Meet the (Real) Future Death Panel Czar
- 0 Comments
According to Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent for the Washington Examiner, a serach of the Senate health bill will bring up “secretary” 2,500 times, and under the Senate health bill she will determine what medical treatments are and are not available to you. It is also quite possible the “secretary” will determine if you live or die.
Meet the “real” Death Panel Czar - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Ferrechio writes:
[...] Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would be awarded unprecedented new powers under the proposal, including the authority to decide what medical care should be covered by insurers as well as the terms and conditions of coverage and who should receive it.
“The legislation lists 1,697 times where the secretary of health and humans services is given the authority to create, determine or define things in the bill,” said Devon Herrick, a health care expert at the National Center for Policy Analysis.
For instance, on Page 122 of the 2,079-page bill, the secretary is given the power to establish “the basic per enrollee, per month cost, determined on average actuarial basis, for including coverage under a qualified health care plan.”
The HHS secretary would also have the power to decide where abortion is allowed under a government-run plan, which has drawn opposition from Republicans and some moderate Democrats.
And the bill even empowers the department to establish a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation that would have the authority to make cost-saving cuts without having to get the approval of Congress first.
“It’s a huge amount of power being shifted to HHS, and much of it is highly discretionary,” said Edmund Haislmaier, an expert in health care policy and insurance markets at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Haislmaier said one the greatest powers HHS would gain from the bill is the authority to regulate insurance. States currently hold this power, and under the Senate bill, the federal government would usurp it from them. This could lead to the federal government putting restrictions and changes in place that destabilize the private insurance market by forcing companies to lower premiums and other charges, he said.
Robert Wenzel suggests at EconomicPolicyJournal.com that destabilizing the private insurance sector is part of the plan to “nudge” everyone into a public plan.
It will take time to pull off, but that is the goal. In the meantime, Sebelius will be able to control treatments via capping of price, any treatment she deems unnecessary she can mark the price down so low that any health provider won’t be able to provide it without losing money. Once most are in the public plan the real cost cutting will begin, including cutting back on treatments that will prolong your life.
Morgan Richman says essentially the same thing in his must-read piece at Big Government since a single-payer system would give the federal government total control over our lives:
The truth is that the public plan is a carefully devised scheme, a sneaky strategy, to deceive American voters. It’s a political marketing ploy designed to move the nation to a single-payer system - like the one in Canada - over the next decade. The public option is the Trojan horse. On the outside it’s all about “choice and competition”, but once it has been dragged within the walls of American medicine it’s true nature will become evident. By that time, it’ll be too late.
Richman offers “plenty of proof” in his piece, including a pont to this damning video of the original architect of the public option, Yale professor Jacob Hacker, describing how it was designed to not “frighten people into thinking they are going to lose their private insurance” even though that is the inevitable result (via Verum Serum):
In another clip he denies the plan is a Trojan horse saying, on the contrary, “it’s right there”. In other words, it’s not even a secret. Most relevant of all, Hacker admits in another clip that the real advantage of his plan is that “at least you can make the claim that there is competition between the public and private sectors”. In other words, this is all a marketing strategy designed to get around public resistance to government-run health care.
Death panels? What death panels! They’re hidden in plain sight. And the Czar has been identified in the Senate bill.
