But it is curious that the Europeans who already went down this road in large part are starting to go back in our former direction.
It’s kind of like driving towards a massive accident and seeing people coming back from it bloodied and hurt, but you decide it can’t happen to me so you keep going anyhow.
That’s National Health Care now nearly 5 months after it was crammed down the throats of the American public in the single most partisan vote in memory.
Damn The Torpedoes! Full Steam ahead!
LONDON — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.
Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.
Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.
The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished. (London Times)
So like the G20 Summit where “austerity” was the watchword by the Europeans and Obama stood there stamping his foot demanding people spend even more.
Not only are the Democrats and their dream out of date they are out of step even with the people they still want to dance with.
They wanted to be them.
Now it’s too late.
But that won’t stop them, of course.
Zealots who have been waiting 80 years+ for this will not be so easily deterred.
But the effects of this are beginning.
MANDEVILLE, La.—Mark Baumann, a 44-year-old uninsured diabetic, sees in the Obama administration’s health-care law a future with stable coverage to pay for his insulin shots and blood tests.
That’s likely to come indirectly at the expense of his mother’s generous health-care plan.
Humana Inc., Mary Baumann’s insurer, intends to pare her “Medicare Advantage” plan to make up for the smaller government payments it will soon receive as a result of the new law, leaving her with higher costs or fewer services. On the table are beefed-up co-payments and premiums, as well as the loss of perks such as her free membership at a health club.
Most Americans know the overhaul is designed to cover the uninsured, a decades-long goal of Democrats. But it also represents a change in how the government spreads its social safety net underneath Americans. Already, it’s creating tensions that are a harbinger of debates to come.
Since the creation of Social Security and Medicare, younger workers have funded programs for the elderly. It’s a compact in which workers paid for retirees with the understanding that they’d be looked after by the generation behind them.
The health overhaul diverges by tapping a program for the elderly to help provide insurance to 32 million Americans of younger generations. Nearly half the funding for the law is supposed to come from paying lower fees to hospitals, insurers and other health-care providers that participate in Medicare, the federal insurance program for Americans age 65 and older, as well as younger disabled people.
The 44 million Americans on Medicare won’t see changes to their guaranteed benefits under the law. But of those, 11.3 million on Medicare Advantage plans, a public-private hybrid of the type used by Ms. Baumann, who is 79, are likely to begin seeing extra benefits go away as soon as next year. Medicare Advantage cuts are slated to pay for 15% of the health-care law’s tab.
The trims mark the leading edge of a spending shift that could broaden as lawmakers grapple with a deficit expected to hit $1.47 trillion this year. Left unchanged, Medicare and Social Security will consume half of all federal spending by 2035, up from about one third today, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
And remember, by recess appointment an NHS-loving administrator is the head of Medicare.
And if, as predicted by many, including me, that private health insurance is driven completely to extinction then you’ll have health cost also in that GDP soup and with already half the people in this country not paying any taxes it does very bleak.
But at least it’s “fair”.
And, of course, the solution that will be published after the election by Obama’s “deficit commission” is a forgone conclusion, The VAT TAX and other taxes.
Then came Financial “reform” where one of the biggest cause of the problem, just like in Health Care (Trial Lawyers anyone?), were ignored because of partisan politics — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And then with the massive tax increases, even on the poor, slated for Jan 1,2011 you have the perfect storm.
But the Democrats will not change course. You know that. I know now that. They know that.
Damn the Torpedoes! Full Steam ahead!
They don’t care how many European train wrecks occur.
It’s their time and they will do it anyhow!
For “fairness” and “equality” and “social justice”!
Meanwhile, the rationing the Democrats say will not happen here are happening in their beloved NHS, acocrding to the liberal Sun Telegraph newspaper:
* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.
* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.
* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.
* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.
* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.
* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.
* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.
And now back to US…
“We badly need to, over time and very gradually, reallocate resources from the elderly to younger families and their children,” said Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.
“I’m sure that some of those additional benefits have been nice,” Nancy-Ann DeParle, who runs the White House’s Office of Health Reform, says of Medicare Advantage plans. “But I think what we have to look at here is what’s fair and what’s important for the strength of the Medicare program long term.”
