As a country whose laws show little respect for life at its most vulnerable stages, from the unborn to the elderly and disabled, it should come as no surprise that the government, in efforts to control costs, will begin to limit hospital stays for those covered by Medicaid.
Indeed, with Medicaid increasing its roll significantly with the economic downturn, anyone should be able to see that this is merely the beginning of Obamacare.
Under the new healthcare law, competition for health insurance will be finite as the government takes control of the market. Private insurance companies will be forced to cap premiums, hamstringing their potential to make any kind of profit while covering government-mandated services for “free.” As the proponents of Obamacare want, Americans will be forced into a government exchange where the people who need care will have to fight for limited resources and doctors.
It wasn’t too long ago when Sarah Palin was lamented as an alarmist when she coined that infamous phrase “death panels.” Unfortunately, it seems she was correct in her assessment.
All one has to do is look at the healthcare systems of other countries under government-controlled health insurance. Not only evident throughout Europe, with frightening stories of rationing potentially threatening countless lives, but with our neighbor to the north where government runs a centralized healthcare system. It is all too common for Canadians to wait for an extended period of time, in some cases months and months, for doctor appointments and surgeries.
There just isn’t the time or money to cover everyone in a suitable manner. There are horror stories of patients who need life-saving treatment and their government-run insurance plans are unable help in time – so, they take out loans and go to the United States to get life-saving treatment.
In England, where the National Health Service (NHS) provides healthcare for all UK citizens, which is funded by taxpayers, the system has become so insufficient that women have died because they can’t get to the gynecologist in time to test for cervical cancer.
What good is a system to provide health insurance for everyone if people can’t even get an appointment to the see the physician? Or worse, what good is it to be “covered,” but have your healthcare limited because of government bureaucracy and costs?
What Medicaid is doing to the poor and disabled is merely the beginning of healthcare rationing. The government comes out of this looking like it could not care less for those people in society who need more care than others. That’s certainly what happened when it came to my sister, Terri Schiavo.
The government and the courts were apathetic to the love and care my sister needed and subsequently because of their actions/inactions and disregard for human life at all stages barbarically starved and dehydrated her to death while my parents were forced to watch.
Necessary medical decisions will no longer be made by families and individuals but by unelected bureaucrats tasked with finding ways to cut costs. Indeed, as healthcare costs rise, services that are most expensive, some of them life-sustaining, will be cut. It’s an inevitable fact.
The controversial Obama appointee, Dr. Donald Berwick, the Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said that “the decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
As opposed to rationing with our eyes closed? Berwick has professed his love of Britain’s single payer system, and he wants to institute a similar healthcare system in the U.S. that allocates resources to subgroups of patients instead of individual patients.
Who decides which subgroup gets what kind of the care? Unelected bureaucrats? Would the elderly be an important subgroup? Or the disabled?
As Obamacare is implemented and Americans find out the dirty underbelly of government-run health insurance, it may be too late. The country needs to continue to fight the healthcare law, exposing its many weaknesses and fight to have it repealed or struck down in court. The option of implementation shouldn’t even be on the table.
Editor's Note: Bobby Schindler, co-executive director of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network (www.lifeandhope.com).
