ObamaCare: Elderly Need Not Apply

"Obama lies, grandma dies" (a popular sign at town hall meetings). Governor Sarah Palin, with her description of Obama's "death panel" may be the first person in history to change a major political debate with an entry in Facebook.

"Obama lies, Grandma dies" (a popular sign slogan at town hall meetings)

The attached is a graphic (very graphic) image of what ObamaCare will mean to grandma and grandpa. Please pass it on.Here's what Dick Morris thinks (not much) in boldface below of the removal of the end-of-life-counseling component from the Senate Finance Committee health proposal: Obama and congressional leftists have provided no answers to the questions Morris raises.

President Obama's retreat from his previous insistence on establishing a government owned insurance company to compete with private health insurers will do nothing at all to mitigate the massive rationing in medical care to the elderly his legislation will force. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in a rare moment of profundity, said that government alternative to private health insurance is "not the essential element" of the administration's health care overhaul. How right she is.

The fundamental equation that means worse and worse medical care for our seniors remains exactly as it was before the public option was abandoned: Fifty million new patients to be treated and no extra doctors or nurses to care for them. The result will be precisely the same whether or not there is a public option -- massive rationing of medical services to the elderly.

The legislation still plans to achieve 40% of its savings from cuts in Medicare, slicing reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals encouraging them shortchange their elderly patients as a matter of economic necessity and shrinking further the population of doctors. The deletion of the public insurance option is a good step.

It reduces the likelihood of "socialized medicine" dominated by a single payer. But it does nothing to alter the basic equation of supply and demand which will doom medical care for the elderly.

ObamaCare is Bad Medicine

ObamaCare inevitably will make the US health care system more like the Canadian one, and that's not a good development. The cure rate in our country is well ahead of that in Canada for just about every ailment known to mankind. Eventually, rationing will become the order of the day in American hospitals and physicians' offices. Sarah Palin will oppose such developments, and we need to stand with her.

Consider the following story from Dr. David Gratzer's book The Cure:

"In medical school, I learned the most important lesson not in a classroom but on the way to one. On a cold Canadian morning about a decade ago, late for a class, I cut through a hospital emergency room and came upon dozens of people on stretchers -- waiting, moaning, begging for treatment. Some elderly patients has waited for up to five days in corridors before being admitted to beds. They smelled of urine and sweat. As I navigated past the bodies, I began to question everything I thought I knew about health care -- not only in Canada, but also in the United States. Though I didn't know it then, I had begun a journey into the heart of one of the great policy disasters of modern times." [page 2]

In fact, Barack Obama and Kathleen Sibelius are beginning the same dismal journey -- and they, along with us, will experience the same disaster. That disaster will not occur overnight, but occur it will.

[On Saturday and Sunday, I'll have new columns up here -- the first one being about Sarah Palin's support of "Miss California," Carrie Prejean.