Ginger the private sector believes the same thing! Instead of government bureaucrats making decisions you have private for PROFIT bureaucrats making decisions about what is and is not a "medical benefit." That should be made clear. And Emmanuel's brother was taken out of context to my understanding. He is not the villain Faux news makes him out to be.
Can you point me toward the context that would make those quotes benign? Because I can't think of one that would make those words in that order mean anything other than what they seem to mean. I am open to your being right about the context thing... but it is really hard to see how.
And yes... much of the private sector does believe the same thing... however...
The private sector is much more easily held accountable. You can sue the private sector. You can walk away from an unethical business in the private sector. You can bring charges on the private sector.
We can do none of those things to the government officials who are currently and for a prolonged period of time, jacking our kids.
The question is not "which is more moral, the public or private sectors"... neither are because they are both populated by flawed human beings in positions of power, and as we know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The question is "which can be more quickly and effectively held accountable when they behave badly". (Notice I say "when" they behave badly and not "if" because we all behave badly eventually. And when those of us in power behave badly, it devastates people lives and even whole populations.)
In fact the purpose of government is to hold the private sector accountable, not to be the private sector. They suck at being the private sector. (Just take anything [housing, pools, bathrooms] and put the word "public" in front of it and you immediately see that thing as much less desirable... "public housing", "Public pools", "public bathrooms".. See what I mean?)
The best example in the difference in being able to hold these sectors accountable that I can think of is an Enron/HUD.
When corruption at Enron was exposed, the shareholders immediately responded, dumped the stock, the company folded in like a week, the principles were arrested and went to jail and the mere word Enron is synonymous with the worst of corporate culture. They are a pile of shameful ashes now.
Around the same time I saw a news piece that billions were missing from the department of Housing and Urban Development. Billions missing... just... missing.
"At the time we discontinued our audit work... An additional 242 adjustments totaling about $59.6 billion, were made to adjust fiscal year 1999 activity." Susan Gaffney HUD Inspector General US Dept of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) March 22, 2000
Never heard anything about it again. Have you ever heard of this?
Probably not.
They just noted it in their check book and kept going.
No one arrested, sued, on trial, HUD didn't fold, no one held accountable. Nothing.
That is the difference.
If the private sector defrauds the public, the government can (and must) step in check them
When the government defrauds the public, they public doesn't even know about it most of the time, IF you can find a whistle blower that is willing to risk their career to do the right thing, they are usually ignored, so many government palms have been greased or so many legislators are actually involved that hell if they are gonna call hearings on it, and the corruption and fraud runs rampant.
But they will hold hearing on steroid use in baseball players... boy howdy.
So no... no praise for the behaviors of some of these insurance companies and their spoiled, heartless CEOs who light cigars with the 100 dollar bills of dying little old ladies. But fix that system and hold them accountable, don't turn the system over to people who actually brought us the autism epidemic, who we can't even now hold accountable now for lying about their mere recommendations.
Is that a better explanation of where I am coming from?
2:12 PM
Anonymous said...
Ginger,
Excellent article and come back on Aaron.
I have said from the get go that Obama care was not a good thing for any of us most of all our children. I posted the following on my facebook account when I added your post:
"I have been saying NO to Obama Care from the get go. I never understood why our "leaders" within the autism community were so bent out of shape about our kids not being included in this law to kill legally. That is all Obama care is about killing the extremely young, the extremely old and the disabled LEGALLY."
This is Hannah Bevills, I am an editor with Hospital.com. We are a medical publication whose focus is geared towards promoting awareness on hospitals, including information, news, and reviews on them. Given the relevance of what you are offering from your site and what our mission is, I feel we may be able to collaborate in some way or another, I look forward to your response regarding the matter. Thanks!
Hi, listen, I'm pretty new on this blogosphere and Internet thing, so I don't know if there's a sort of "subscription" method that I can use Cheap Viagra Online in order to receive notifications of your new entries...? Thing is I enjoy reading your blog a lot and I'd like to be up to date with your posts!
4:58 PM
I have been largely opposed to HRC as is it is being proffered by Obama/Reid/Pelosi et. al. for several reasons, but until now, I have not taken a public stance on the current health care reform as I thought it was more of a personal opinion. Reading this article has changed my mind.
I am no fan of government health recommendations re: vaccine program. The destruction that this program has done and is doing is incalculable. Mostly because they won't allow it to be calculated. I can't imagine just how much destruction they could pull off if they went from merely recommending medical care to providing it. All medical care will become 'public health' and individual care will begin to breathe its last.
This health care bill needs to die.
And Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm's brother), the architect of Obama Care, needs to retire and take up golf. I am not even going to paraphrase him.... read his words for yourself and let the meaning of that for your child sink in.
And, if you are a child with disabilities, the government has already completely given up on you. Emanuel believes “services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” What’s worse, since he does not believe in “guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason,” once the public option puts the private sector out of business, these types of life-changing services for children will no longer exist. I don't think that he or his opinions should be going anywhere near actual human beings. I can only imagine how he would calculate the value of my precious child.
Posted By Sarah Durand On December 7, 2009 @ 12:00 am In . Column2 05, . Positioning, Health, Money, Politics, Science & Technology, US News | 54 Comments
Under the Democrats’ proposed health care reform legislation, we know that the government will have to determine some sort of rationing system in order to control costs. We are aware that part of the rationing will be absorbed in the discrimination that the bill inflicts upon the elderly; we know that it cuts $500 billion from Medicare [1]. What has remained puzzling is how exactly this rationing will be determined for the rest of us. Similarly elusive is how the new Health Benefits Advisory Committee will decide whether or not you get certain medical treatments, regardless of the opinion of your doctor. After all, how do you put a dollar value on a human life?
If you think there is no answer to that question, you are way behind the progressives. In fact, most countries with socialized medicine, including Britain, are already using a mathematical formula that expresses the numerical value of one year of a human life in a measurement called the QALY [2], or “quality-adjusted life year.” In terms of determining medical care, the mathematical formula of the QALY is based on both how much a treatment may lengthen your lifespan and the quality of the life you will be living.
Basically, if you are in optimal health, the QALY of one year of your life is 1.0. But if you have any underlying conditions, like asthma or muscular dystrophy, your QALY is much lower. Under the QALY system, the blind are worth less than those with sight, as those who can walk are worth more than those in wheelchairs. Sound like discrimination against persons with disabilities? It gets worse.
In a paper entitled “Cost-Effectiveness and Disability Discrimination [3],” the director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the Harvard Medical School, Dan Brock [4], argues “prioritizing health care resources by their relative cost-effectiveness can result in lower priority for the treatment of disabled persons than otherwise similar non-disabled persons.” He says that type of system not only “implies that disabled persons’ lives are of lesser value than those of non-disabled persons,” but it also “conflicts with equality of opportunity; it conflicts with fairness, which requires ignoring (some/most) differential impacts of treatment; it wrongly gives lower priority to disabled persons for equally effective treatment; it conflicts with giving all persons an equal chance to reach their full potential; and, it is in conflict with giving priority to the worse off.”
The “double jeopardy [5]” scenario that describes how the disabled are not only already suffering with an illness or disability, but are also given a lower priority of health care treatments to preserve or improve the quality of their lives, has been widely debated in countries with universal health care. It does little good to pass health care reform that restricts denying insurance to those with underlying conditions when treatment is still withheld from these individuals as an inherent flaw within the system.
As if that’s not bad enough, the health advisor to the president, Ezekiel Emanuel [6], is proposing a system even more deleterious. His system, similar to the QALY, is “the complete lives system [7],” which not only allows for discrimination against the elderly and disabled, but also targets the very young, i.e., our children.
Emanuel says of his system: “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”
Leave it to American progressives to take the QALY one step further by defining quality of life as how useful you are to society — that is, how likely you are to increase the government’s tax revenue, hence the emphasis on those between ages 15 and 40. Health care gets a lot cheaper by rationing care to all non-taxpayers.
According to Emanuel [8], “The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a two-month-old girl.” I doubt the parents of the two-month-old agree.
And, if you are a child with disabilities, the government has already completely given up on you. Emanuel believes [9] “services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” What’s worse, since he does not believe in “guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason,” once the public option puts the private sector out of business, these types of life-changing services for children will no longer exist.
Years of research in treating children with autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and dyslexia are in jeopardy of being rendered null and void. Years of progress in passing anti-discrimination laws may be undone in one single bill. Health care is a mess, but much of the mess is the government's fault in the first place. They have proven themselves completely corrupt in this area. They are not just in bed with Pharma, they are Pharma, as CDC holds its own vaccine patents. They are flat out saying that our kids are not valuable. I have decided to take them at their word. Which is really the only thing you can do as they have behaved as if our children had no value and were expendable since they took up the autism issue a few years back.
My predictions if this bill passes? Paul Offit put in charge of Autism treatment and full vaccination required to access any medical services. Plus any new vaccines that they decide to add on a whim.
Currently the only way we have to check the corrupt and useless garbage coming out of our public health service is with our feet. We can walk away and go to private docs who actually value our children and will TREAT THEM. If we give these bastards in public health more power to begin dictating who gets what services, we are cutting our own throats.