Sun Telegraph: The Government has promised to protect the overall budget of the NHS, which will continue to receive above-inflation increases, but said the service must make “efficiency savings” of up to £20 billion by 2014, which would be diverted back to the front line.
Brother from another socialist mother?
Dr Peter Carter, the head of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was “incredibly worried” about the disclosures.
Dr Carter said: “Andrew Lansley keeps saying that the Government will protect the front line from cuts – but the reality appears to be quite the opposite. We are seeing trusts making job cuts even when they have already admitted to being short staffed.
Trust boards are the ones who make the health care calls now.
Much like the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology that was in the Stimulus Bill.
And we won’t even go over the Food Police again this time.
Sun Telegraph: On Thursday, the board of Sutton and Merton primary care trust (PCT) in London agreed more than £50 million of savings in two years. The plan included more than £400,000 to be saved by “reducing length of stay” in hospital for the terminally ill.
As well as sending more patients home to die, the paper said the savings would be made by admitting fewer terminally ill cancer patients to hospital because they were struggling to cope with symptoms such as pain. Instead, more patients would be given advice on “self management” of their condition.
Bill Gillespie, the trust’s chief executive, said patients would stay at home, or be discharged from hospital only if that was their choice, and would be given support in their homes.
The president told the {New York Times in 2008}magazine that the chronically ill and elderly represent 80 percent of American healthcare costs, and said, “(T)here is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.”
“And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance,” he added.
That “independent group” turns out to be the government, now run by him. Funny how that worked out.
But the president questioned whether his now-deceased grandmother should have received her hip replacement while suffering a terminal illness.
Recounting the dilemma, Obama said, “(T)he question was, does she get hip replacement surgery even though she was fragile enough that they weren’t sure how long she would last (or) whether she could get through the surgery.”
“I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time,” Obama said.
This was not the first time the president had used his grandmother to illustrate his point on health care. In an April 2008 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Obama suggested much of the cost of health care in America comes from the elderly and those with chronic illness.
“That’s where you get into some very difficult moral issues,” Obama said – specifically considering whether “in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.”
This was BEFORE he became president mind you. But the Journo-List inspired Media was not going to let you dwell on it.
2009 Newsweek article on the “The Five biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate”:
What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the current system, by both Medicare and private insurance. No plan covers everything, but coverage decisions “are now made in opaque ways by insurance companies,” says Dr. Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Donald Berwick? Where have I heard that name recently.
Oh yeah, he’s the guy who was appointed by Obama as Head of Medicare and Medicaid without Senate approval by a recess appointment and he’s an admitted lover of the NHS.
Gee, that couldn’t be a coincidence now could it?
The {Health Care} law will spend $938 billion over a decade, mostly to expand coverage to lower-income Americans. To finance that, there will be $455 billion coming from cuts in government payments to health-care providers that serve patients on Medicare and two other federal programs. The hardest hit—to the tune of $136 billion—will be private insurance companies that run Medicare Advantage plans.
The payment cuts to Medicare Advantage begin in 2012.
“With the president being younger, my biggest concern is that we don’t mean anything,” said Sandy Reed, a 61-year-old who has a Medicare Advantage plan because she qualifies as disabled. “We’re disposable.”
‘Death Panels’ indeed…
And it has come out on the Daily Caller in their further investigation of the Journo-List scandal that the Mainstream media were in full bore mode of destruction when Gov. Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate.
All that savagery was plotted out.
So what you do when your opponent speaks the truth to power, destroy her.
So that’s why the ‘death panels’ comment was so widely and uniformly from left mocked, dismissed and discredited.
To this very day she is the most hated woman in America by the Left.
Most of the rest will be funded by new levies, including taxes on health-care companies, a higher Medicare payroll tax for wealthy Americans and a tax on high-value insurance plans. Critics of the law say its total cost is likely higher than advertised.
But it’s not like the Democrats actually care.
Their one and only shot at injecting their socialist cancer, that they’ve been waiting since their grandparents time in many cases, is all that matters.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
But at least it’s “fair”.
