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YahooConservatives are reeling over the "gift" Tom Daschle stuck in the bailout package with the blessing of President Obama. The disgraced former nominee to the Health and Human Services Secretary post seeks to exponentially increase government via the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. (It's French for "Omnipotent Overlord of Your Healthcare.")
The expanded duties of the coordinator and proposed oversight board sound cutesy and benign but are quite malevolent. Former Lt. Governor of New York Betsy McCaughey writes for Bloomberg:
The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (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.
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).
I guess the government decided that since it was doing such a BANG UP job at managing the economy, the housing market, education, why not micromanage healthcare by reviewing our medical care to see if a treatment is arbitrarily deemed worthy? Sure! We can afford to pay for this huge increase in government! We're already passing a massive bailout package, the majority of which will be distributed to states who mis-managed their funds, what's another couple of billion dollars to pay for this expansive bureaucracy?
Apparently Michael Phelps was present and shared his massive bong with sponsoring legislators because the half-hearted attempt at establishing penalties for practitioners who do not comply is reckless due to its ridiculous vagueness:
Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)
What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional.
Intentional and dangerous.
McCaughey states that the elderly will be the hardest hit:
Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.
So healthcare isn't about making people healthy anymore? Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury has been sounding the alarm on this since December:
Perhaps more troubling than Daschle’s lobbying résumé is what he will do in his new HHS role. To judge from his new healthcare policy manifesto, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis, Daschle’s proposals for revamping the U.S. health care system are cause for concern. Among them is his proposal to create a “super board” of “experts” to oversee decisions about medical care for average Americans. As Daschle explains in his book, “In choosing what it will cover and how much it will pay, [this ‘super board’] could steer providers to the services that are the most clinically valuable and cost effective, and dissuade them from wasting time and money on those that are neither.”
We've already tried this and it's failing miserably:
Dr. David Gratzer, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute] warns against the dangers inherent in such a bloated bureaucratic system. “How would a government panel figure out the best treatment for, say, depression? How can payment consider ‘best practices’ without massively increasing paperwork for everyone involved? The U.S. federal government is already involved in a massive pricing experiment of health-care services -- Medicare pays for 9,000-plus services, pricing them down to the penny. No one is satisfied with that system. Now the federal government would have to judge not only price but quality?”
Dr. Melissa Clouthier cuts to the chase:
[... ] this legislation will affect you and your family. The end results of this legislation will not be freedom, choice and individualized care. The end result will be that a bureaucrat will be deciding who should and should not receiver care, how and when they should receive care and what care the person should receive.
I don't get how women won't allow Uncle Sam to dictate what goes on with our wombs or childbirth choices yet some will give him a pass when it comes to dictating medical treatment of everything else concerning our bodies. Where is the outrage?
And remember this: Rich people will ALWAYS have choice because they’ll have the money to pay for whatever care they want. It will be the poor and middle class, yet again, who get screwed. They will be stuck with the basic minimum health care. They will be told no and turned away and they will not have the means to seek alternatives.
Doctors, too, will suffer. Already, doctors function under the threat of violating arcane rules and regulations with HIPAA. The unintended consequences are legion and patients enjoy less privacy protection. Don’t get me started on Medicaid and Medicare.
Exactly. Look - I understand the end to these means, really, I do. I just completely disagree with the means. It's great to want to make certain things accessible to everyone, yet time and time again we've seen how the poor get screwed. You cannot force the market to deliver the results you want: that's big government and as we've seen, it does not work. From McCaughey:
The health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry. Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy.
We cannot afford this. We can not afford to let Uncle Sam dictate our healthcare choices. It's dangerous to us, our children, our parents, our grandparents; I shudder to think.
two things
jalee123 February 11, 2009 - 6:49pmFirst, doesn't this already exist? See the Health & Human Services page here, where the duties of the (already-extant) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology are detailed.
Second, wasn't this created by President Bush? See here the summary of the executive order:
"On April 27, 2004, President Bush called for widespread adoption of interoperable EHRs within 10 years, and also established the position of National Coordinator for Health Information Technoloy. On May 6, 2004, Secretary Tommy G. Thompson appointed David J. Brailer, M.D., Ph.D., to serve in this new position."
?