Healthcare reform

[lostfan]

Ok, which one of you is going to change your avatar status to evil-monger? Come on.

[StrangeSox]

Shouting irrational, hyperbolic fears is the highest form of discourse.

[southsider2k5]

Ok, which one of you is going to change your avatar status to evil-monger? Come on.

 

Done.

[lostfan]

Done.

[mr_genius]

Done.

 

YES!!

 

[EvilMonkey]

Shouting irrational, hyperbolic fears is the highest form of discourse when there is an R after the speaker's name.

Fixed that for ya.

[lostfan]

Fixed that for ya.

No it's embarrassing when Dems do it too. Code Pink, Berkeley, etc. Really unfair, it makes liberals look bad, like a bunch of retarded cartoon characters.

[HuskyCaucasian]

aaah yes... my favorite punching bag caught in hypocracy again:

Sarah Palin: For "Death Panels", Before She Was Against Them

[jasonxctf]

dont forget Glen Beck

 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-augu...eck-s-operation

[HuskyCaucasian]

dont forget Glen Beck

 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-augu...eck-s-operation

HA! I know people like to rip the daily show because it isnt "real news", but they do some of the best "compare to what he once said" reporting of any "news" organization.

 

[Balta1701]

Fairly short and excellent callout editorial from the Washington Post on the End of life issues demagoguery.

As it happens, there is evidence, though inconclusive, that advanced directives might save some costs. A study of 603 patients with advanced stages of cancer, published this year by Harvard researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, found that the final week of health costs for those who had discussed end-of-life treatment with their doctors was 36 percent lower than for those who did not have such talks.

 

But here's the more important finding: Patients who hadn't discussed treatment options did not live longer, but they had a "worse quality of life" in the final week, more likely to be in intensive care or on a ventilator. Yet a recent AARP survey of people 50 and over in Massachusetts found that, though 89 percent of seniors believed it very important to get honest answers from their doctors about end-of-life issues, only 17 percent had discussed such issues with their doctors. Indulging in demagoguery on this issue -- suggesting, for example, that encouraging physicians to discuss advance directives with their patients is starting "down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia," as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) asserted -- could have the effect of consigning more patients to unnecessarily uncomfortable deaths.

[mr_genius]

lol

 

i love how the Democrats are s***ting their pants when right wing protesters do the exact same thing they did for the past 8 years. exaggerations, nazi symbols, yelling, screaming, out of control conspiracy theories with no base in reality.

 

recursion. you wrote the this algorithm you should have known it's nature.

[Balta1701]

Rick Perlstein makes the case for why it really is different now...it's not that the crazy hasn't been there in the past, it's that right now there's a group of people in the media who are explicitly promoting the crazy.

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

 

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

 

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

 

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

[southsider2k5]

Here's what I don't understand... Is this new plan going to always include all life saving procedures, always, if the patient didn't say they didn't want them? If there are situations where they aren't, someone is becoming a defacto "death panel".

[Balta1701]

Here's what I don't understand... Is this new plan going to always include all life saving procedures, always, if the patient didn't say they didn't want them? If there are situations where they aren't, someone is becoming a defacto "death panel".

Would you think it's a good thing for the government to force people to undergo treatment they don't want?

[lostfan]

Here's what I don't understand... Is this new plan going to always include all life saving procedures, always, if the patient didn't say they didn't want them? If there are situations where they aren't, someone is becoming a defacto "death panel".

???

 

I don't follow this train of thought unless doctors had the power to fix everything and/or provide immortality. What exactly are you getting at? If I'm close to dying or have a terminal illness where the outcome isn't certain, and I tell the doctor I want him/her to do everything possible, then that's what should/will happen. If I'm dying and I talked to my family about it and I told the doctor that I don't want to go to the struggle and let nature take its course on me, that's what should/will happen (I'm guessing this is the source of the manufactured outrage, because I'm choosing to let myself die whereas conservatives seem to want to make this decision for me, for some reason). In any case, when I ask, the doctor tells me the list of options. It's my choice, not the government's, and the language in the bill I saw didn't say otherwise. It doesn't seem much more complicated than that to me.

