The hard place- Are those type of insurance decisions acceptable to the rich and to Obama himself for his family?
Barack Obama, with his healthcare infomercial where he was allowed to basically filibuster the whole show into one huge commercial for the Obama Show and Obamacare, is the perfect example as to why conservatives are against socialized medicine.
Obama makes the Republican's point for them in one specific exchange: (video at link)
DR. DAVINSKI: If your wife or your daughter became seriously ill, and things were not going well, and the plan physicians told you they were doing everything that could be done, and you sought out opinions from some medical leaders in major centers and they said there's another option you should pursue, but it was not covered in the plan, would you potentially sacrifice the health of your family for the greater good of insuring millions or would you do everything you possibly could as a father and husband to get the best health care and outcome for your family?
OBAMA: ... does she get hip replacement surgery even though she was fragile enough that they weren't sure how long she would last whether she could get through the surgery. I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time. and you're absolutely right that if it's my family member, my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care. but here's the problem that we have in our current health care system. Is that there is a whole bunch of care that's being provided that every study, every bit of evidence that we have indicates may not be making us healthier.
Hot Air calls it Obama's Michael Dukakis moment.
Barack Obama got ABC to move their news division into the White House in order to make the big pitch for his egalitarian, everyone-gets-treated-equally ObamaCare push. Instead, Obama fumbled into a Michael Dukakis moment that exposed him as a hypocrite. ABC itself leads with Obama’s response that he wouldn’t stay within his own plan for his family:
LA Times uses this as their sub-header "At a healthcare town hall, he says stopping futile procedures for the terminally ill can lower costs."
Futile procedures?
Wow.
Mr. Hope and change wants to take "hope" away from people because to attempt to give them longer lives, to try to save their lives, even against the odds, is too expensive for a government run socialized medical plan.
Meet Rich Luze, who was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer: (Stats on Pancreatic cancer- Thirty-eight thousand people will be diagnosed with the disease this year and 34,000 will die.)
Six years after diagnosis, Luze is cancer-free.
Meet some other patients, Pancreatic cancer survivors that beat the odds.
Meet Jonathan Simms, 23 year old, from Belfast.
Simms was considered terminally ill when he was diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD. By 2204, Simms was no longer considered terminal. As of 2007, Simms was still alive and showing more improvement.
In Britain 147 people have died from the rare brain disease. Jonathan Simms is the only patient known to have survived three years while suffering from it. Usually patients diagnosed with it survive about 14 months.
"The general consensus. . . is that Jonathan Simms is no longer terminally ill," his father, Don, told BBC Radio Ulster following a medical evaluation of his son.
The family had to fight an extensive court battle to get him treated with an experimental drug when the doctors thought it was "futile."
Who determines what is and is not "futile"?
Will we now be allowing our government to make that determination by cost and "odds of recovery"?
Reporting from Washington -- President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don't stand to gain from the extra care.
In a nationally televised event at the White House, Obama said families need better information so they don't unthinkingly approve "additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care."
Barack Obama expects the general public to accept a government insurer determination on what is or is not futile, except when it comes to HIS family...
ABC headlines with "President Obama Defends Right to Choose Best Care."
President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people -- like the president himself -- wouldn't face.
The probing questions came from two skeptical neurologists during ABC News' special on health care reform, "Questions for the President: Prescription for America," anchored from the White House by Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson.
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it's not provided by insurance.
Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn't seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he's proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if "it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.
"There's a whole bunch of care that's being provided that every study, that every bit of evidence that we have indicates may not be making us healthier," he said.
Gibson interjected that often patients don't know what will work until they get every test they can.
Chicago Boyz suggests that Obama and all politicians that try to force socialized medicine down our throats not be allowed to get away with one set of rules for them and another for the general public:
I don’t think we should leave him any choice.
We should create a legal requirement that political elites have to use the same system they foist on everyone else. They should have to wait for hours in doctors offices. They should have to wait weeks or months for test. They should be fobbed off on emergency rooms if they get sick over the weekend. They should be denied any hail-mary test , medications and procedures. They should get the entire politically-managed health care experience.
This standard should extend to all elected officials, political appointees and their immediate family.
Such a law would create a built-in feedback loop that would prevent politicians from ignoring the health of the people.
HEH
Fact Check takes a look at some of Obama's changing answers.
A fact check on President Obama's main messages of Wednesday night's forum reveal a president eager to make his case to the public -- but sometimes glossing over the thorny details of how to achieve reform.
Fact check no. 3:'Comparative Effectiveness'
When President Obama talked to Jane Sturm, whose mother received a pacemaker six years ago at the age of 99, he said it's important for the government to work with doctors and hospitals to determine the best care possible, as a rule, for specific ailments.
Sturm said the doctor originally balked at giving her 99-year-old mother a pacemaker because it would cost Medicare $30,000. But Sturm argued the pacemaker saved the taxpayers money by keeping her mother out of the hospital for lengthy alternative therapy.
The president said it's this kind of cost weighing that health care reform should focus on.
"If we've got experts who are looking at this and they are advising doctors across the board that the pacemakers are saving money," he said.
Such studies, known as "comparative effectiveness" touch on an important issue, according to many Republicans, particularly Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a practicing doctor. He sees a government hand in determining the best practices for health care leading to the rationing of care to what the government thinks is best and not what doctors want for their patients.
Coburn has tried to change a reform proposal being considered in the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee to ban such comparative effectiveness research. The issue snarled that bill in committee earlier this week.
Another campaign lie below:
Fact check no. 6: Right Track/Wrong Track? Taxing Benefits
When Charlie Gibson challenged President Obama to reconcile his harsh criticism of taxing health care benefits during last year's presidential campaign with the current reality that he may have to sign a bill that does exactly that, Obama maintained that he did not like the idea, but would not rule it out.
During the campaign, part of Republican nominee John McCain's health care reform plan including taxing the value of the health care benefits employees receive from their employers. Candidate Obama issued one of his harshest criticisms of McCain for that plan.
"For the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits," Obama said on the campaign trail last fall. "Apparently, Senator McCain doesn't think it's enough that your health premiums have doubled. He thinks you should have to pay taxes on them, too."
But the reality of reforming health care from the White House has changed that. Despite campaign rhetoric, as president, Obama has refused to rule out a tax on money paid into a health plan, creating the appearance of a flip-flop on the issue.
Tonight, Obama argued that taxing benefits is still not his first choice as a way to pay for health care, but that some compromise might have to be reached in Congress.
Doctors can give survival odds to their patients, but the decision on what is and is not futile, when it comes to an individuals life, should be made by that individual.
Hope should never be ripped away from a person by the government, simply because that hope isn't cost effective.
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