Is the Obama Stimulus Plan Anti-Alternative Medicine"

[Michael Ellner]

Hi,

I am not a fear monger -- I do not believe the sky is falling -- I do believe the health provisions in this bill are a serious concern for all people who use Alternative Medicine and the practitioners that help them.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist...

Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan: Betsy McCaughey
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Commentary by Betsy McCaughey


Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.

New Penalties

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Elderly Hardest Hit

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).

The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.

Hidden Provisions

If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes the Senate in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).

Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”

More Scrutiny Needed

On Friday, President Obama called it “inexcusable and irresponsible” for senators to delay passing the stimulus bill. In truth, this bill needs more scrutiny.

The health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry. Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy.

(Betsy McCaughey is former lieutenant governor of New York and is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Betsy McCaughey at [e-mail]

Last Updated: February 9, 2009 00:01 EST

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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

[Vincent Smith]

great article, but, I have to say that this bill needs to be reviewed again, there are still remaining branch or medicine field that needs to added or reconsider.
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self hypnosis mp3 audio cds do they really work???

[Nadine Romain]

Seems to me that Betsy McCaughey is, like many people in the US, seeing everything in black and white. Maybe, they are trying to stop the overrated supremacy of technology. For example, sonograms. it use to be we didn't know the sex of the baby and would need to wait (how archaic), then we discovered we could take sonogram (a doppler picture of the baby in utero), good, we were (still are) able to detect early defect or malfunction of this or that and sometimes correct them in utero, GREAT! Then there were more and more sonograms, from 2 per pregnancy to 1 a month almost, to noe the 3D 'cause I want to see what my baby looks like! Ok, it's neat and beautiful but you can see how it can drive up the prices and then people want the 3D and go to hospitals that have the machine and then all the hospitals want the machine, and then as they spent the money, now they need to sell more 3D sonograms! You get the picture! So maybe, perhaps, its not a bad thing to "keep a eye" on what doctors and hospitals want to "prescribe" in the name of "technology"!?
Now of course, it is scary, because who knows will posted to that task (keeping an eye", how competent, unbiased and honest they would be...We can only hope....

There is no perfect solution, is there?

Also, the electronic filling of everything you undergo in a hospital is ALREADY electronic. Hospitals are even destroying 'hard" copies. So too late for that (that was decided a long time ago under Bill Clinton). BUT it does not affect alternative treatments, on the contrary, I think it will push more people our way!!! More trust in your relationship to the practitioner, more freedom in who you see, how many times and for what, no "black" labels (like "depression" or ADD/ADHD, etc). It's all good!

Just my 2 cents,

Nadine