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More Over The Top Rhetoric
It’s barely political debate or discussion any more — it’s pure polemics and varying degrees of demonization.
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19 Responses to “More Over The Top Rhetoric”
Huckabee's comment – He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments.” The truth is the Sen. Kennedy knew that most of us can't choose like he was able to. Most of us don't know if our insurance would cover it, they might cancel our policy, most of us might not have any insurance and most of us couldn't afford to pay it ourselves (and keep our house). Sen. Kennedy didn't think we should have to die (without even trying to live) because we didn't have the choices he did. Huckabee should be ashamed of himself, (especially being a man of God and all). This is the entire problem with the elected GOP's arguments against Health reform. They don't see the problem with people not haveing the same choices as them. I think they still believe in the Old Testament that if bad things happen to you – you must deserve them as you must be a sinner. They complained that Pres. Obama didn't see the “exceptionalism of Amerca” – when I look at how many people are without basic, decent health care I wonder what direction they are looking at to see this “shining City on a hill”?
The other point to make about Kennedy's selfishness is that many people when told they have terminal cancer volunteer to enter a research protocol because it may help them but it will definitely help others. It also is a way to get treatment while not paying as much.
I'm going to disagree here a little bit. All the talk about “death panels' was clearly over -the-top and dishonest and Huckabee's words do seem to harken back to that. If you look closely though I think he has a point, and it's about a topic that nobody wants to deal with, namely that when Obama talks about panels deciding “what works” they are going to decide some things that people might want might be denied. This very possibly is going to include some end-of-life care.
Might Kennedy's surgery have been denied because a board decided it was futile? I don't think anybody knows the answer to that, in fact the role of the board is still pretty vague as far as I know.
DaGoat-Problem is that those boards exist in the private market already and if you have the money you go around it and if not you die. So it actually changes nothing for the poor or the wealthy in such a circumstance except for not being kicked out of a healthcare plan if the cancer was deemed “pre-existing”.
MSF I don't understand why whenever I talk about what rationing will be like on the Obama Plan, somebody always reminds me there is already rationing in private plans. This kind of rationing doesn't currently exist in government-sponsored plans like Medicare, and I would like to know to what extent it will exist in the Democrat's plan.
I would add that while these boards exist in the private market they're often criticized by proponents of health care reform. How will government boards be different and why will they be any better?
Huckabee, should buzz away! to Arkansas. I wonder what his memorial will bee like? Lot's of buzz and no substance…! ditto for Rush, Hannity, etc.
Amazing how disinformation can be debunked, only to be resurrected so the con can continue. Dumb and dumber…
Da Goat comments, “All the talk about “death panels' was clearly over -the-top and dishonest….”
Dishonest for the wrong reason. The end of life “death panel” inclusion is alleged to have been stripped out of HR3200. However, this is not a guarantee this provision will not be slipped back in at the last minute before voting takes place.
However, there is a “death panel” provision within HR3200 which is very well hidden through slippery semantics of which our government boys are so fond of using to allow wide interpretation. This provision is aimed at the poor and the elderly. I will work at keeping this simple so you readers can pull your hair out trying to figure out this “death panel” provision.
Section 1751 of HR3200 is loaded with slippery semantics gooblygook. Making this harder to understand, this section refers to buried sections in our Social Security Act. Unless you are willing to chase after the devil in the details of HR3200 and our Social Security Act, you will never discover truth.
Section 1751 refers to “never events” but not directly. This section denies payment for never events. A never event is something which is to never happen, such as performing surgery and a surgeon leaves a 16 ounce framing claw hammer inside you. This is OK, hammers should not be inside you. This is a classic “never event” – never to happen, inexcusable.
Catch is our government has added to this never events a host of infections. This is the “health-care acquired condition” part of Section 1751. Most listed infections make sense. Some do not. I believe currently there are eleven health-care acquired events. Check me on this, I have not looked recently; might be more now, not sure.
Greater problem is some of these infections are almost impossible to prevent and are becoming highly resistant to anti-biotic treatment. Another problem is admitted patients may have a “dormant” underlying infection which is exasperated by hospital treatment, such as surgery.
