~ “I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.” Ronald Reagan.
It says it will keep much of Obamacare tax structure in place, but give the money to the states to allow them to create their own health care “systems” in the form of block grants.
So does that mean Medicaid is Kaput? Not according to this article:
Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia expanded Medicaid under Obamacare to people earning up to 138% of poverty. The Graham-Cassidy legislation would immediately block more states from expanding Medicaid and would stop the existing expansions in 2020. Instead, states would receive per capita block grants to address the needs of low-income residents.
So it won’t end Medicaid, just stop the expansion of it. Riiiiiiight! So now, we’re going to have to pay for Medicaid programs and we’re going to have to pay for Graham-Cassidy programs and we’re going to keep paying the Obamacare taxes that are inserted throughout the tax code.
So is this a win? Really????
Does letting the states create health care systems they want mean there are no strings attached? So that means no Congressional oversight, just dole out the money?
“My concern is for people who don’t have resources, who don’t have a choice.”
“You read about Oregon denying someone a lung transplant, but, ‘Here, you can you have these pills.’”
“That’s my fear about what this would become.”
That’s what Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a Democrat who represents the San Diego area, told the Sacramento Bee in an interview published in July.
Gonzalez is a Democrat who opposed California’s new physician-assisted suicide law, which was signed Monday by Gov. Jerry Brown, also a Democrat.
Gonzalez is right to be afraid.
In theory, the California law has safeguards ensuring that suicide is solely the patient’s choice. “Before the drugs can be prescribed, two California doctors must agree that the person has no more than six months to live,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. “It is then the patient’s choice whether to take the drugs. Those who want to must affirm their intention 48 hours in advance and must take the drugs on their own, without help.”
Oregon’s Example
But there are many ways to influence people, to get them to the point where they do state that their intentions are to die. And the example of Oregon, which enacted physician-assisted suicide in 1997, provides plenty of reason to be concerned that people, especially those who are low-income, are susceptible to ill-intentioned persuasion.
Dr. William Toffler, an Oregon doctor, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in August that “the regular notices I receive indicating that many important services and drugs for my patients—even some pain medications—will not be covered by the Oregon Health Plan, the state’s Medicaid program” were “concerning.”
“Yet physician-assisted suicide is covered by the state and our collective tax dollars,” Toffler, who is also national director of Physicians for Compassionate Care, noted. “Supporters claim physician-assisted suicide gives patients choice, but what sort of a choice is it when life is expensive but death is free?”
Take the case of Barbara Wagner, whom Gonzalez was likely referring to in her remarks. Wagner was a lung cancer patient whose case attracted national attention in 2008, after her insurance company told her it wouldn’t cover a drug costing $4,000 a month her doctor had prescribed but would cover the drugs required for a physician-assisted suicide, according to ABC News. “It was horrible,” Wagner told ABC News at the time.
“I got a letter in the mail,” she recounted, “that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the medication to live.”
Health Care Costs and Physician-Assisted Suicide
The situation in Oregon and Washington, which legalized physician-assisted suicide in 2008, also support the worries of Gonzalez and others about the financial incentives created by legalizing physician-assisted suicide.
“Last year, over half the patients who committed assisted suicide in Oregon relied on the government for their health coverage or had no coverage at all,” wrote Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in Public Discourse earlier this year. “Over three-quarters of those dying under Washington’s assisted suicide law were partly or completely dependent on Medicare or Medicaid.”
As health care costs continue to soar, physician-assisted suicide could potentially draw more interest as a solution. Ryan T. Anderson, the William E. Simon fellow at The Heritage Foundation, warned in a March report about that possibility.
“Given the increasing number of elderly patients in modern societies, their increasing longevity, and the increasing cost of treating their chronic illnesses,” he wrote, “[physician-assisted suicide] will increasingly be seen as a cost-effective option and one that the elderly should be encouraged to consider….”
A nearly $800,000 project from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is pairing the University of Pennsylvania with a robot company to create the machines, which will be able to deliver glasses of water to senior citizens.
The government said that the project is necessary due to a demographic crisis in America where soon there will not be enough young people to take care of their elders….
This Partnership For Innovation project develops and tests the use of service robots to monitor and improve health of the elderly. The growing elderly population coupled with low birth rates in the developed world is creating a crisis in healthcare. The number of senior citizens is outgrowing the number of working-age adults to care for them. In the U.S. alone, the number of seniors over age 65 is projected to double from year 2000 to 2030, reaching 71.5 million. With the scarcity of care options available, affordable robots are a welcome solution for assisting elders with small tasks that would normally be done by a caregiver. While helping elders with activities of daily living in an elder care facility, the system learns about them. It can then do things such as help ensure that they are eating or drinking healthily.
