We all live in polarities. He who seems the most self-confident is often the most insecure, etc.
Thus Barack Obama – the man who rose so fast to the presidency that he did not pass GO, though he did collect $200. He moves like someone with a preternatural fear of being found out, as if all would crumble if he stops for a second. And now it’s healthcare healthcare healthcare all the time and incessantly as if we were a country of three hundred million suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer. Saith the man: In an interview aired this morning on NBC’s “Today” show, Obama defended his insistence on Congress passing healthcare overhaul legislation before its August summer recess. “If you don’t set a deadline in this town, nothing happens,” the president said, adding, “And the deadline isn’t being set by me. It’s being set by the American people.”
Well, no. Not any American people I’ve met anyway. They all just wish this fella would slow down for a moment, not to smell the roses, but at least to add up the bucks and think things through.
Earth to Obama: no healthcare system in the world works perfectly or even close. Yours won’t either. You are Don Quixote here, riding across La Mancha with no Sancho Panza and, alas, no sense of humor.
Meanwhile, I’m at LAX on my way to DC for PJTV’s Virtual Healthcare Forum. [Aren't you being a little hypocritical here?-ed. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em... But at least we can say slow down slow down slow down you're rocking the boat.]
UPDATE: I am adding this partly out of the novelty of blogging from my Virgin America flight from LAX to Dulles with their new Gogo Inflight Internet system, which seems to work well, about the speed of a decent 3G connection. Since I took off, it seems that Obama’s rush to get us all heathy has only increased: Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce panel are headed to the White House, not their committee room, on Tuesday.
Instead of continuing their markup, Energy and Commerce Democrats will be lobbied by President Obama at the White House. Tuesday’s continuing markup was canceled, but the panel is scheduled to meet again on Wednesday.
The delays and intense effort by the White House cast more doubt on whether the House will meet its deadline of voting on the landmark bill before the August recess.
Am I wrong or does this all seem rather panicky? And for what? [It's sort of like feeling the need to blog while you're on a plane.-ed. Relax. Read a book. Catch up on the latest hip-hop tracks. You know, you've got a point. I'm going to log off... after a last check of my email. You are doomed! Not doomed. Addicted.]
Yes Roger, the man needs to slow down and take a break from “solving” all these crises we seem to be having. Speaking of the healthcare crisis, I’ve been dying to know when the last time was that the government ever made something cheaper or more efficient-running after it got through with its reforms? Could healthcare be made less expensive or more cost-effective after being handled by an army of politicians and lawyers?
Yes, it can be made less expensive if we look at where the majority of expenses lie.
Most of your lifetime healthcare expenses are incurred during the last few months of life. This is the elephant in the room. Going through one expensive treatment after another to save a life hanging by shoe-string is wasteful and brutally costly. It’s time we acknowledge that death is a part of life and focus on keeping people comfortable in their last days. Yes, it is rationing. But we don’t have infinite resources.
I dunno, governments can be pretty good at cheapening human life.
The odds are at least 50/50 that Barack Obama will experience a mental breakdown. How will the American public respond to such a crisis? Are we ready for a President Joe Biden? My guess is that this will be widely discussed no later than the end of next month.
Free Quark, I don’t think it’s the elephant in the room at all. It’s talked about quite a bit and many people are uncomfortable with letting the government decide it’s time for them to tune out and wait to die.
Just as good looking actors and actresses are put out front to deliver convincing lines from the people who wrote them, but probably couldn’t sell those lines as well in front of an audience, Barack Obama is the vessel liberal Democrats have helped set-up to use to sell programs they’ve wanted for years, but could never find the appropriate spokesperson to get those ideas through.
They thought they had that in Obama, just like they thought they had it in Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993-94. But as they see the polls start to head south, they’re realizing that all the PR hype and near deification of the man over the past 18 months only goes so far, and that in an immediate gratification political world (one which they helped create), the rush to push things through without even reading them is eventually counterbalanced by the fact that the public expects immediate results from those items pushed through.
Obama and crew promised all that emergency spending was going to bring the country out of recession by the summer. It hasn’t, and so while Obama’s trying to rush health care through the same way he did with the winter porkfest, the public hasn’t seen any miracle results from that, and more and more believes they’re not going to see any great fixes from this heath reform plan, either. So as the window for unquestioned loyalty (especially among the Blue Dogs) closes, the faster Obama tries to get his health plan through before fears about overspending totally swamp all the spin on Barack’s magnificence that has been put out since the start of 2008.
