The Senate had a flurry of voting on amendments to the Budget Bill yesterday, including one extremely important vote that could have helped to stop government rationing of medical care.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) offered an amendment , SA 793, that would have thrown a big roadblock in the way of any plans for government rationing through “Comparative Effectiveness Research,” or CER.
The stimulus bill passed with $1.1 billion allocated for CER to compare the clinical outcomes, effectiveness, and appropriateness” of medical services. That money sets the stage for a health rationing bureaucracy.
Yesterday on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Kyl and his colleague Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) expressed their concern that CER would be used to justify rationing by comparing costs, rather than effectiveness. Sen. Roberts compared it to giving away the “golden ring” to bureaucrats.
The language of Sen. Kyl’s amendment was simple: it would have prohibited the government from denying care to patients just to save money based on CER studies.
This is just the start of socialized medicine and more of the socialist philosophies of our current president.
Patients, not derived data metrics,
best judge the value of visits to us physicians.
Like banking collapse from derivatives, medical care judged from codes (derivatives) will collapse.
Failures of Pay 4 Performance were noted by
Groopman and Hartzband (wsj 4/8/09 Opinion):
failures to reduce hospital infections, diabetic
deaths, knee replacement complications or heart failure.
Also, physicians avoided difficult cases.
Success is in consumer-directed care, with HSAs prefunding office visits. 6+ M USA subscribers, double every 2 years despite insurer and gov. obstructions.
Do you like the post office which has gone broke despite continuously raising prices for mail? Do you think that it is appropriate for 33% of healthcare costs to be related to processing, reviewing and repealing claims?
Don’t you think that one third of the cost which is now lost to administering healthcare would be better spent on actual healthcare? Does it make sense to charge $100 for a service only to have the cost cut to $59 or completely rejected by someone in a Medicare office who is ‘only following the rules’?
Granted there must be oversite of healthcare, but it gets VERY tiring when we are faced with defending our medical decisions because of regulations. Get ready for the worst which is yet to come.
Government regulation of healthcare has led us to Medicare approved reimbursement, with decisions being made by high school graduates who are not physicians. We took an oath to provide service to our patients. Most of us do it in a conscientious manner. I don’t know many colleagues who don’t work very hard for a living. We take calls when we are not on call, we make decisions for which we may be sued and are at the mercy of our government to determine ‘Medical Necessity’.
The healthcare reform which may be coming is likely to be worse than the U.S. postal service-gone broke. Please let physicians be physicians and patient advocates, and make the decisions which are best for our patients. Help us to provide the medical care yet not be burdened by frivilous lawsuits, and the paperwork which is likely to consume even more of our time and resources.