Cancer drugs? No, but we have a special on Assisted Suicide today!
Whenver I hear either of our presidential candidates shouting about health care reform I get a prickling senstion in my palms and a pronounced tic in my left eye. It’s not that we don’t have a need for health care and insurance improvements in our country – clearly there is work to be done. But I’ve been watching and participating in elections since Nixon’s day and all too often I’ve gawked as our Federal government’s well intentioned but ham handed attempts to “fix things” turn into a case of Ferdinand the bull trampling the flowers he was attempting to sniff.
I had another of those queasy sensations reading Lady’s Logic this morning, with a tale of woe from Barbara Wagner, a woman in Oregon suffering from cancer, who had to face off with the medical community.
Last month her lung cancer, in remission for about two years, was back. After her oncologist prescribed a cancer drug that could slow the cancer growth and extend her life, Wagner was notified that the Oregon Health Plan wouldn’t cover it.
It would cover comfort and care, including, if she chose, doctor-assisted suicide.
I would not blame our loyal readers if you thought that, by following the link above, you were about to either be Rickrolled or sent to The Onion, but the story is real. And it goes downhill from there. As the Lady Logician herself points out:
According to administrators of the state run plan, treatment of advanced cancer that is meant to prolong life or change the course of the disease is not covered. Excuse me….isn’t that why we WANT health care….to prolong our lives and change the course of diseases? No???? Silly me – what was I thinking????
This isn’t a case of bad doctors. This is a system following rules meant to improve the process which wind up veering off into realms better suited to science fiction. Follow the links and read on, my friends. Reality truly trumps cinema today.
15 Responses to “Cancer drugs? No, but we have a special on Assisted Suicide today!”
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Wait until we have Medicare for All and cost controls become inevitable in the next 20 years or so. There will be limitations. That's even without the spectre of the far Left seeking to corrupt such a program with elitist-utilitarian examples such as a prohibition on paying for (providing) liver transplants but spending the money on rehab for as many alcoholics as possible with the same (redirected) amount.
Yeah. Just wait till everyone has healthcare. Then things will be so much worse! Cats will be marrying dogs. Armageddon!
Yes US health care is so great the Northern border is swamped by illegal immigrants from Canada, smuggled over here to escape their Commie health plan(not). Ask a Canadian if they would trade their plan for the US private capped plan.
Single payer systems, as Rudi points out, allow medical treatment without question or rationing. If as DLS posits, we can't do as well as Canada, UK or France, well, how pitiful are we?
Greendreams,
Nothing could be further from the truth than saying that Single payer systems, as Rudi points out, allow medical treatment without question or rationing
Canada, UK, and France all have similar situations to Oregon. The cost-benefit analysis says that an additional round of chem-therapy will costs too much for Ms. Wagner. CMS does this now with many technologies. Zevalin is a drug used for recurrent lymphomas. CMS has set the reimbursement rates below the cost of the drug. Virtually every hospital has given up the procedure because of decisions made by CMS.
When you look at the Obama health plan of national boards determining efficacy, there will be a huge number of these stories. People will have to learn that free government health care means that the government gets to determine when you die.
One area that needs improvement does not mean the entire idea of government-sponsored/socialized/single-payer healthcare is stupid. Instead of saying “man this whole idea is such commie BS,” or “socialized medicine means cost caps that prevent people from taking certain drugs,” why not look at that particular problem and propose a solution to it? Or, suggest an alternative. The commentary here (and everywhere else, it seems) regarding healthcare is somewhat less than constructive. We will never solve the problem if people consistently focus on tearing down the ideas of political opponents without offering serious solutions of their own. That tactic hasn't worked for our country for the last 20 years – I don't know why anyone continues to employ it except out of pig-headedness.
So, lest I make myself a hypocrite by not offering my own suggestion, here's an idea (probably not the best, but it's all I can think of at the moment). Could we get the FDA involved in regulating drug costs? If the FDA becomes a source for prescription medicines, I would assume they'd be able to buy bulk quantities at much lower prices than individuals. Then the FDA could act as a distributor to people who opt into a government-sponsored health plan or prescription drug plan.
Also, is it feasible to have some real oversight into insurance pricing and coverage? It seems like one of the biggest complaints you hear is from people who pay into a plan for years, have to actually use it, and then the company raises their rates or drops them. Can we prevent that, and how would we do it?
Amanda, I like your second idea better.
A minimum coverage for all legal citizens would be nice BASE to build from. Then let the individual choose extra coverages, similar to how Medicare works now. With just enough oversight or rules to make sure if you purchase extra cancer insurance they can't just drop you when you submit claims.
