While Joe, the gaffe, Biden goes around telling his mother and other seniors that there are no Death Panels in the health care bills currently under review, apparently, unbeknown to him (and there is a lot that seems to be unknown to Biden), the Baucus health care bill does contain a provision that will inevitably lead to deaths of older Americans
The Washington Times has an editorial talking about the new death panel provision added to the Baucus health care bill. This is in addition to the already existing panel of bureaucrats who will decide who will get treated and who won’t.
The offending provision is on Pages 80-81 of the unamended Baucus bill, hidden amid a lot of similar legislative mumbo-jumbo about Medicare payments to doctors. The key sentence: "Beginning in 2015, payment would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization." Translated into plain English, it means that in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent.
Forget results. This provision makes no account for the results of care, its quality or even its efficiency. It just says that if a doctor authorizes expensive care, no matter how successfully, the government will punish him by scrimping on what already is a low reimbursement rate for treating Medicare patients. The incentive, therefore, is for the doctor always to provide less care for his patients for fear of having his payments docked. And because no doctor will know who falls in the top 10 percent until year's end, or what total average costs will break the 10 percent threshold, the pressure will be intense to withhold care, and withhold care again, and then withhold it some more. Or at least to prescribe cheaper care, no matter how much less effective, in order to avoid the penalties.
The National Right to Life Committee concludes that this provision will cause a "death spiral" by "ensur[ing] that doctors are forced to ration care for their senior citizen patients." Every 10th doctor in the country will fall victim to it. Libertarian columnist Nat Hentoff calls the provision "insidious" and writes that "the nature of our final exit" will be very much at risk.
Now, I cannot believe that the current illustrious leaders of our country, along with the mainstream media, are so simplistic that they think there are no death panels in the health care bill because nowhere can you find the exact term Death Panel.
Let’s see, that would be like saying there was never an iron curtain because there was not actually a curtain made of iron hanging down in Eastern Europe. Ridiculous! Iron Curtain? Show me where it is hanging. Also, there is no such thing as a banana republic because there is no sign down there in Venezuela or Nicaragua or any of those former, or is it current, banana republics that announce that you are now entering a banana republic. And hey, what’s a baby boomer? I don’t see anyone with a sign around their neck or with a birth certificate announcing they are a baby boomer.
No, I would call it selective blindness.
I hope Mrs. Joe Biden’s Mother continues to ask tough questions of her son about health care for seniors. I hope she pulls out the Baucus bill and asks him about this new provision that will force doctors to cut their services to seniors like herself. Don’t let him off the hook, mom!
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