On every issue we go around in the same circle. The problem is that we have ceeded high ground to the Progressives.
from my latest post: http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2009/07/most-savage-compassion.html
“The progressive (Obama) demands that we believe his claim that he serves a higher truth and a loftier goal. He tries to force us to accept the idea that his ideas are unassailably good. And, even if they fail to be good, his virtuous pretentions are supposed to indemnify him from guilt or shame. Even if he make mistakes, behaves badly or cause harm, virtue will save him from blame. His “caring and good intentions” are supposed to trump the fact that he cares about the wrong things in the wrong way and his intentions are a humbug. Virtue is more than a sham- it is the prim, ruthless face of coercion. It is aimed outward, at others, as a self-justification; an accusation and, above all, a yearning for Utopia…I look at my fellow classical liberals and say, “you poor bastards”. It is time to break the strangle hold of compassion by showing how savage and deadly it has become in service of a theory of humanity as opposed to a real understanding of and empathy for human beings.
Tim Maguire;
I’ve heard too many stories of people telling the nursing home to keep their 85 year old grandmother, who has Alzheimers and other serious physical problems, alive, no matter what heart attacks or strokes come her way. Medicare is paying anyway.
This isn’t compassionate, it’s cruel. It’s cruel to Grandma and it’s cruel to a system that is under serious financial strain.
There’s a time for us to move on.
Abu Infidel – it’s usually Tony Soprano mafioso types that insist on extraordinary end-of-life measures. If we just eliminated La Cosa Nostra, we’d save health care in America.
The Dem leaders and their White House front man are in a hurry, because they know the American people are beginning to wake from their lazy torpor, and they know that when Congress breaks in August, they will go home and get dumped on by their constituents. They know too many Dems will bail then, and that even weathervane “moderates” and deep thinkers like Snowe and Grassley will balk.
I imagine the only debate they are having now is whether to shoot for the moon now, even though this thing appears at the moment to have little chance in the Senate, or magnanimously announce they are giving it careful consdieration and come back after the break with a “compromise” bill that throws enough bones to lure the Snowes and Grassleys into being Great (Wo)Men. Right now, it’s looking like they may have to settle for the latter. But if they do, they will simply come back later and add back all the stuff they took out to give RINOs and Blue Dogs fig leaves.
“This isn’t compassionate, it’s cruel. It’s cruel to Grandma and it’s cruel to a system that is under serious financial strain.
There’s a time for us to move on.”
Going down the creepy path of places like The Netherlands is not only wrong, it is also morally repugnant. Screw “the system” and its “strain” — Grandma is a human being.
I am beginning to think that Obama is bipolar or something, he seems so manic.
Obama needs to be impeached!
Have you read the bill? It’s scary.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.3200:
Be sure to include the trailing colon (:) at the end.
0bie is in a big rush. He knows what’s best for us and we’d all better fall in fast.
Something tells me this will backfire. He’s like the guy who insists on getting laid on his first date. Never mind, babe, he’s wonderful. Let’s get it over with and enjoy a cigarette or two, already.
Cap and trade climate change bullshit, universal free healthcare, plus stimulus on top of stimulus on top of stimulus, and who cares how high taxes go and who cares about growth (what’s that?), this guy makes Clinton look good. We’ve got a wet behind the ears Chicago politician who got lucky, and, as Mister President, he’s determined to be LBJ & Jimmy Carter on steroids.
Count me out.
I think I am not the only one who is already sick and tired of his monotonous monotone lectures. Maybe this is why the market is rebounding. Maybe people are realizing that America is far bigger and far wiser than our Mister Peanut President jumping up and down and wagging his finger on TV every frigging day.
Never mind turning the auto industry over to the wunnerful corrupt unions. First they turn over the auto industry to a combination of government bureaucrats and corrupt unions, then they will go after fast food and retail, and drive them into the ground. Notice how Caterpillar is recovering now? Here’s a company which said NO to the unions 20 – 30 years ago and became one of the most efficient companies in the world.
If somebody sat around with his asshole “progressive” cohorts, and tried to devise the best way to destroy our country, they couldn’t come up with a better script than President 0, Mister Peanut, seems to be following now.
