By Mr. Curmudgeon
Oh, oh, ObamaCare! The health care monstrosity forced upon us by President Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and the chief reason for this month’s shellacking, won’t take full effect until 2014, but the totalitarian government program is getting down to business by establishing a much needed component to make ObamaCare run “efficiently” – death panels.
With Congress unlikely to do much about the president’s health care law until he’s voted out of office in 2012, hospitals and doctor’s groups are merging to cut costs, which earns them government bonuses under ObamaCare. This, of course, creates medical monopolies. But these new health care groups have sent teams of lawyers and lobbyists to the Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department and Department of Health and Human Services to ask for waivers from federal antitrust laws.
In creating health care monopolies, ObamaCare undercuts the primary driving force for lower costs – competition.
But as the New York Times reports, there are other ways for these new medical groups to drive down costs to gain ObamaCare profits. “With potential efficiencies come incentives for doctors and hospitals to control costs, and a potential for abuse. Judith A. Stein, director of the nonprofit Center for Medicare Advocacy, said she was concerned that some care organizations would try to hold down costs by ‘cherry-picking healthier patients and denying care when it’s needed.’”
In other words, the new bonus incentives built into ObamaCare distorts the profit motive by gearing available health care to only the healthiest Americans. That’s quite a government innovation.
Peter W. Thomas, a lawyer for the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, told the Times, “In an environment where health care providers are financially rewarded for keeping costs down, anyone who has a disability or a chronic condition, anyone who requires specialized or complex care, needs to worry about getting access to appropriate technology, medical devices and rehabilitation. You don’t want to save money on the backs of people with disabilities and chronic conditions.”
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a huge proponent of ObamaCare, was not afraid to state the obvious during the healthcare debate. “…The eventual resolution of the deficit problem both will and should rely on ‘death panels and sales taxes.’” Nothing is certain in life except for death and taxes, says the old expression. Under ObamaCare, death and taxes are the work of everyday big government.
You see, the expansion of government gives power to bloodless bureaucrats to cut the higher costs of medical care they are chiefly responsible for. Not to worry – like lions hunting on the Serengeti Plain, ObamaCare bureaucrats will kill the most vulnerable stragglers among the herd. This is what Democrats and establishment Republicans mean by “government compassion.”
That means it is up to Tea Party America to keep the pressure on Beltway Republicans to defund the president’s killing machine before it has a chance to snuff out too many American lives. Many among the establishment GOP went soft on the question of abortion. We can’t allow them to go soft on the question of death panels.