 

The phrase "death panel" is pure, naked, unmitigated hyperbole, and portraying it as anything other than that smells like a copout.

Edited August 15, 2009 by lostfan

[HuskyCaucasian]

The phrase "death panel" is pure, naked, unmitigated hyperbole, and portraying it as anything other than that smells like a copout.

Especially since these "death panels" were once advocated by both Palin and Gingrich. When they proposed them, they were great ideas. Now they are euthanasia boards.

[Balta1701]

The phrase "death panel" is pure, naked, unmitigated hyperbole, and portraying it as anything other than that smells like a copout.

I think, if I'm understanding it, the idea is that if you're meeting people and deciding whether or not you want to go through with a treatment, and you decide the answer is no, then by the most liberal interpretation possible of "Death" and "Panel", you just had a discussion regarding death with a panel. So I guess, by a very liberal definition, that fits. In that case, yes, I fully support death panels, because people should have the right to decide how they want to deal with those situations. Unfortunately, I believe that right was just stripped from the Senate Bill, because the Republicans took exactly that right and said that the government was going to force you to die if you got too expensive.

 

Of course, it's also worth noting that I just got to call 2k5 a Liberal 2x in the same paragraph.

[southsider2k5]

???

 

I don't follow this train of thought unless doctors had the power to fix everything and/or provide immortality. What exactly are you getting at? If I'm close to dying or have a terminal illness where the outcome isn't certain, and I tell the doctor I want him/her to do everything possible, then that's what should/will happen. If I'm dying and I talked to my family about it and I told the doctor that I don't want to go to the struggle and let nature take its course on me, that's what should/will happen (I'm guessing this is the source of the manufactured outrage, because I'm choosing to let myself die whereas conservatives seem to want to make this decision for me, for some reason). In any case, when I ask, the doctor tells me the list of options. It's my choice, not the government's, and the language in the bill I saw didn't say otherwise. It doesn't seem much more complicated than that to me.

 

The phrase "death panel" is pure, naked, unmitigated hyperbole, and portraying it as anything other than that smells like a copout.

 

My point was that if there ever was a point that the government made the judgement that you were not going to get treatment anymore, they have just acted as a "death panel". That's where that stupid idea came out of.

[southsider2k5]

I don't have kids, yet my tax dollars pay for other kids schools. Since I'm not in school, I'm being penalized.

When I didn't own a car, my tax dollars paid for roads I didn't drive on. Since I'm not driving, I'm being penalized.

 

Your tax dollars currently fund several single payer health programs that you do not participate in. Yet you pay for them and are therefore being penalized for not using them. All this proposal does is level the playing field. Giving you access to health coverage if you can't afford a private plan. I don't understand the "taking away your freedom" argument. It seems rather tenuous at best.

 

 

The interesting thing is why the federal road system, specifically the interestate system was developed in the first place.

 

Not to mention, I don't accept prior erosions of economic freedoms as justifications for future ones. To me that is circular logic. Its like my three year old saying that I let her stay up an hour let when friends were over, so she gets to stay up late every night.

 

I notice no one took up the challenge on the interstate system, and it is kind of an interesting segue into what people who put a higher value on individual freedoms are worried about here. The original rationale behind the national interstate system was to provide the American military a way to move troops and equiptment around quickly in the case of an invasion. Instead it has become a crumbing system that no one can afford to maintain, and it no longer serves the purpose it was really built for.

 

Going back to our national education system as a justification for national health care is also scary to me, because that system is pretty much in complete failure, especially for the people it is supposed to be helping the most, the poor and the disadvantaged. The more kids that have ended up in public schools, and the more legislation of our system by Washington, the further the US has fallen down when compared to the rest of the industrialized world. Yeah, again, not really inspiring a lot of confidence for the eventual government takeover of health care.