0 and the lovely Michelle are angry, spiteful missionaries who have no real clue where their zeal might lead them. They are on a destructive path to nowhere in a hurry, and it’s our job to stop them.
#2 Free Quark,
I’ve heard this too, but when is ones last six months? At 77 I’d tell my nearest and dearest to pull the plug, at 57 hold off for a while, at 37 go all out, and if it was my child at 7, do everything possible. The big question remains: when is the last 6 months. My father died at 54, another 20 years of medical progress and he would have been rocking his greatgrandsons to sleep. When is the last 6 months?
Ned
Knuckleheads all.
The great O (short for Oz) is a lightweight. Not born in the United States (or else he’d just relaease his birth certificate, right? Never held a real job, no experienece except as a critic (that’s what a community organizer is, right?), voted present 128 times in the Illinois senate, has never been a leader, lies in every statement he makes, cannot speak in front of an audience unless he’s got his teleprompters – this guy is totally unqualified to be POTUS and just think about how qualiifed his staff is, NOT!
Only 3 1/2 years from today until he gets replaced by someone who is a leader and who has commonsense.
“Knuckleheads all.”
Don’t worry, Ted. O!Care will find the cure for us. If not, a litte “end of life counseling” should do the trick.
The peasants are starting to rebel.
From the comments at the Wizbang blog:
“..the best part about the Sibelius video is her answer, possibly the worst one she could have given: “Excuse me, the Federal employee health system would stay in place.”
Brilliant, Secretary Sibelius, just brilliant. Government employees and their choice health care benefits will be exempt from ObamaCare. Just what the audience wanted to hear. And she was jeered and booed after her answer! I love it.”
Same old great benefits for gov’t employees and unions, Welfare benefits for the rest of us.
Suggest a new bumper sticker for those having difficulty removing their “Obama ’08″ and “Change” stickers: “Oops!”
Obama needs to ram this through because he has to look like he’s doing something, even if it’s l;ess than nothing.
Action at all times is the key. That way people will be too harried to really think about what they’re being asked to vote for.
Most of your lifetime healthcare expenses are incurred during the last few months of life. This is the elephant in the room. Going through one expensive treatment after another to save a life hanging by shoe-string is wasteful and brutally costly. It’s time we acknowledge that death is a part of life and focus on keeping people comfortable in their last days. Yes, it is rationing. But we don’t have infinite resources.
The last few months of life is obviously going to be expensive for many because that’s when you die. The peak expenditures for health occur at age 70 or thereabouts. The NBER has done studies on this. The real elderly, over 80, rarely want extensive care but may want a pacemaker, like the mother of the woman brushed off by Obama. Geriatrics is a specialty of caring for the elderly. It is so inhibited by Medicare rules, which will pay for a coronary bypass but will not pay for monthly visits to frail elderly by a physician, that some geriatrics specialists are dropping out of Medicare and practicing for cash payment.
Medical care is evolving and primary care will evolve the most with nurse practitioners and PAs doing most of the care. This process could be interrupted by a poorly designed government program. Why doesn’t the FBI’s IT system work after $300 million was spent on it ? Think about that while you contemplate government electronic medical records. There are ways to reform health care but none of them are under consideration in Congress right now.
I disagree: Joe Biden is his Sancho Panza.
Zoltan, under the proposed “card check” legislation, which is now being repackaged and renamed, not only will union thugs have a powrful recruiting tool (especially when your organizer is also your supervisor, and you don’t get a secret ballot any more,) but in the event an employer and the union can’t agree, the government, the union-infested NLRB will impose a binding settlement. So “saying no to the union” may no longer be an option. That’s the goal.
With Stewart Smalley in the Senate, Arlen Spector in flames and a few wobbly Rs, the new version of this company killer has a good chance of passing in the fall. I am afraid the health care bill will also live to fight another, more insidious, day.
Which government agency is self sustaining, that is, not reliant on tax payer money and operates at zero deficit?
Although it started with federal funds the only one I could come up with is TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) which now is pretty much self sufficient, but hey they are a monopoly, but even at that it would be hard to compete with them anyway due to the regulation and red tape a private concern would have to go through to even try to compete with them.
Abu:
No, medicare does not pay for open ended care in a nursing home.