Just like the energy crisis I don't think there is one magic solution but a concert of improvements/changes that make up a solution that works.
there is no magic solution period There is just a reordering of priorities. If you want single payer, then you have to live in rationing, slower introduction of new drugs, and queues.
What the American version of single payer will look like is that people like Teddy Kennedy will not have to wait, will get cutting edge care, will not have to worry about costs whereas the middle class will have to wait in line, not be given cutting edge care, and will still have to worry about costs.
The other problem that everyonen refuses to acknowledge is that many who currently work in healthcare will walk away if the government lowers pay.
So I guess that high-tech pace maker than Dick Cheney has is just common, eh?
Scare tactics cooked up by the insurance and drug companies deceive us into blindly embracing the most expensive and among the least effective health care systems in the world. Most of the claims are patently false. For example, it is fiction that we will “wait longer” for drugs if we don't let drug companies charge us far more than the other countries they sell in. Most of these companies are not even American! As with most manufacturing we've given up dominance in pharma. European drug companies (Bayer, Novartis, Ciba Geigy, etc) are OUR major sources of drugs. Europeans have the same access to the same drugs, usually sooner, always cheaper. I guess there's one born every minute (an American) who is easily scared into voting against their own health for the sake of medical industry profit.
But the key point is that we lag behind other major industrialized countries–behind every one–in every measurable health statistic. Longevity, heart disease, cancer, infant mortality, diabetes and more.
Both higher cost and worse performance are due to the same single cause: insurance companies. They soak up 30% of our health care costs in profit and overhead (which would more than cover all Americans AT NO ADDITIONAL COST and at existing care levels). Plus, for-profit health care means decisions about your health are made by heartless corporations, which I submit are worse than civil servants (besides, we can create a system in which doctors and patients decide treatment as it should be). Insurance companies will never care more about your health than their profit. Never!
“A minimum coverage for all legal citizens would be nice BASE to build from.”
This is a reasonable position. However, the Democrats and the far Left even more will grossly enlarge (in the name of “dignity” or even using the “human right” lie) what will eventually constitute “minimum.” Look at the already existing kind of situation in several states, where basic health insurance of the kind you no doubt would recognize as “minimum” (true insurance = catastrophic care, not routine and ordinary care) is impossible to obtain because so many states require what are called “gold-plated” or “Cadillac” health plans as a legal minimum.
(It is a reasonable position because I confidently assume we'll have more federal health intervention and even provision in our future. It will not be the magic solution assumed by the foolish and the naive and the childish and those who simply hate one more form of business in this country. We will replace the current set of problems with another. There will be no magic disappearance of unmet health care costs. I suspect many believe the cost-benefit tradeoff is favorable nevertheless, or they just see government and especially Washington as their parent to give them whatever they want magically, and so we will likely have more federal health care in our future.)
Language note: “Single payer” is, always has been, and always will be weasel language, weasel words. *** WHO'S THE PAYER? *** Don't be so cowardly or dishonest as to avoid using the correct term “government health care.” (In our case, what is being sought is federal health care, typically using Medicare as the model if not simply extending Medicare to everyone, or beginning with children.)
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“we lag behind other major industrialized countries–behind every one–in every measurable health statistic”
Are these conditions uniform in our society, or are some abusing or harming themselves, or each other in their own communities, and their conditions are misused to present a dishonest picture of general health in this country?
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“The other problem that everyonen refuses to acknowledge is that many who currently work in healthcare will walk away if the government lowers pay.”
Medicare currently underpays, definitely, in some circumstances, and the losses are covered by getting money out of the private sector, something the advocates of government health care ignore or try to evade. What we may see eventually in this country with “Medicare for All” are occasional work stoppages, outright strikes by doctors, as well as reintroduction of private health care as “supplemental” but which will become the work-around method of preference by many.
Our system is bad now and a uniform federal government replacement is a likely outcome, but don't expect it to be miraculous. [sigh]
“Ask a Canadian if they would trade their plan for the US private capped plan.”
I haven't bothered to look here in Detroit, but when I lived in Seattle and went up to Vancouver a lot, I looked from time to time in Seattle, Bellingham, and Blaine and I didn't see any large number of BC license plates on the vehicles at doctors' offices there, nor did I see a huge just-across-the-border US health care complex (indicating a real bonanza) in Blaine. I.e., there was no stampede in the Northwest.
[...] [...]
Cancer has a reputation for being a deadly disease. While this certainly applies to certain particular types, the truths behind the historical connotations of cancer are increasingly being overturned by advances in medical care. Some types of cancer have a prognosis that is substantially better than nonmalignant diseases such as heart failure and stroke.
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