A few of those infections are impossible to trace to source. Section 1751 does not account for this nor does Section 1903(i) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396b(i)) to which reference is made in Section 1751 of HR3200. Confused yet? Try chasing down those provisions in our Social Security Act.
Devil is in the details. Upon rummaging through our Social Security Act you will stumble upon a magical expression, “organ transplant procedures”. Read context around this. Wording allows for refusal of payment to cover organ transplants. Worse yet, upon returning to HR3200 Section 1751 you will find in all that gibberish, “Nothing in this section shall prevent a State from including additional health care-acquired conditions for non-payment in its Medicaid program….”
Between HR3200 and our Social Security Act, you will begin to find some truth which is well hidden, if you are willing to invest time and effort into finding truth which our government has well hidden.
End result of this is Section 1751 does allow for refusal of life saving treatment through refusal to pay for this type of treatment. A hospital, which includes staff, nurses, doctors and such, are faced with a number of prospects. One is to perform exhaustive testing to discover underlying problems before treatment. This will skyrocket costs. Hospitals will need to take more aggressive measures to prevent “health-care acquired” problems. This will skyrocket costs. A hospital may also elect to simply allow a patient to die and take a chance on being sued or not sued. Civil litigation will skyrocket costs.
Most important, a hospital may elect to deny accepting Medicaid coverage to protect against unwarranted costs or losses because of Section 1751 in HR3200; people will die.
Even more important, each state of our union may add whatever “health-care acquired” provisions liked, such as toilet paper causing butt rash. Seems extreme, nonetheless payment under Medicaid could be denied simply for acquiring butt rash while in a hospital.
Devil is in the details. Section 1751 of HR3200 is, de facto, a “death panel” provision aimed at the poor and the elderly. This section allows for extensive government abuse, such as saving money at the cost of patient treatment; people will die.
This is the overall problem with HR3200; hidden slippery semantics which Americans are too lazy to chase after to discover truth. However, next time you develop butt rash from rough toilet paper in a hospital and our government refuses to pay your hospital bill, you may regret not taking a bit of time to discover just what you are getting in the end, sans K-Y Jelly.
Okpulot Taha
Choctaw Nation
Puma Politics
Dagoat-Because killing granny gets you a one way ticket to voted outta office. The first time it is tried anyone in power will be voted out that touched it. People pull out pitch forks in mass in such situations because the other side is backing them with whatever they think may make them vote for their side. Sad but mobs just dont work against mega corps as its always “just a company trying to do its best to feed their families.”
just an addition to superdestroyer (hi there) speaking about experiemental research studies that a person with terminal disease might volunteer to be a part of… often, too too often, to enter the experimental treatment, patients are chosen through a literal lottery run by the pharma co and the medders. Sadly and I think, even egregiously in many cases, many dying patients are turned away from a potential life-legthening or cure, no matter how much they want to volunteer. The ethics of all that has not yet come in clear focus before the public in any sustained measure.
Neither has the ethics of giving in experimental studies some terminally ill people placebos instead of the actual and potentially life-sparing medicine. That too, has not come before the public eye.
My experience with persons who are seriously afflicted is that many are often, if clearly compos mentis, vulnerable to entering into medical contracts with debatable outcomes… entering into agreements that are often stacked against them (as in placebo giving to serious ill persons)… agreements they would never in a million years agree to if they were not slammed sideways by the shock and debilitation of their illness.
I do know as firsthand witness, that not all experimental studies are geared to treating human beings with humanity, but rather only as stats and units, taking advantage of seriously ill persons desire to at the very least do something altruistic. However, seeing the backside of such endeavors, when the experimental study brings forth no new or useful data, and the patients die anyway… these outcomes often slash not only the patient in their last days, but hurt the psyches of the families also. Their last idea of finding meaning in experimental studies has crashed and burned and come to naught.
Despite protestations to the contrary about how patients agree in full knowing what they are getting into, I find that rarely does a seriously ill patient realize that disappointment in being able to help others, to have a study come to naught, actually disheartens the ill person and offten appears to take them to their deaths that much faster.