So, the government won’t allow me cancer treatments but they won’t let me kill myself either. Wonderful.
It is interesting to note that when Medicaid and Medicare were created in 1965, no one was arguing that the poor and the elderly were being denied medical care. No one was arguing that because it simply wasn’t true. At the time, “lack of access to medical care” was not a significant cause of death among either the poor or the elderly.
In fact, those pushing socialized medicine knew — and generally admitted — that doctors were very generously, and quite voluntarily, treating indigent patients free of charge — and were happy to do so. For instance, the Prime Minister of the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan, Woodrow Lloyd, who instituted full-scale socialized medicine throughout his province in 1962, said at the time, “Doctors have a fine tradition of providing services without charge to those who are unable to pay….”
What, then, was the argument for creating these programs? What problem were they attempting to solve? The problem, according to Lloyd, was this: “Many people are uncomfortable in asking for and obtaining something for which they cannot pay”.
As former president Harry Truman said at signing ceremony where Medicare and Medicaid became law:
“These people (the indigent and the elderly) are our prideful responsibility… (Oh, really, Mr. Truman? And just why is your grandmother my responsibility?) …and they are entitled, among other benefits, to the best medical protection available. Not one of these, our citizens, should ever be abandoned to the indignity of charity. Charity is indignity when you have to have it. But we don’t want these people to have anything to do with charity…
So the purpose of these programs was not to help the “needy” — such help was already being provided — the purpose was to help the dishonest “needy”, i.e. to help those who wished to evade the fact that they are charity cases.
Now comes looter-in-chief Obama who proposes to practice vastly more such “forced charity” with an enormous additional looting of the American taxpayer, all to bribe the American people into acquiescing in the government takeover of some 16% of the economy.
Ned;
I agree that the age of the person should be taken into consideration. It is not reasonable to resuscitate a very elderly person from a heart attack. Spending huge amounts of money to keep an 85 year old alive for a few more months just isn’t possible anymore. We need to focus more on palliative care for the elderly.
One of the disadvantages of advanced medical technology is that you can be kept alive longer than you want to. That’s why people get DNRs.
Free Quark: You are an Obamaphile. You know, just know, what’s best for others. I recommend you let others make their own decisions.
When Social Security was enacted, effective for 65 year-olds, the life expectancy for white males born that year was 62.
Your end-of-life logic, applied in the ’30s, would have snuffed out lives that you now wish to prolong because folks in their 50s are too young to die (today).
My advice is to grant individuals the opportunity to make individual decisions, like DNR orders, instead of mandating death for cost management reasons.
BTW, I will not/do not have a living will, finding them very flawed and dangerous in their inability to address unknown future contingencies.
#2
Yes, but you don’t know it was the last 6 mo. until AFTER they’re dead. Some things (advanced pancreatic cancer) are pretty obvious, or severe trauma where the extent of damage is well known and a clear decision can be made, but in a lot of cases the attempts at care are not unreasonable, and many such may work for every one that doesn’t.
i cannot believe my country, electing such a horrible administration as this. remember that our country is suppose to be free from government, now we are having discussions about our government deciding who will live and who will die and who will get this treatment and who will not get this treatment.
who are the uninsured? how many people die from not getting medical treatment because of being turned away from hospitals? if this were such a problem it would be headlines everyday. i worked in a non profit hospital and we never turned anyone away. you want a quick solution to our medical care problem, end welfare as we know it and reform immigration. a lot of the doctors, nurses and medical people i worked with volunterred at clinics for free and worked into late hours at night. obamba’s plan will kill this kind of american kindness.
also, it is up to our GOD to decide when our time is up on this earth, not obamba and his ilk.
Another problem I have with the approach being taken is the focus on years of life extension, with some attention to the “quality” of those years as judged by someone else, but if a treatment does not prolong life, but makes it better, even to the point of letting the person work and add to the GDP numbers (a pretty crass measure) it counts for nothing in all these formulations.
This is idiocy and all too typical of what happens when govt gets involved–simplistic measures, misapplied.
TomMD;
You are typical of the culture that thinks life should be prolonged in every case, in any case, no matter what the quality or horrendous cost to the rest of us or the discomfort to the patient.
That’s why we’re in the mess we’re in.
If you want to live forever, do it on your own dime, not the taxpayer’s.