Commenter LCB sent me this very popular article from the UK Telegraph. This article is their most popular article as of Sunday. (ECM also sent it)
The title is “Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections”.
Excerpt:
The Government’s drug rationing watchdog says “therapeutic” injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.
Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.
Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment.
The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million.
Why did the government decide that accupuncture and osteopathy were more effective than painkillers? Was it because of research findings? Or was it due to the influence of alternative medicine lobbyists?
The NICE guidelines admit that evidence was limited for many back pain treatments, including those it recommended. Where scientific proof was lacking, advice was instead taken from its expert group. But specialists are furious that while the group included practitioners of alternative therapies, there was no one with expertise in conventional pain relief medicine to argue against a decision to significantly restrict its use.
Doctors don’t like it at all, but government-run health care means government-run health care.
Dr Jonathan Richardson, a consultant pain specialist from Bradford Hospitals Trust, is among more than 50 medics who have written to NICE urging the body to reconsider its decision, which was taken in May.
He said: “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients. It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate.”
…Anger among medics has reached such levels that Dr Paul Watson, a physiotherapist who helped draft the guidelines, was last week forced to resign as President of the British Pain Society.
So much for the “public” option. It should be called the “rationing” option.
Democrats and President Obama have denied that the creation of a new government-run health care plan would be a Trojan Horse for single-payer health care, but a new report by the Lewin Group (comissioned by the Heritage Foundation) finds that the House Democrats’ health care bill would shift more 83.4 million Americans from private health care coverage to the government plan. To put that in perspective, that would mean that nearly half (48.4 percent) would lose their private health coverage. In all, the government plan would have 103.4 million members once implemented, according to the Lewin analysis. President Obama has repeated the mantra that anybody who likes their health insurance plan can keep it, but in reality about 63 percent of covered Americans get their health care through their employers, and if employers decide to drop their current health plans in favor of the government plan, workers won’t have any choice but to sign up.
The reason for the dramatic shift is that the Lewin Group has anticipated that with government setting lower reimbursement rates for doctors, hospitals and other health care providers, the government plan will offer lower premiums than private plans. However, the flip side is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates providers will lose $361.9 billion in revenue over the next decade if the House bill is passed. That will mean lower quality of care, shortages in doctors and hospitals, and/or increased shifting of costs on to those with private health care. Should further cost-shifting occur, it will then in turn erode private health care coverage even more dramatically.
He’s a socialist. He wanted single-payer health care. He wants to control whether you can buy medical services. He wants to confiscate your earned income that you want to use to pay for your prostate cancer treatment, and he wants to spend it on someone else’s elective abortion. Understand?
These video clips feature one of the conservatives I like, Senator Tom Coburn! (H/T Club for Growth)
Tom Coburn is a medical doctor, and ran a medical business. He gives you the inside view of why American health care needs changing, and why big government socialism is not the answer. This is not just a lesson in health care. Listen closely – this is a lesson in economics, and it shows the vision of free-market capitalism, liberty and personal responsibility that drives the policies of the right-wing.
Part 1:
Part 2:
And here is Ronald Reagan talking about the loss of liberty that follows when a country adopts socialized medicine. (H/T Club for Growth)
This is the easiest way to learn about health care policy.
Note: If you prefer to learn about socialized vs consumer-driven health care with podcasts, click here.
More details from a think tank
Here is a comprehensive treatment of the problems of health care today, and the right way to reform it. This article by the founder of the Heritage Foundation, Edwin Feulner, Ph.D., is so long that it is exactly the kind of thing that lefties like commenter Jerry won’t have the patience to read! This is the best thing to read in this post if you can only read one thing.
Here is are some of the myths he corrects:
If you like your health care package you can keep it
“…a public plan will lead many employers to drop private health coverage for their workers and dump them into the public plan… According to independent analyses, as many as 119 million Americans could end up in a public plan….”
The end goal is not a single payer system
“…The “single payer” here is Uncle Sam, using taxpayers’ money, and not just paying the bills but calling the shots and deciding what care every American will get—or not get….”
The end goal is not a single payer system
“…Congress’s own watchdog–have issued preliminary estimates that the cost could be high as $2 trillion over 10 years, with most of that borrowed money…”
The quality of your health care will get better
“…Medicare has huge gaps in coverage. Medicaid’s quality is notoriously bad. They both offer substandard care compared to most private insurance plans…”
And of course his letter also gives conservative solutions to the problem of rising health care costs. The Heritage Foundation is my favorite think tank. Conservative across the board – not just on fiscal issues.
James Demint
And conservatives like James Demint are getting this message out to the public, too.
Sen. James Demint
Here is Senator Demint’s article in Forbes magazine. He answers the question: “What is the cause of our current health care problems? Is it the free market? Or is it government intervention into the free market?”
Excerpt:
…Washington politicians make it hard for individuals to own their own health insurance policies. Government gives tax benefits to businesses to provide group health plans to employees, but offers no such tax benefit to individuals who try to buy their own plan for themselves or their family. Government prevents consumers from shopping for better plans across state lines, which limits competition and drives up prices. Government health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid pay doctors and hospitals less than the full value of their services, and the difference gets priced into the higher premiums paid by people who do have insurance.
In other words, politicians deliberately restrict consumer choice, drive up prices, underpay doctors and hinder both access and portability. Then they turn around, blame the free market for the health care crisis and say the only way to save the system is a government takeover of health insurance in the form of a so-called “public option.”
And he’s goes on to explain conservative solutions to the problem of rising health care costs. A great article from one of my favorite conservatives.
The real costs of Obama’s plan
Keith Hennessey has an analysis of the costs of Obama’s new government-controlled, rationed health care plan. You may have heard that the CBO has issued an estimate about the costs of Obama’s plan: 1 Trilliion over 10 years. Keith says that the number is actually closer to 1.3 trillion.
Health care subsidies over 6 years
Keith took at closer look at the CBO’s 1 Trillion estimate, which includes only ONE area where money will need to be spent (subsidies for the poor). He found that many items in the Democrats’ health care bill were not included in the CBO estimate!
Excerpt:
The budgetary effects of neither the individual mandate nor the employer mandate are included in this score. I think CBO will find these provisions would raise revenues for the government and reduce the deficit. While the leaked draft of Kennedy-Dodd was specific about the employer mandate, the official version has just the placeholder language, “Policy under discussion.” Both mandates leave wide discretion for the Secretaries of Treasury and HHS to create a level and structure of taxation “to accomplish the goal of enhancing participation in qualifying coverage.” It is extremely difficult for CBO and their tax counterparts, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) staff, to estimate something like this.
The estimate does not include the budgetary cost of expanding Medicaid to childless adults with income below 150% of the poverty line. I expect that this will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost over the next decade.
It does not include the requirement that health plans define “children” as dependents up to age 27. I expect this will raise costs.
It does not include the effects of the Medical Advisory Council’s ability to define benefits, or the requirements that plans rebate premiums to the insured. I think this too will raise costs.
It does not include the budget effect of having a “public plan option.”
There are a bunch of other programs in the bill, including a new disability program and lots of new public health programs.
Keith will be posting more articles on his blog as he calculates the real costs of Obama’s plan.
Obama thinks that you are more satisfied with the service at your local DMV than you are with Amazon.com. And he plans to make sure that you are dealing with government bureaucrats, not with private businesses, when you need health care. Who gives you better service? The government, that isn’t trying to compete with anyone to meet your needs? Or private businesses, which do need to compete to earn your business?
Further study
You can watch some videos containing horror stories from countries that have adopted single-payer health care, too.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