This is just my two cents worth.
dr.e
arch
As you signed your comment as dr e, I assume you're in the field. Surprising, considering some of your comments show little or no understanding of experimental procedures and a person's end of life experience..
1. Experimental procedures are offered to people who have exhausted all normal channels of treatment and their outcomes are medically assured. It's not like a doc skips know methodology to offer “something experimental.” That would be malpractice.
2. “when the experimental study brings forth no new or useful data,” You do understand the concept of experimental, don't you? Experiments have two basic outcomes, positive or negative reaction to the hypothesis defined as the reason for the test. Because a treatment does not cure or positively mitigate the condition, it is patently absurd to say it provides no useful data. Knowing something is not ineffective is every bit as important as finding it is.
3. If an experimental treatment fails to resolve the life-threatening condition, it's ridiculous to surmise that failure is the reason a patient feels disappointed. You fail to incorporate the well known stages of grief consciously terminal patients experience. The patient who tries an experimental procedure is “bargaining” with death, and when that bargain fails, depression follows as a natural consequence. Hopefully, that patient will move on to acceptance before the end comes.
What troubles me most in your and super's comments is an almost blind allegiance to the idea that end of life is somehow avoidable. Every day, patients with no brain waves or patients eaten up with cancer in ever major organ in their body are held in this world not because they want remain any longer, but because well-meaning but ignorant family members can't accept their demise. The result is a patient stuck in pain or oblivion, unable to heal and unable to pass on through life's last door. At some point in your life, you may find that hospice care that removes discomfort and allows you time to make your piece is the only “treatment” worth pursuing. When the time comes, all patients need to know they are reaching the end, and a professional needs to let people know that medicine has no solutions. Acceptance of one's own death is something people do not want to do, and medicine many times promotes that deception.
Da Goat, the ethics boards and the issue of “futility” is already an issue related to health care practice as well as ethics, as I've mentioned in the past and is noted here by someone else.
And given the nature of who's setting up the current “appropriateness of care” board (under the stimulus legislation, as I noted earlier this month), as well as the nature of liberal politics related to rationing and euthanasia and realated topics (not just the euthanasia fan club, but the likes of Singer at the extreme), it's no surprise why so many people are concerned (despite dishonest attacks on them by desperate proponents or advocates — the more desperate things seem, the more and more desperately they attack, are “shocked” by opposition, etc.) –
concerned not only about ineptitude or incompetence, or deliberate substitution of preferences and command and control of health care, but also of malevolence, baggage the Left carries in large measure. Nobody sane believes that arbitrary or worse restrictions in the future will all be in the name (honestly or otherwise) of “cost control” alone.
The fear isn't great, but the concern obviously is there, among rational people.
Only the worst among us would stoop to denying this, and the reasons for it, with any vigor.
“slippery semantics of which our government boys are so fond of using to allow wide interpretation”
Don't forget convenient omission (“If you [still have your doctor, and you] like your doctor…”) as well as concealment or other forms of deception. (Get, why did this administration remove unpleasant but noteworthy, as former Trustees wrote, facts about the future size of federal revenues and federal expenditures with Social Security and Medicare from their administration's Trustees' Report?)
For that matter, how many people did they expect to evade by putting medical “appropriateness” research and other things related to health care into the stimulus effort?
“The ethics of all that has not yet come in clear focus before the public in any sustained measure.”
There are a lot of ethical issues related to medicine (to name one example, organ transplantation, which incidentally places before us something of an ocean of different ethical and related issues) that are among the many things meriting priority over a vague, grand, frantic, sloppy “take over medicine” scheme and related approach to it.
DLS comments about organ transplants and related topics.
You know about slippery semantics and “deceit through omission”. Good boy!
Joe Gandelman up there writes about “More Over The Top Rhetoric”. Here is some “over the top rhetoric” provided to me by Sylvia Soyara who participates here.
Guess who wrote this quote!
BEGIN QUOTE
Allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines is a persistent ethical challenge. We evaluate eight simple allocation principles that can be classified into four categories: treating people equally, favouring the worst-off, maximising total benefits, and promoting and rewarding social usefulness. No single principle is sufficient to incorporate all morally relevant considerations and therefore individual principles must be combined into multiprinciple allocation systems. We evaluate three systems: the United Network for Organ Sharing points systems, quality-adjusted life-years, and disability-adjusted life-years. We recommend an alternative system—the complete lives system—which prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life, and also incorporates prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value principles.