The project consists of two main parts: development of a low-cost mobile manipulator capable of a limited set of elder-relevant manipulation tasks (e.g., picking up dropped items or filling a water glass); and development of a data-driven service system that analyzes the use of the robot over time to monitor elder health via service requests and pro-actively offer assistance as needed. One key to making this system viable is maintaining effectiveness at low cost. This work builds on a commercial low-cost mobile robot platform being developed at Savioke and adds manipulation capabilities via a novel low-cost expanding prismatic joint arm under development at the University of Pennsylvania. This mobile manipulator robot will be used to perform service tasks, such as delivering water to elders. The data gathered by these robots and how elders use them in the field will provide information about how robots can help create a larger data-driven health monitoring system.
The partners at the inception of the project include University of Pennsylvania, both the School of Engineering and Applied Science as well as the School of Medicine (Philadelphia, PA) and Savioke (Sunnyvale, CA, a small business concern) along with broader context partner, “LIFE”–Living Independently For Elders (Philadelphia, PA, a non-profit organization).
“…ensure that they are eating or drinking healthily…This mobile manipulator robot will be used to perform service tasks, such as delivering water to elders.”
Impossible to buy this sell from an administration that has so little regard for the unborn, babies, the sick and elderly especially when one takes into account that the primary objectives of the government and corporations is data mining.
Nudge, Push, Shove, Sabotage – GRUBER
While the NSF webpage quotes the growing number of seniors as the rationale behind this project, it is worth noting that Barack Obama’s cuts to Medicate under Obamacare will drive nearly half of the home healthcare agencies in the United States out of business and/or into bankruptcy by 2017.
this will have a detrimental effect beyond seniors; it will also have a direct impact on taxpayers and the economy. By causing so many home health providers to close, the home health care cut will result in higherMedicare costs as many seniors are forced into more expensive institutional settings. The closures will also cause as many as 465,000 professional caregivers to lose their jobs, according to an analysis by Avalere Health.
But most important, the ObamaCare home health cut will have a direct impact on seniors and disabled Americans too.….
Barack Obama, his administration and comrades are biased against the unborn, physically impaired and elderly.
former Obama regulator czar, Cass Sunstein paper written while at the University of Chicago eleven years ago entitled, “Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay;” and
Obama’s science czar, John Holdren who believes in population control via forced abortions and mass sterilization globally. Holdren and the National Science Foundation are connected at the hip.
Finally, there is Barack Obama’s infamous blue pill red pill analogy. See Hot Air’s 2009 article entitled, “Video: Let them eat painkillers.”
Speaking of cradle to grave data mining and going from Common Core to robotic assistance for the elderly, enter Bill Gates.
[i] A $920,000 federally funded research project by the University of Indiana that monitors Conservatives via their twitter handle, tweets, conversations and hashtags such as #tcot #sarahpalinusa, #GOP. The information of which goes into a federal database for the 2016 elections. Its intent is to target Conservatives by suppressing free speech and political dissent.
The hits just keep on coming. AMAC has learned that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has proposed yet another reduction in funding for Medicare home healthcare services. The proposed $58 million cut would reduce access to this vital care for seniors who depend on in-home treatment to manage their chronic medical conditions….
The cuts to Medicare home healthcare are so drastic that even CMS estimated that 40% of the small businesses that provide this care will be out of business by 2017. That means that nearly 5,000 companies and 500,000 jobs could be lost due to these funding reductions. And where will the money that’s being cut from home healthcare go? It will be used to fund subsidies on the Obamacare insurance exchanges and to expand Medicaid….
Millions may get “insured” through Obamacare, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to see a physician. Proponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) insist that the law will extend health insurance to millions, expand access to health care, and improve Americans’ overall health. But, as the New York Times recently reported, at least 20 percent of the new enrollees have not paid their premiums. They therefore do not really have insurance. But even for those enrollees paying premiums, having health insurance is not the same thing as getting good health care, or any health care. In fact, it doesn’t matter how many Americans obtain insurance under the ACA. Most will have difficulty finding a physician[…]
Another one of those little factoids of which Obama and klan neglected to inform the masses, i.e., receiving quality healthcare was never part of the deal.
I personally wanted to unleash one heck of a rant on this one but being a female and old school, I could not bring myself to discuss the apparatus referred to in this post.
Thus, you can (or maybe not) imagine my relief when patriot Moos, “in keeping with existing MoosRoom standards,” took on the matter of government spending “$175 million” for “vacuum erection systems” as referenced in the following article.
…From the article referenced above: Taxpayers paid nearly $175 million for vacuum erection systems (VES), commonly known as “penis pumps,” from 2006 to 2011, according to an inspector general report released on Monday.
. .The federal government paid more than double the retail price for VES, the Department of Health and Human Services IG found. Medicare prices for the systems, the report said, “remain grossly excessive compared with the amounts that non-Medicare payers pay.”
[Translation: If you purchased your own ‘Winky Pump’ it would have cost you approximately HALF of what Medicaid paid for it on your behalf. Keep reading, it’s coming… .
.“The fact that taxpayers have spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the past decade on penis pumps via Medicare is obscene and insulting…
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