Health care has problems.... I have spent years documenting them, but letting the foxes run the hen house is not the solution.
NO, NO, NO on Health Care.
HELL NO.
UPDATE: Apparently Nancy Pelosi heard that I came out against her bill because only twenty minutes after I posted this, she pulled the plug on the public option.
"No to Obama's Health Care Reform - Not Just No... but Hell No"
5 Comments -
Ginger the private sector believes the same thing! Instead of government bureaucrats making decisions you have private for PROFIT bureaucrats making decisions about what is and is not a "medical benefit." That should be made clear. And Emmanuel's brother was taken out of context to my understanding. He is not the villain Faux news makes him out to be.
1:31 PM
AKA...
Can you point me toward the context that would make those quotes benign? Because I can't think of one that would make those words in that order mean anything other than what they seem to mean. I am open to your being right about the context thing... but it is really hard to see how.
And yes... much of the private sector does believe the same thing... however...
The private sector is much more easily held accountable. You can sue the private sector. You can walk away from an unethical business in the private sector. You can bring charges on the private sector.
We can do none of those things to the government officials who are currently and for a prolonged period of time, jacking our kids.
The question is not "which is more moral, the public or private sectors"... neither are because they are both populated by flawed human beings in positions of power, and as we know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The question is "which can be more quickly and effectively held accountable when they behave badly". (Notice I say "when" they behave badly and not "if" because we all behave badly eventually. And when those of us in power behave badly, it devastates people lives and even whole populations.)
In fact the purpose of government is to hold the private sector accountable, not to be the private sector. They suck at being the private sector. (Just take anything [housing, pools, bathrooms] and put the word "public" in front of it and you immediately see that thing as much less desirable... "public housing", "Public pools", "public bathrooms".. See what I mean?)
The best example in the difference in being able to hold these sectors accountable that I can think of is an Enron/HUD.
When corruption at Enron was exposed, the shareholders immediately responded, dumped the stock, the company folded in like a week, the principles were arrested and went to jail and the mere word Enron is synonymous with the worst of corporate culture. They are a pile of shameful ashes now.
Around the same time I saw a news piece that billions were missing from the department of Housing and Urban Development. Billions missing... just... missing.
"At the time we discontinued our audit work... An additional 242 adjustments totaling about $59.6 billion, were made to adjust fiscal year 1999 activity."
Susan Gaffney
HUD Inspector General
US Dept of Housing
& Urban Development (HUD)
March 22, 2000
Never heard anything about it again. Have you ever heard of this?
Probably not.
They just noted it in their check book and kept going.
No one arrested, sued, on trial, HUD didn't fold, no one held accountable. Nothing.
That is the difference.
If the private sector defrauds the public, the government can (and must) step in check them
When the government defrauds the public, they public doesn't even know about it most of the time, IF you can find a whistle blower that is willing to risk their career to do the right thing, they are usually ignored, so many government palms have been greased or so many legislators are actually involved that hell if they are gonna call hearings on it, and the corruption and fraud runs rampant.
But they will hold hearing on steroid use in baseball players... boy howdy.
So no... no praise for the behaviors of some of these insurance companies and their spoiled, heartless CEOs who light cigars with the 100 dollar bills of dying little old ladies. But fix that system and hold them accountable, don't turn the system over to people who actually brought us the autism epidemic, who we can't even now hold accountable now for lying about their mere recommendations.
Is that a better explanation of where I am coming from?
2:12 PM
Ginger,
Excellent article and come back on Aaron.
I have said from the get go that Obama care was not a good thing for any of us most of all our children. I posted the following on my facebook account when I added your post:
"I have been saying NO to Obama Care from the get go. I never understood why our "leaders" within the autism community were so bent out of shape about our kids not being included in this law to kill legally. That is all Obama care is about killing the extremely young, the extremely old and the disabled LEGALLY."
1:41 PM
This is Hannah Bevills, I am an editor with Hospital.com. We are a medical publication whose focus is geared towards promoting awareness on hospitals, including information, news, and reviews on them. Given the relevance of what you are offering from your site and what our mission is, I feel we may be able to collaborate in some way or another, I look forward to your response regarding the matter. Thanks!
Hannah Bevills
hannah.bevills@gmail.com
Hospital.com
2:21 PM
Hi, listen, I'm pretty new on this blogosphere and Internet thing, so I don't know if there's a sort of "subscription" method that I can use Cheap Viagra Online in order to receive notifications of your new entries...? Thing is I enjoy reading your blog a lot and I'd like to be up to date with your posts!
4:58 PM