END QUOTE
That quote is from Ezekiel J. Emanuel which is a name all readers should instantly recognize. He has an odd habit of using British spellings.
When you look at HR3200 and the “organ transplant” denial provision for the poor and the elderly in our Social Security Act, then look at this quote of Ezekiel Emanuel, you instantly realize Ezekiel Emanuel is guiding this HR3200 bill. Emanuel made sure a “death panel” is included but well hidden. This death panel targets the poor and the elderly through Medicaid in keeping with this “prioritizing” health care based upon class and age.
Now that is some real over the top rhetoric. Devil is in the details.
Thanks to Sylvia Soyara for alerting me to this bit of “euthanize” the poor and the elderly thinking on the part of Obama and his boys.
Okpulot Taha
Choctaw Nation
Puma Politics
Surprise, Surprise, a Republican tried to make a political gain out of Kennedy's death, just like the Democrats are doing. Too bad neither side could restrain themselves and just bury the man.
sorry hemmD to be so late getting back to this article and seeing your comment, I am trying to wrestle a small crisis at work into some calm order.
Let's see. I cant speak for SD, but I dont think end of life is avoidable. I've kept vigil with way too many souls whose bodies were dying down, to think otherwise. That family members sometimes cannot bear that their loved ones are dying, is sometimes true, as you say. No one ought be stuck in pain or oblivion, I dont think, and this is one reason why I have signed the documents needed so my loved ones wont have to be torn, given authority to other than my loved ones for medical proxy, and this is what I gently encourage others to do also. Before, long before it is anticipated such directives would need be in place.
I was one of the many who contributed to the development of the hospice movement. Legions of us across the country and the world gave palliative care, respect, understanding, tender teachings and support emotionally, medically and spiritually to persons in their last times, as well as their loved ones. Before hospice was ever called hospice, we all were there… and still beg, borrow and fundraise for money to come to the hospices worldwide, as they are ever in need and often underfunded for the immense work they do. Thank Creator! truly for all the holy volunteers who are sacred to us all. Without them, there would be little hospice.
My experience Hemm is that each person rows to the very end in their own way. Sometimes it's a 'professional' but often it is the mother of the child who is dying, or the loving spouse of the son who is dying at midage, and often it is just a regular person who has a spiritual heart who tells a hard truth with soft edges to the patient… as you say, about ways to reverse or more than merely maintain have run out.
Along with that however, is huge amounts of love and literal acts of support and comfort and calming and care. We dont give much emphasis to whether people 'accept' their death in some factual reductionist way. We try very hard to help them live as fully as they can and are able when their last days are upon them, leaving them in as much peace as possible, not imposing.
Also, I must add, that the general public has very little close up view of the intimate emotional life of persons who are encouraged or disappointed about various matters at end of life. That's an entire set of volumes yet to be published. People at life's end, just like all other stages of life, feel and think many things… and just as before, people's thoughts and emotions follow unique and one-of-a-kind patterns of tangents and integrations. They have feelings, just as before about anything put in their path. That they are near the end of life does not mean they suddenly 'get it all.' In fact, the nearing of the end of life, many will remark, has brought them a far richer and complex way of relating to every single thing in life, rather than diminishing reactions. Their highs are often higher, their lows, sometimes far more poignant.
I'm sorry I cant answer more here, but I've been thinking of writing an article for TMV about one of my greatest teachers, a feisty little old woman who was dying and who had gave the docs 'what -for' for not letting her die in her own way.
When things settle down a bit, I'll see if I can finish that one.
Thanks HemmD
it's 4:57 am and I have GOT to go find the bed.
dr.e
Pope John Paul II taught us all a lesson about dying.
Thanks for the great insight.
I look forward to that article as the “secret” that the public largely does not know is part and parcel of the health care debate. Knowing all to intimately about the experience of life's end, I hope you agree that the political BS of “death panels” is a particularly disgusting form of coercion.
Thanks again.