Hidden inside the $800 billion stimulus plan are health provisions that will affect every American’s medical care. Funds from the stimulus will create a new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, who will monitor everyone’s medical treatments to make sure your doctor is performing what the federal government has deemed appropriate and cost effective medical care. You’ll now have governmental medical doctors and overseers making sure that this is cost- appropriate. Hospitals and medical doctors that do not conform to the new system will face penalties.
The Health and Human Services secretary is empowered to impose measures on the members of the medical field. The goal of this new medical system is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. The system, the brainchild of former HHS nominee Tom Daschle, praises Europeans for being more willing to accept hopeless diagnoses and forgo experimental treatments, and he chastises Americans for anticipating too much from the health-care system.
The age group hit the hardest will be the elderly. Daschle says he thinks seniors should be more accepting of their health conditions that come naturally rather than treating them. The stimulus bill would change how the government health care provider Medicare currently operates. Medicare now pays for medical treatments considered safe and effective, but the new rules would only apply a cost-effectiveness standard set by a Federal Council. The Federal Council is a medical board (modeled after one in the United Kingdom) that 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.
Three years ago the U.K. health board decided that elderly patients with macular degeneration would have to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could receive a costly new drug to save the other. Public protest finally reversed the medical board’s decision. This bill will treat the health-care industry as a cost problem instead of growth industry. Imagine the government limiting growth and innovation in other major industries. The hidden medical provisions in the stimulus bill are a danger to American’s health.