It’s kind of like driving towards a massive accident and seeing people coming back from it bloodied and hurt, but you decide it can’t happen to me so you keep going anyhow.
That’s National Health Care now nearly 5 months after it was crammed down the throats of the American public in the single most partisan vote in memory.
Damn The Torpedoes! Full Steam ahead!
LONDON — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.
Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.
Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.
The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished. (London Times)
So like the G20 Summit where “austerity” was the watchword by the Europeans and Obama stood there stamping his foot demanding people spend even more.
Not only are the Democrats and their dream out of date they are out of step even with the people they still want to dance with.
They wanted to be them.
Now it’s too late.
But that won’t stop them, of course.
Zealots who have been waiting 80 years+ for this will not be so easily deterred.
But the effects of this are beginning.
MANDEVILLE, La.—Mark Baumann, a 44-year-old uninsured diabetic, sees in the Obama administration’s health-care law a future with stable coverage to pay for his insulin shots and blood tests.
That’s likely to come indirectly at the expense of his mother’s generous health-care plan.
Humana Inc., Mary Baumann’s insurer, intends to pare her “Medicare Advantage” plan to make up for the smaller government payments it will soon receive as a result of the new law, leaving her with higher costs or fewer services. On the table are beefed-up co-payments and premiums, as well as the loss of perks such as her free membership at a health club.
Most Americans know the overhaul is designed to cover the uninsured, a decades-long goal of Democrats. But it also represents a change in how the government spreads its social safety net underneath Americans. Already, it’s creating tensions that are a harbinger of debates to come.
Since the creation of Social Security and Medicare, younger workers have funded programs for the elderly. It’s a compact in which workers paid for retirees with the understanding that they’d be looked after by the generation behind them.
The health overhaul diverges by tapping a program for the elderly to help provide insurance to 32 million Americans of younger generations. Nearly half the funding for the law is supposed to come from paying lower fees to hospitals, insurers and other health-care providers that participate in Medicare, the federal insurance program for Americans age 65 and older, as well as younger disabled people.
The 44 million Americans on Medicare won’t see changes to their guaranteed benefits under the law. But of those, 11.3 million on Medicare Advantage plans, a public-private hybrid of the type used by Ms. Baumann, who is 79, are likely to begin seeing extra benefits go away as soon as next year. Medicare Advantage cuts are slated to pay for 15% of the health-care law’s tab.
The trims mark the leading edge of a spending shift that could broaden as lawmakers grapple with a deficit expected to hit $1.47 trillion this year. Left unchanged, Medicare and Social Security will consume half of all federal spending by 2035, up from about one third today, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
And remember, by recess appointment an NHS-loving administrator is the head of Medicare.
And if, as predicted by many, including me, that private health insurance is driven completely to extinction then you’ll have health cost also in that GDP soup and with already half the people in this country not paying any taxes it does very bleak.
But at least it’s “fair”.
And, of course, the solution that will be published after the election by Obama’s “deficit commission” is a forgone conclusion, The VAT TAX and other taxes.
Then came Financial “reform” where one of the biggest cause of the problem, just like in Health Care (Trial Lawyers anyone?), were ignored because of partisan politics — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And then with the massive tax increases, even on the poor, slated for Jan 1,2011 you have the perfect storm.
But the Democrats will not change course. You know that. I know now that. They know that.
Damn the Torpedoes! Full Steam ahead!
They don’t care how many European train wrecks occur.
It’s their time and they will do it anyhow!
For “fairness” and “equality” and “social justice”!
Meanwhile, the rationing the Democrats say will not happen here are happening in their beloved NHS, acocrding to the liberal Sun Telegraph newspaper:
Some of the most common operations — including hip replacements and cataract surgery — will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected.
Patients’ groups have described the measures as “astonishingly brutal”.
An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.
* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.
* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.
* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.
* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.
* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.
* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.
And now back to US…
“We badly need to, over time and very gradually, reallocate resources from the elderly to younger families and their children,” said Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.
“I’m sure that some of those additional benefits have been nice,” Nancy-Ann DeParle, who runs the White House’s Office of Health Reform, says of Medicare Advantage plans. “But I think what we have to look at here is what’s fair and what’s important for the strength of the Medicare program long term.”
