| Obama does not want to kill your grandma. (Does anybody really believe this stuff???) |
| We now have a chance to reform this cruel and capricious system. If we let that chance slip away, there will be another [American] dying every half-hour.
That’s how often someone dies in America because of a lack of insurance, according to a study by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a year, that amounts to 18,000 American deaths. After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance -- and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing? Source: "The Body Count at Home" By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF - NY Times - September 12, 2009 Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves - and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" - and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS". Source: "Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason: How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?" - by Johann Hari - The Independent (UK) -19 August 2009 The campaign of the moment is based on a small provision in the health care bill that would allow Medicare to reimburse doctors for time spent consulting with patients about their end-of-life choices. The bill doesn’t really mandate anything. It simply assures that a talk about advance care planning will be covered for the patients and families who want it. As Obama told a woman at an AARP forum, “It strikes me that that’s a sensible thing to do.” One-quarter of all Medicare dollars are spent in the last year of life, much of it in the last month. We don’t know yet whether it will cost less (and how much less) for patients to choose high-quality palliative care. It surely isn’t the cheap fix to the health cost spiral. But … in a study of terminal cancer patients at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, those who had end-of-life conversations spent about one-third less in their last week than those who didn’t. And they had a better quality of life and death. Yes, those who didn’t talk about options had more aggressive treatment. They ended up in intensive care and/or on ventilators or were resuscitated. They not only had a worse quality of death by any measure, they left their families in more distress, and here’s the kicker: They didn’t live any longer. We confuse life-prolonging and suffering-prolonging treatments. We don’t always hear about palliative care and hospice. This is precisely why we need to encourage these conversations. Some people will choose “everything.” Others will choose comfort care. But if we train and reimburse clinicians for the fine art of communicating, we’ll have an informed choice. And that’s what this teeny little clause in the great big health care bill does. It enables granny and grandpa and us to say how we want to die. Source: "In a Wing-Nut World, Granny’s Toast" - By Ellen Goodman - truthdig.com - Aug 5, 2009 The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die—either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill. The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of working age due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least 20,000, according to studies conducted over the past decade by medical researchers, and the number is almost certainly rising as more and more people lose their coverage as costs continue to go up. They die primarily because they didn’t have the coverage or the money to pay doctors and thus delayed seeking treatment until it was too late. They don’t get checkups, screenings and other preventive care. That is why uninsured adults are far more likely to be diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer or heart disease, at an advanced stage, which severely reduces their chances of survival. Between 2000 and 2006, the last year of that study, the total number of dead was estimated to have reached 137,000—a body count more than double the number of casualties in the Vietnam War. All those appalling figures, which are real rather than mythical, do not include the casualties of insurance company profiteering—namely, all the people, including small children, who perish because of the anonymous “death panels” that deny or delay coverage to consumers. Source: "The Real Death Panels" By Joe Conason - truthdig.com - Aug 13, 2009 |
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