The new Medicare benefit for end-of-life counseling that was snuck in by the Obama Administration over the objections of Congress and the American people, is the fourth and final step of a process that will indeed lead to “death panels.”
The first three steps are
- a mandatory Health Information Technology (HIT) system that allows authorities to track doctors
- comparative effectiveness research (CER), where experts decide what works and what does not.
- Accountable Care Organizations, which reward and punish doctors, tracked by health information technology, according to the results of comparative effectiveness research.
Scandlen continues:
Now we’ve got something. Now we have HIT telling the government what every doctor is doing, and we’ve got CER determining what is the right and what is the wrong thing to do, AND now we have a payment system that will “incentivize” doctors to do what the government says. There is only one thing missing – how to tell the patient.
STEP FOUR – “End-of-Life Counseling.” There is no acronym for this as yet. End-of-Life Counseling will pay physicians to deliver the bad news to the patient … Now, notice the physician is not explaining there IS something that can be done, but the government decided to not pay for Avastin because it costs too much. …
Read the whole post: Death Panels – American Style.
On Avastin, see: The Avastin Travesty – A cancer-fighting drug vs. an out-of-control federal agency.
(via FIRM)