Sun Telegraph: The Government has promised to protect the overall budget of the NHS, which will continue to receive above-inflation increases, but said the service must make “efficiency savings” of up to £20 billion by 2014, which would be diverted back to the front line.
Brother from another socialist mother?
Dr Peter Carter, the head of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was “incredibly worried” about the disclosures.
Dr Carter said: “Andrew Lansley keeps saying that the Government will protect the front line from cuts – but the reality appears to be quite the opposite. We are seeing trusts making job cuts even when they have already admitted to being short staffed.
Trust boards are the ones who make the health care calls now.
Much like the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology that was in the Stimulus Bill.
And we won’t even go over the Food Police again this time.
Sun Telegraph: On Thursday, the board of Sutton and Merton primary care trust (PCT) in London agreed more than £50 million of savings in two years. The plan included more than £400,000 to be saved by “reducing length of stay” in hospital for the terminally ill.
As well as sending more patients home to die, the paper said the savings would be made by admitting fewer terminally ill cancer patients to hospital because they were struggling to cope with symptoms such as pain. Instead, more patients would be given advice on “self management” of their condition.
Bill Gillespie, the trust’s chief executive, said patients would stay at home, or be discharged from hospital only if that was their choice, and would be given support in their homes.
The president told the {New York Times in 2008}magazine that the chronically ill and elderly represent 80 percent of American healthcare costs, and said, “(T)here is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.”
“And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance,” he added.
That “independent group” turns out to be the government, now run by him. Funny how that worked out.
But the president questioned whether his now-deceased grandmother should have received her hip replacement while suffering a terminal illness.
Recounting the dilemma, Obama said, “(T)he question was, does she get hip replacement surgery even though she was fragile enough that they weren’t sure how long she would last (or) whether she could get through the surgery.”
“I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time,” Obama said.
This was not the first time the president had used his grandmother to illustrate his point on health care. In an April 2008 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Obama suggested much of the cost of health care in America comes from the elderly and those with chronic illness.
“That’s where you get into some very difficult moral issues,” Obama said – specifically considering whether “in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.”
This was BEFORE he became president mind you. But the Journo-List inspired Media was not going to let you dwell on it.
2009 Newsweek article on the “The Five biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate”:
What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the current system, by both Medicare and private insurance. No plan covers everything, but coverage decisions “are now made in opaque ways by insurance companies,” says Dr. Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Donald Berwick? Where have I heard that name recently.
Oh yeah, he’s the guy who was appointed by Obama as Head of Medicare and Medicaid without Senate approval by a recess appointment and he’s an admitted lover of the NHS.
Gee, that couldn’t be a coincidence now could it?
The {Health Care} law will spend $938 billion over a decade, mostly to expand coverage to lower-income Americans. To finance that, there will be $455 billion coming from cuts in government payments to health-care providers that serve patients on Medicare and two other federal programs. The hardest hit—to the tune of $136 billion—will be private insurance companies that run Medicare Advantage plans.
The payment cuts to Medicare Advantage begin in 2012.
“With the president being younger, my biggest concern is that we don’t mean anything,” said Sandy Reed, a 61-year-old who has a Medicare Advantage plan because she qualifies as disabled. “We’re disposable.”
‘Death Panels’ indeed…
And it has come out on the Daily Caller in their further investigation of the Journo-List scandal that the Mainstream media were in full bore mode of destruction when Gov. Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate.
All that savagery was plotted out.
So what you do when your opponent speaks the truth to power, destroy her.
So that’s why the ‘death panels’ comment was so widely and uniformly from left mocked, dismissed and discredited.
To this very day she is the most hated woman in America by the Left.
Most of the rest will be funded by new levies, including taxes on health-care companies, a higher Medicare payroll tax for wealthy Americans and a tax on high-value insurance plans. Critics of the law say its total cost is likely higher than advertised.
But it’s not like the Democrats actually care.
Their one and only shot at injecting their socialist cancer, that they’ve been waiting since their grandparents time in many cases, is all that matters.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
But at least it’s “fair”.
