Health Wars (8/24/09)

A sneak preview of BarryCare's "death panels" - in book form, distributed to....one of the Left's favorite demonizable demographics:

Evidently, "supporting the troops" includes "doctors hav[ing] to discuss end-of-life decisions when veterans are confined to wheelchairs or have emotional and financial issues, [not just] in cases of irreversible comas or the like.  Sounds like the Obamunists can't liquidate America's injured and disabled veterans bend the V.A.'s cost curve fast enough.

Oh, yes, I know Tammy Duckworth is a wounded vet herself - which makes her defense of this predation on those who have sacrificed so much for the freedom we pissed away last November all the more infuriating.

Following the Towey-Duckworth segment Chris Wallace did to Snarlin' Arlen Specter what would never happen to a Democrat anywhere else - submarined him with a question on the VA death book that wasn't in the script:

He praises the betraying ghoul Duckworth in one breath and calls for a senate investigation in the next.  Sounds like the soon-to-be former senator from Pennsylvania is as confused as ever.  The eye tic he got when Chris Wallace introduced him as a "newly minted Democrat" was a dead giveaway.

Looks like Duckworth was softening up the next battalion of wounded vets for their hemlocking:

At least 1,200 veterans across the country have been mistakenly told by the Veterans Administration that they suffer from a fatal neurological disease.

One of the leaders of a Gulf War veterans group says panicked veterans from Alabama, Florida, Kansas, North Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming have contacted the group about the error.

Denise Nichols, the vice president of the National Gulf War Resource Center, says the VA is blaming a coding error for the mistake.

Kinda reminiscent of the Clinton administration, isn't it?  "Coding errors," "mistakes were made," "Whooops!"  And if this little "error" made twelve hundred more vets prime fodder for "end of life discussions," well, that's just pure coincidence, I'm sure.

The notifications went out in a letter intending to inform ALS sufferers about the benefits available to them through the VA.  At that time, one of those benefits was end-of-life counseling and access to Your Life, Your Choices, the booklet that refers veterans to the Hemlock Society when they feel life is no longer worth living.  I wonder how many of these veterans were given the booklet?

Yep, just burp-in-the-universe bad luck.  No foolin'.  C'mon, would the ever-more-popular Red Barry lie to you?

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In other news, unconfirmed rumors had Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Allegedly) sighted briefly yesterday by telephone.  Or maybe she briefly phased back into our space-time continuum in order to update her milk carton picture.

Further bulletins if anybody is enough of a masochist to want to sit through more Donk BS.

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BarryCare counts for a large chunk of its funding on gutting Medicare to the tune of over half a trillion smackers over the next decade.  Dick Morris, being at least one of the political strategists behind Mediscare thirteen years ago, instantly recognized the opportunity Barack Obama is foolishly providing the GOP and bellowed it from the rooftops.

The Man of Steele was paying attention:

Republicans want reform that should, first, do no harm, especially to our seniors. That is why Republicans support a Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights, which we are introducing today, to ensure that our greatest generation will receive access to quality health care. We also believe that any health-care reform should be fully paid for, but not funded on the backs of our nation’s senior citizens.

The Republican Party’s contract with seniors includes tenets that Americans, regardless of political party, should support. First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of “health-insurance reform.” As the president frequently, and correctly, points out, Medicare will go deep into the red in less than a decade. But he and congressional Democrats are planning to raid, not aid, Medicare by cutting $500 billion from the program to fund his health-care experiment. The president also plans to cut hospital payments and Medicare Advantage, all of which will mean fewer treatment options for seniors. These types of “reforms” don’t make sense for the future of an already troubled federal program or for the services it provides that millions of Americans count on.

Hey, turnabout is fair play.  What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  What goes around comes around.  And any other tit-for-tat metaphor you can think of.  Why should Dems get to seize a monopoly over a sixth of the U.S. economy and maintain the monopoly they've enjoyed for three quarters of a century on using the elderly as partisan dobermans?  Taking down the Left's six-legged coalition stool is the name of the game, particularly as overextended as the Donks are now.  Besides, if the positions were switched, you KNOW they'd do it to us.

Yeah, it's not a gambit without a few boomerangs - but it's still worth it, given the stakes:

[T]he more lip service Republicans pay to Medicare now, the less room they have to maneuver later when Medicare’s rapidly approaching day of reckoning finally arrives. Has Steele conceded too much in trying to derail the Hopenchange express?

I’m leaning towards no just because the GOP’s fingerprints are already on the program and once it runs dry the crisis will be severe enough that even Democrats will be forced to support drastic measures, leaving them in a poor position to screech about Republicans selling out grandma....

Actually, I think the fact that the head of the RNC’s been reduced to taking this position at all proves the necessity of stopping ObamaCare now, even if it means a Faustian bargain. Such is the British dependency on universal health care that even Tory leader David Cameron is forced to regularly reassure Britons that conservatives “support the NHS 100%.” We’ll be hearing the same thing — or worse — from Republican presidential candidates about ObamaCare within a decade if America chokes down this crap sandwich. Do what you have to do to hold the line.

Three thoughts:

(1) Dems will "screech about Republicans selling out grandma" in inverse proportion to the power they wield over the federal government; if they're in charge when Medicare goes tits-up, they'll just quietly send out letters to everybody over the age of, say, sixty ordering them to report to the nearest federal "end of life" center for "processing".

(2) It speaks to how far America has fallen into Marxism already that the biggest step to date towards socialized medicine is our last line of defense against falling the rest of the way into that abyss.  Even if Republicans are successful in "holding the line," it pretty much guarantees we'll never be able to advance forward from it.  And in 2024, as every sixteenth year before it going back to 1960, another "young, dynamic, charismatic" Donk will come out of nowhere to take the country by storm, make the Enemy Media orgasm collectively, and sweep to the White House, where the whole damn thing will rise like Jason anew, its time come 'round yet again.

And you know what they say about third times.

(3) Why didn't False Messiah just leave Medicare alone and raise the $1.0 trillion $1.6 trillion $2.0 trillion solely through ruinous, economy-destroying tax increases?  "Fiscal responsibility"?

On the other hand, Republicans may simply be operating in the political landscape We, The People inflicted upon them:

I hate to be gloomy on this front, but the voters effectively killed most serious entitlement-reform options last November. Sure, Obama makes noises on this front every couple of weeks, but if there's one hallmark of this young administration, it's been its difficulty summoning the will to say "no" on spending. An administration that pats itself on the back for cutting $100 million in meetings in Australia and office renovations isn't likely to have the will to tell Americans that their benefit checks will be getting smaller. The president is burning through his political capital with great speed; the health-care fight will probably use every last drop. Card check, illegal-immigration amnesty, cap-and-trade, Afghanistan . . . does anyone see this administration going all-out to, say, reduce Social Security benefits or limit who can collect it?

Funny J-Ger should pose that particular question.

Bottom line:

[A] public that worries about long-term economic consequences doesn't elect guys like Barack Obama.

All too true.  Of course, when was the last time the public worried about long-term economic consequences?  When has it ever?  And if it's happening now, hasn't that die pretty much already been cast?

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Once again, the difference between health care reform and health care cleansing: thirty-five to forty million human shields.