Sep 09 2009
Saving Health Care Costs In The “Public Option”
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has been held up as the model for the liberal government rationed health care solutions now in front of Congress as Obamacare. I have written extensively on the NHS and its hellish, substandard performance (see here). In government rationed health care systems costs are contained by selecting who is worthy of treatment and who is not. Who will die and who will survive.
In recent years both the Canadian and UK NHS programs have been forced to restrict more and more care. In the UK they have almost given up on curing and gone to simply keeping the healthy healthy. They have also flirted with the idea of including growing to a ripe old age in with other bad life style choices like overeating, heavy drinking and smoking. Like growing old is a choice?
Even Obamacare gets half its funding from cutting Medicare by 10% at a time its roles are growing by 30% and its customers are aging (requiring more investment, not less).
One way to reduce costly end of life care is to accelerate the end of life. In the UK there have been lots of warning bells that patients are being shuttled off their mortal coils prematurely. One such case just hit the Drudge headlines today:
Mrs Munkenbeck, 56, from Bracknell, said her father, who previously said he wanted to live until he was 100, has now said he wants to die after being deprived of fluids for five days.
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Last week The Daily Telegraph reported a warning from experts that some patients with terminal illnesses were being wrongly put on the NHS scheme and allowed to die prematurely if they ticked “the right boxes”.
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Mrs Munkenbeck said that her father was taken off an intravenous drip last week but she argues that he has as much of a right to life as anyone else. Although a spokesman for Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey says Mr Troake is not on the scheme “at the moment”, it is likely he will be offered a plan of care for dying patients.
What a scheme. Deny the man fluids for 5 days until he is begging to die, then put him on the path to meet his maker. The article notes another big problem with this approach and the elderly I have seen numerous times:
Although Mrs Munkenbeck admits her father is “confused”, she argues that is because of the drugs the hospital have given him.
I have seen this in my own mother. She is incredibly susceptible to narcotics, even in mild doses such as in cold medicine. It builds up in her over a very short time. It takes days to get her head clear. This man is being dehydrated (which causes delusions itself) and being drugged. Who wouldn’t be confused?
The daughter has a reasonable answer, but under government rationed health (costs savings you know) she has little control:
“We believe that he has been forced down this route. By withdrawing fluids he is now very weak and there’s no going back from it,” she told The Daily Telegraph yesterday.
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“Let his body do his own job with a little bit of help. If it’s not possible we don’t necessarily expect him to be put on a ventilator,” she said.
How hard is this? Give the man his fluids and reduce or suspend the medication for a week. They are not asking for him to be artificially kept alive. The fact he can ‘ask’ to die is a clear sign he is not mentally gone.
This is the brave new world of Obamacare if the current plans get passed. A few cheap drugs to mask clarity of the mind and you can make all sorts of claims about viability. Senior citizens, you have been warned. And all of us who hope to be senior citizens in 10-20 years, we have been warned as well.
Bottom line is that this system is nothing more than an expansion of medicare and the forcing of healthy people into it so they collect premiums to pay for the huge number of boomers who are now needing more services.
Medicare was a bad idea. They could have done it a lot differently.
There is another sad story out there:
NHS lets a Newborn Die
http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/2009/09/08/9920/#more-9920
Sad story. His mother begged that they give him the intensive care he needed; but, the article explains:
“You see, even though he was born alive, the British do not consider his to be a live birth.
His mother’s pregnancy was two days shy of the 22-week minimum to be considered a birth and therefore worthy of treatment.
So the British consider him to be a fetus, not an infant.”
He wasn’t given care; yet was able to cling to life for two hours before he died. The baby’s picture is shown in the article.
Born two days too early to recieve medical care? Sounds like a “death panel” to me.
The article above about the newborn NHS allowed to die also said this:
“In fact, the medical guidelines for Health Service hospitals state that babies should not be given intensive care if they are born at less than 23 weeks.
The guidance, drawn up by the Nuffield Council, is not compulsory but advises doctors that medical intervention for very premature children is not in the best interests of the baby….”
She was given bereavement counselling and info on planning a funeral before her child was even born (as she started having contractions).
and,
“She was shocked to discover that another child, born in the U.S. at 21 weeks and six days into her mother’s pregnancy, had survived.
Amillia Taylor was born in Florida in 2006 and celebrated her second birthday last October. She is the youngest premature baby to survive.
Miss Capewell said: ‘I could not believe that one little girl, Amillia Taylor, is perfectly healthy after being born in Florida in 2006 at 21 weeks and six days. ”
Read the whole article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1211950/Premature-baby-left-die-doctors-mother-gives-birth-just-days-22-week-care-limit.html
The fundamental problem with government anything is that there is no competition. When you have competition, people will leave an inefficient or incompetent provider. When there is only a single provider, you can’t. In a competitive system, there is an incentive to be better than the other providers. Find new solutions to things. Cure something, have a neo-natal unit that can keep these babies alive. And people who need that service or procedure or drug will seek it out. People will health plans that don’t cover it will find a different plan that does and the system evolves. When you have only a single provider, there is no evolution of care. Things remain static.
Imagine there is a cure that works 15% of the time. Under a government system it might not be allowed as it is too expensive with too little chance of payoff. So you never try it on anyone. In a private system you DO try it because you don’t know who the 15% are that benefit until you DO. And maybe you learn why it works on that 15% and expand that to work on 25% or maybe 50%.
Government ruins EVERYTHING it touches.
Medicare was a bad idea. They could have done it a lot differently
Yes, they could have farmed it out to the existing insurance companies. They could have made a deal with them re premiums. I guarantee there would not be the waste as with medicare and the dems management would not have gotten richer at our expense. Don’t think for a moment that the dems didn’t scrape moneyoff the top just as they did with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and every other existing government program. There were many people who did not want to be on medicare. The regarded it as welfare.
Insurance companies check and double check claims and are denigated for doing so. But there is a whole less waste with these companies. Sometimes they go too far but are brought up short with lawsuits. You can’t sue the government though.
The public option will not only put millions of people out of work but will bankrupt the stockholders of these companies. If I had anyoney, which I no longer do since tis recession, I would be hard pressed to know where to put my money where the government will not mess it up and make me lose even more.
Old men starved and babies killed to save money.
This is the system that Conman says is the best system in the world.
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Crosspatch,
I agree. I have argued from the beginning that this was a plan to eliminate Medicare as such and fold it all into the public option. Then, it would be much easier to reduce and ration health care to those who were former Medicare recipients by claiming the resources are going to the young.
Rick