“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”
;)
So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress took his advice by creating the 647-page, $825 billion House legislation that was sold as an economic “stimulus”. But when Democrats finally released the details, we better understood Rahm’s point. It managed to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.
Just scratching the surface exposed $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects, even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.
House Republicans and even some Democrats argued that the Democrat appropriations bill disguised as a stimulus bill was heavily laden with pork and pet projects that had little to do with stimulus or job creation and demanded they be trimmed. Some were, although an outraged Nancy Pelosi wanted them added back in when the Senate came to bat. And so the Bill moved on to the Senate which, with the help of three RINOs (Sens. Susan Collins, Maine, Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania and Olympia Snowe, Maine), passed their version. Now dems in both bodies will feign due diligence before presumably reaching a compromise.
None of this “delay” is sitting well with President Obama who, along with liberal democrats, are chaffing to ram the thing through before the public gets a whiff of what they really have in store for us. (More on that in a minute.) Obama says he’s extended his hand and made nice, even allowed the trimming of a little pork, but Republicans disagreed with the content of the bill and refused to bow to his will. So now he’s mad. Really mad. He’s shouting to everyone who’ll listen that the sky will fall if we don’t hurry, hurry, hurry and pass the biggest spending bill in history. Sure there’s pork in it, he admits, but all big bills contain pork. That’s to be expected, he says. But there’s no time to debate, no time to think, no time to examine or question!
But now we’ve uncovered at least one really big item he didn’t want us to know about, and it isn’t stimulus. Buried within the bill is the creation of a new federal bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, which 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. These provisions in the stimulus bill reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently Obama’s nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department, and they’re virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
In the book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make. The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the “Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research”. The goal, Daschle’s book explains, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.
;)
Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free” and that seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt. Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective, but the stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost-effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council.
The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.
If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined.
Hiding health legislation in the stimulus bill is blatantly intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”
On Friday, President Obama called it “inexcusable and irresponsible” for senators to delay passing the stimulus bill. In truth, this bill does little to provide stimulus or create jobs and needs much more scrutiny. We can’t afford to be herded like sheep being led to slaughter. We won’t get a do-over.