Conventional, western medicine tends to rely too much on expensive surgery and pharmaceutical drugs. With that said, in a free society no government bureaucrat should ever interfere with the relationship between doctor and patient, which is the likely outcome of government-run healthcare. Private insurance companies are hard enough to deal with, aren't they?
With that in mind, remember how Sarah Palin was ridiculed for raising the possibility of “death panels” in connection with Obamacare despite that fact that rationing is the likely outcome of socialized medicine.
But as the mainstream media has reported last week, the former Alaska governor has essentially been vindicated:
The National Academy of Sciences said Thursday that the federal government should explicitly consider cost as a factor in deciding what health benefits must be provided by insurance plans under President Obama’s health care overhaul, and it said the cost of any new benefits should be “offset by savings” elsewhere in the health care system.
Moreover, it said, in defining “essential health benefits,” the government should try to guarantee that the average premium would not exceed benchmarks that would be set by the secretary of health and human services. [New York Times]
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An advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that the Obama administration emphasize affordability over breadth of coverage when it comes to implementing a key insurance provision of the 2010 health-care law.
Obama officials charged with stipulating what “essential benefits” many health plans will have to cover should make it a priority to keep premiums reasonable, even if that means allowing plans to be less comprehensive, counseled the committee of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM). [Washington Post]
Socialized medicine is in effect in the U.K. in the form of the failing, near-bankrupt National Health Service. Readers of the British press know that the equivalent of death panels have already been implemented there. This is what we have to look forward to if the Supreme Court and/or Congress allows Obamacare to fully become implemented.
Added: British physician Lesley Kirkpatrick describes in the
Daily Mail the lengths to which she had to fight through the NHS bureaucracy to obtain treatment options after she herself was diagnosed with cancer.
I’d worked in the NHS all my life — and yes, I felt guilty. But being a patient made me see things differently. I felt alone, uncared for, and forced to make things happen myself....
I should be dead, but here I am still running 40 miles a week. and it’s all because I fought every step of the way. But I’m struck by the thought — what happens to patients who don’t have my medical training and determination?
NHS rationing is hurting the patients who need it, and the wrong areas are being cut. We have management and ethnicity surveys, while patients are denied proper scanning and fast responses.
And according to the
London Telegraph, "The number of patients who waited longer than the recommended 18 weeks for NHS hospital treatment has risen by almost 50 per cent over the past year."
