Death to the Death Panel - Maybe

Finally, it looks like the "death panel" might die.  This is from today's Daily Signal:

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=482733621165398840#editor/target=post;postID=8870181689740650422

For additional background on the Independent Payment Advisory Board, also known as the "death panel," see the earlier blog posts on the subject:

https://wwwpopblogger.blogspot.com/search?q=death+panel

Death Panels: Time to Believe

If you just can't bring yourself to believe in "Death Panels," you have to read this post on the Catholic Fire Blog today.

Be sure to watch the video of Amelia, who, after a groundswell of support, might now be reconsidered by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) for a transplant.

More on The Death Panel Known as The Independent Payment Advisory Board

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Back in April of this year we posted this piece written by Stanley Kurtz on National Review Online.

Yesterday, Kathryn Nix of The Heritage Foundation posted this piece on The Foundry (the Heritage Blog). The following is from the Nix piece:

This week, the House Budget Committee and Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings to examine the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a board of unelected bureaucrats tasked under Obamacare to reduce the growth in Medicare spending.

During the Budget Committee hearing, Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, described the board:

[T]he IPAB is unprecedented in the power given to unelected officials to direct hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending. The IPAB will give unelected, unaccountable government appointees the power to make decisions about payment policy in Medicare that will ultimately determine whether millions of seniors have access to the care they need. This challenges the very principles of representative democracy and consent of the governed.

If, after reading both links to this post, someone tells you the IPAB is not a Death Panel, the appropriate response would be: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

What's The Independent Payment Advisory Board? It's a Death Panel!

Stanley Kurtz, writing on The Corner on National Review Online:

They’re back. Rationing, death panels, socialism, all those nasty old words that helped bring Republicans victory in 2010, and that came to seem so impolite after November of that year. They’re back because of IPAB. Remember that acronym. It stand for The Independent Payment Advisory Board. IPAB is the real death panel, the true seat of rationing, and the royal road to health-care socialism. President Obama won’t admit to any of that, but his speech in response to Paul Ryan’s plan did push IPAB out of the shadows and into public view, however briefly.

In his speech on the deficit, Obama pointed to IPAB as an answer to Paul Ryan’s plan. In Ryan’s vision, competition among insurers will force efficiencies and lower prices. Under Obama’s plan, in contrast, health-care prices for the elderly would be controlled by IPAB. Ryan’s plan puts consumers in the driver’s seat, but also exposes them to the risk of bad choices and limited subsidies. While Obama’s plan offers government-guaranteed care, IPAB’s price controls will lead to one-size-fits-all rationing. As IPAB caps Medicare payments for various services, the elderly will be unable to obtain many kinds of care, or will experience de facto rationing via long treatment delays and sharp declines in the quality of care. And by the way, IPAB rationing will hit many current seniors, whereas Ryan’s reform of Medicare will never affect anyone now 55 or older.
Rationing, death panels, socialism, and deception. It’s all there. When Sarah Palin first raised the “death panel” issue, she was referring to end-of-life counseling. But IPAB is the real death panel (as Palin herself later noted), a body of unelected bureaucrats with the power to cut off care through arbitrary rules based on one-size-fits-all cost calculations, just as in Britain. IPAB is the key to socialized, single-payer health-care, which is and has always been Obama’s ultimate goal.
Click below to read the entire post by Stanley Kurtz.

IPAB, Obama, and Socialism - By Stanley Kurtz - The Corner - National Review Online

Death Panels by Fiat: Thomas Sowell

Dr. Thomas Sowell writes today on National Review Online about "Political End-Runs." The Constitution of the United States begins with the words “We the people.” But neither the Constitution nor “we the people” will mean anything if politicians and judges can continue to do end-runs around both.

Bills passed too fast for anyone to read them are blatant examples of these end-runs. But last week, another end-run appeared in a different institution when the medical “end of life consultations” rejected by Congress were quietly enacted by administrators of Medicare through bureaucratic fiat...

The denigration of the Constitution began during the Progressive era of the early 20th century, led by such luminaries as Princeton scholar and future president Woodrow Wilson, future Harvard Law School dean Roscoe Pound, and future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis.

As a professor at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson wrote condescendingly of “the simple days of 1787” when the Constitution was written and how, in our presumably more complex times, “each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day.”

One is anxious to inquire: Just whose "needs of the day" did Wilson (and his Progressive progeny) have in mind?

You can read Dr. Sowell's essay by clicking on the link below.

Political End-Runs - Thomas Sowell - National Review Online

And for more on Death Panels, go here and here.

Death Panels are Real - and Here.

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"No man is an island, entire of itself ... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

John Donne (1572-1631)

Those of us who are dying of cancer did not (as did homosexuals demanding to serve OPENLY in the military) get good news this week.

Peter Ferrara, writing in The American Spectator yesterday gave us the bad news about the undeniability of the existence of death panels.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked its regulatory approval of the drug Avastin to treat late stage, metastatic breast cancer. Each year, the practicing oncologists chosen by 17,500 American women to save them from their life-threatening, heavily progressed cancer prescribe Avastin to treat them.

The FDA explained that it was revoking approval of the drug for that use because it decided that the drug does not provide "a sufficient benefit in slowing disease progression to outweigh the significant risk to patients." Risk? The drug is prescribed for women who are otherwise going to die from cancer unless the drug saves them at least for a time. The far greater risk to these women is from the FDA, not the drug.

As The Wall Street Journal said last Friday in response to the FDA's explanation:
Ponder that [word] "sufficient." The agency is substituting its own judgment about clinical meaningfulness for those of practicing oncologists and terminally ill cancer patients.

That FDA judgment was determined last summer by an internal agency panel of 13 experts, only two of whom were breast cancer oncologists, and none of whom were breast cancer patients.

Ferrara goes on to recount the plight of a Mrs. Turnage, who could possibly be the first victim of Obamacare's Death Panels. The rest of us have to wonder when our drugs will be deemed by the FDA's "internal agency panel of experts" to not provide "a sufficient benefit in slowing disease progression to outweigh the significant risk to patients."

For a previous post on Death Panels, go here.

Nat Hentoff: Real Death Panels Are Coming

Nat Hentoff, one of our most prolific writers exposes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who had been writing columns calling those (Sarah Palin, most prominently) who were talking about "death panels" in Obamacare, part of "the lunatic fringe."

Hentoff quotes Krugman from his appearance on ABC's This Week, on November 14th: "Some years down the pike," he said, "we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes." That would mean the U.S. Debt Reduction Commission "should have endorsed the panel that was part of the [Obama] health care reform."

When Krugman realized later what he had said on TV, he attempted to spin his remarks by writing on his Blog: "What I meant is that health care costs will have to be controlled, which will surely require having Medicare and Medicaid decide what they're willing to pay for — not really death panels, of course, but consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much we're willing to spend for extreme care."

Krugman did not further define what he meant by "extreme care."

You can read the full Hentoff piece on the website of the Cato Institute.