Obamacare means treatment rationing, so getting Grandma plugged in in the first place is the greater peril.
Mark Steyn
August 14, 2009
Orange County Register
…Anyway, there he was, reassuring the crowd that the provision for mandatory “end-of-life counseling” has “gotten spun into this idea of ‘death panels.’ I am not in favor of that.” Well, that’s good to know. So good that a grateful audience applauded the president’s pledge not to kill them. He has no plans, as he put it, to “pull the plug on Grandma.”
The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It’s that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to “control costs” is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don’t worry, it’s all very scientific. In Britain, they use a “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” formula to decide that you don’t really need that new knee because you’re gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it’s in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert “finite resources” away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you’d be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to “old age.” Well, he had a good innings. He was 57.
This ought to be of particular concern to Americans. As is often pointed out, U.S. life expectancy (78.06 years) lags behind other developed nations with government health care (United Kingdom 78.7, Germany 78.95, Sweden 80.63). So proponents of Obamacare are all but offering an extra “full year” of Euro-Canadian geriatric leisure as a signing bonus…
…Which brings us to the United States and its allegedly worst health system in the developed world. Here’s the reality: The longer you live in America, the longer you live….
The article continues at Unplugging Grandma