[Balta1701]

My point was that if there ever was a point that the government made the judgement that you were not going to get treatment anymore, they have just acted as a "death panel". That's where that stupid idea came out of.

Here's the other side of the token though...one of Obama's 8 reform planks, or whatever you want to call them, is the elimination of lifetime cost ceilings by law. That basically would, by law, be banning "Death panels" by the current interpretation.

[southsider2k5]

Here's the other side of the token though...one of Obama's 8 reform planks, or whatever you want to call them, is the elimination of lifetime cost ceilings by law. That basically would, by law, be banning "Death panels" by the current interpretation.

 

That doesn't mean that necessarily. You can ban caps, but you can also stop certain life saving procedures after a certain point to cut costs. Those two things are not mutually exclusive by any means.

 

For example, everyone is supposed to be guaranteed social security, but it is a pretty standard procedure for people under 65 who can't work to be denied payment the first time they file.

[lostfan]

My point was that if there ever was a point that the government made the judgement that you were not going to get treatment anymore, they have just acted as a "death panel". That's where that stupid idea came out of.

Fair enough, we both agree that the suggestion at face value is stupid.

[Balta1701]

That doesn't mean that necessarily. You can ban caps, but you can also stop certain life saving procedures after a certain point to cut costs. Those two things are not mutually exclusive by any means.

 

For example, everyone is supposed to be guaranteed social security, but it is a pretty standard procedure for people under 65 who can't work to be denied payment the first time they file.

While that is true, the issue is...who is making the decision at the time?

 

The status quo is; if you're on Medicare, it's some combination of you, your family, and your doctor, because Medicare doesn't include a lifetime cap. If you're in the private sector system, it's your insurance company.

 

Quite frankly, I think we'll all agree, it's a difficult decision to make for everyone, but there is a point at which you should be stopping treatment. Not necessarily to cut costs, but because it's time. These are difficult issues and the country has struggled with them for decades. How do you deal with the case where the family insists you do everything but the doctor believes it will do nothing but cause the patient a lot of pain? How do you deal with the case where the patient has no hope of recovery? And on and on.

 

There's been an enormous amount of work in the governments, state and national to try to get it right. The Medicare consultation/living will thing is an important step in that. Which is why it's so obnoxious that it's been turned in to this "The guvmint's gonna kill you!" idiocy; it's a total step in the wrong direction. It certainly could make things a lot worse for some people; now they're scared to talk to their doctor about those issues because the government will want to kill them, and they wind up not having their wishes indicated, and so on.

[southsider2k5]

While that is true, the issue is...who is making the decision at the time?

 

The status quo is; if you're on Medicare, it's some combination of you, your family, and your doctor, because Medicare doesn't include a lifetime cap. If you're in the private sector system, it's your insurance company.

 

Quite frankly, I think we'll all agree, it's a difficult decision to make for everyone, but there is a point at which you should be stopping treatment. Not necessarily to cut costs, but because it's time. These are difficult issues and the country has struggled with them for decades. How do you deal with the case where the family insists you do everything but the doctor believes it will do nothing but cause the patient a lot of pain? How do you deal with the case where the patient has no hope of recovery? And on and on.

 

There's been an enormous amount of work in the governments, state and national to try to get it right. The Medicare consultation/living will thing is an important step in that. Which is why it's so obnoxious that it's been turned in to this "The guvmint's gonna kill you!" idiocy; it's a total step in the wrong direction. It certainly could make things a lot worse for some people; now they're scared to talk to their doctor about those issues because the government will want to kill them, and they wind up not having their wishes indicated, and so on.

 

What is being lost in the usual stereotyping of the nutjobs as representatives of the mainstream is that a governmental agency will be in charge of your loved ones lives. Even if the vast majority of the time they are going to force/allow treatments, there will be a time where the government is going to sanction the killing of someone. It is just not going to be nearly as often as some would like to indicate it will be.