiat.

“The agency’s broad mandate reveals the mind-set of ObamaCare’s authors. The premise is that the federal government is best positioned to lead an effort in innovation in medical delivery, despite all evidence to the contrary.

…

“The agency’s authority is broad enough to allow across-the-board cuts in payments to hospitals and physicians, and lower reimbursements for pharmaceuticals and related products as well, all in the name of innovation.

“The Congressional Budget Office certainly expects this to happen. It says that legislation to repeal the agency’s $10 billion in funding would increase the deficit because its cost-cutting agenda is expected to produce more than $10 billion in savings from reimbursement cuts. It’s one more indicator that budgetary scorekeeping in health care is hopelessly biased in favor of irrational governmental controls.”

http://www.lifenews.com/2014/05/07/t...r-health-care/



Through both the IPAB and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, Obamacare authorizes federal bureaucrats to impose limits on what life-saving medical treatments Americans are allowed to get. It may not call this “rationing.” But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t.

For a comprehensive overview of the rationing effect of the Affordable Care Act, see “The Affordable Care Act and Health Care Access in the United States.” http://www.nrlc.org/uploads/communic...report2014.pdf

Originally Posted by janelle

Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Second in a Series (Collect All 10!)
08/26/2009

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33300

With the Democrats getting slaughtered -- or should I say, "receiving mandatory end-of-life counseling" -- in the debate over national health care, the Obama administration has decided to change the subject by indicting CIA interrogators for talking tough to three of the world's leading Muslim terrorists.

Had I been asked, I would have advised them against reinforcing the idea that Democrats are hysterical bed-wetters who can't be trusted with national defense while also reminding people of the one thing everyone still admires about President George W. Bush.

But I guess the Democrats really want to change the subject. Thus, here is Part 2 in our series of liberal lies about national health care.


(6) There will be no rationing under national health care.

Anyone who says that is a liar. And all Democrats are saying it. (Hey, look -- I have two-thirds of a syllogism!)

Apparently, promising to cut costs by having a panel of Washington bureaucrats (for short, "The Death Panel") deny medical treatment wasn't a popular idea with most Americans. So liberals started claiming that they are going to cover an additional 47 million uninsured Americans and cut costs ... without ever denying a single medical treatment!

Also on the agenda is a delicious all-you-can-eat chocolate cake that will actually help you lose weight! But first, let's go over the specs for my perpetual motion machine -- and it uses no energy, so it's totally green!

For you newcomers to planet Earth, everything that does not exist in infinite supply is rationed. In a free society, people are allowed to make their own rationing choices.

Some people get new computers every year; some every five years. Some White House employees get new computers and then vandalize them on the way out the door when their candidate loses. (These are the same people who will be making decisions about your health care.)

Similarly, one person might say, "I want to live it up and spend freely now! No one lives forever." (That person is a Democrat.) And another might say, "I don't go to restaurants, I don't go to the theater, and I don't buy expensive designer clothes because I've decided to pour all my money into my health."

Under national health care, you'll have no choice about how to ration your own health care. If your neighbor isn't entitled to a hip replacement, then neither are you. At least that's how the plan was explained to me by our next surgeon general, Dr. Conrad Murray.

Drug Rationing for Seniors Begins ]
Medicare to stop covering critical medications?
By David Catron – 2.24.14

Buried beneath the avalanche of recent news reports about the latest Obamacare-mandated funding cuts to the Medicare Advantage (MA) program is a related but far more disturbing story — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has taken a major step toward rationing medications to the elderly. Since passage of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, seniors enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug program have been guaranteed access to “all or substantially all” of the drugs in several classes of pharmaceuticals. President Obama’s health care bureaucrats, however, have proposed removing three of these classes from the “protected” list.

The New York Times reports, “The administration’s proposal would remove the protected status from… immunosuppressant drugs used in transplant patients, antidepressants and antipsychotic medicines.” Yes, you read that correctly. These are drugs used to facilitate organ transplants and treat patients suffering with mental illness. The Times names a few of the medicines in question: “They include many well-known drugs, such as Wellbutrin, Paxil and Prozac to treat depression, and Abilify and Seroquel to treat schizophrenia.” There can be little doubt that the next step CMS plans to take will involve a decision not to cover the most expensive of these medications at all.

This is why CMS represents this as a cost-saving measure. But the amount of money these changes will save is virtually nothing by Medicare standards. Moreover, as Yevgeny Feyman writes in Forbes, “The likely reduction in therapeutic choices could result in higher health care costs in other parts of the program, like Part A (for hospital care) or Part B (for physician services).” Further undermining the CMS cost-saving claim is that, due to the very market features that make it unpopular with Beltway bureaucrats, the Medicare prescription drug program may be the only federal entitlement in history whose costs have come in below its initial CBO projections.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration didn’t lose its affinity for health care rationing when Donald Berwick was forced out of CMS. Rationing is as much about control as it is about money. And this is where the nexus between the CMS drug proposal and Obamacare’s MA cuts can be found. Medicare’s prescription drug benefits are administered only through Medicare Advantage, and the President as well as his bureaucratic accomplices have been gunning for MA since Obama’s brief pit stop in the Senate. MA introduced private competition and patient choice into Medicare. That cannot be tolerated. Medicare must be wholly returned to their fiscally inept control.

Predictably, the CMS proposal has produced bipartisan protests. As the Times further reports, “Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee warned that the proposal could ‘diminish access to needed medication’ without saving much money.” On February 19, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp and Senate Finance ranking member Orrin Hatch wrote to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner thus: “As authors of Medicare’s successful prescription drug program.… We are strongly opposed to this proposed regulation.”

The following day, the CMS head received another protest letter from a surprisingly diverse coalition of more than 200 groups, including the AIDS Alliance, the National Kidney Foundation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Association of Community Cancer Centers, the Lupus Foundation of America, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, the United Way, various hospitals, physician associations, insurance companies and pharmacy chains. The letter warns Tavenner that the rule makes “unnecessary changes to programs that are already extraordinarily effective” and that it “will impede beneficiaries’ access to affordable health plans and medicines.”

Even some left-leaning media outlets are uncomfortable with the Obama administration’s rationing policy. In the Huffington Post, Professor Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, recently pointed out that the CMS rule “will not only fail to rein in Medicare’s long-term spending growth, but will inflict severe and unnecessary harm on our nation's poor and elderly who are suffering from serious physical and behavioral illnesses.” Thorpe makes much the same point as does Feyman: “Restricting access to the medicines patients need to manage depression, avoid organ transplant rejection, and treat psychosis will drive healthcare utilization in far more costly ways.”

It’s a little disorienting to find such an objective view in a publication that normally repeats Obama administration talking points verbatim, but there it is. Presumably, this departure from partisanship is an indication of just how far CMS has over-reached this time. Most Americans regard health care rationing as repugnant and unnecessary, and we look on it with even less favor when it is imposed on the elderly. As Professor Thorpe writes, “That's a betrayal of Medicare’s promise of access to care for our most vulnerable, older Americans.” Well said.

http://spectator.org/articles/57905/...seniors-begins

[I]Just remember they can't properly take care of the Veterans, how do you suppose they can take care of 340 million of us. If you said they can't and won't do it right, you get a bonus point.