The Washington Times recently took a look at the forced health care rationing in Chairman Max Baucus’s health care overhaul legislation:

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.

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Update: Several Republican Members of Congress are beginning to call the Democrats out over this. Congressman Dave Camp wants to know why the White House is censoring companies - especially while leaving supporters of the president’s plan alone. And Mitch McConnell is calling out Democratic colleague Max Baucus.

I’ve not had the chance to comment on this yet (except on Twitter), but the thuggish tactics of the Democrats in Washington are getting harder and harder to ignore. I’m prompted to the comment by the audacity of Senator Max Baucus and the HHS to start censoring political speech that they disagree with:

The Obama administration warned insurance companies Monday that they could face legal action for allegedly trying to scare seniors with misleading information about the potential for lost benefits under healthcare legislation in Congress.

“As we continue our research into this issue, we are instructing you to immediately discontinue all such mailings to beneficiaries and to remove any related materials directed to Medicare enrollees from your websites,” said a notice from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid…

In one case, the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees the agency, launched an investigation of Humana Inc. after getting a complaint from Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), a lawmaker usually viewed as a reliable ally of the insurance industry. Baucus also put together the Senate Finance Committee’s version of the healthcare bill.

So Baucus (and other Democrats) are pushing for a health care overhaul that depends on dramatic Medicare cuts to bring down the cost. The Medicare providers (the insurance companies) believe that taking hundreds of billions out of the system just might impact care for seniors - so they warn them of the fact. And rather than respect respect the right of companies to speak to their customers, or respect free speech generally, Democrats are turning to blackmail to shut these companies up.

But this isn’t the first time this has happened this year - not by a long shot:

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The last column Camille Paglia did for Salon was highly controversial, but the course of events on health care since her column has her vindicated. Here is the link to this months treat from Salon that is Paglia’s column, and last months column is linked to below:

“What a difference a month makes! When my last controversial column posted on Salon in the second week of August, most Democrats seemed frozen in suspended animation, not daring to criticize the Obama administration’s bungling of healthcare reform lest it give aid and comfort to the GOP. Well, that ice dam sure broke with a roar. Dissident Democrats found their voices, and by late August even the liberal lemmings of the mainstream media, from CBS to CNN, had drastically altered their tone of reportage, from priggish disdain of the town hall insurgency to frank admission of serious problems in the healthcare bills as well as of Obama’s declining national support.”

“But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have — from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)”

“By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done…”

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MediaCurves did a survey of television ads on Obamacare, and determined that the most effective anti-Obamacare ad is this one.

Here are some of the MediaCurve study results about this ad:

“A majority of all parties believe FRC anti-reform ad is effective….

A positive impact score among Democrats suggests that there is some, albeit modest, movement of Democrats away from the pro health care reform camp,” commented Glenn Kessler, president and CEO, HCD Research.

The majority of all parties reported that the FRC anti reform ad was effective, with 64% of Democrats, 81% of Republicans and 71% of Independents indicating that the ad was either extremely effective or somewhat effective. The top three emotions felt by Democrats while viewing the ad included “anger” (26%), “skepticism” (24%) and “disturbing” (20%). Republicans’ top emotions were “anger” (34%), “sadness” (22%) and “disturbing” (20%) and Independents top emotions were “anger” (28%), “disturbing” (26%) and “skepticism” (23%) while viewing the FRC ad.

And for those of you wondering at the power of the abortion/pro-life issue in this Obamacare debate: no other issue has as many NO Democratic votes as does putting abortion in the Obamacare bill.

According to the leading pro-life Democrat, there are 40 Democratic NO votes if taxpayer funded abortion remains in the Obamacare bills in the House and the Senate versions. And given the Democrats overwhelming support for abortion, there is no reason to assume that the Democrats will take abortion out of the bill.

In fact, there have been amendments offered in every House and Senate Committee that has considered the Obamacare bill, and every amendment to prohibit abortion as a benefit failed, in fact, one amendment on the House side guarantees that every American will have a choice of a plan with abortion coverage.

Yes, I know what the Politico article said.  But this is what is actually happening. Via Hot Air Headlines:

That spending has already begun, and its level is unprecedented, experts say, both in sheer volume and balance. According to data from the Campaign Media and Analysis Group, most of the ad spending this year has been to support initiatives pushed by Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.

“That has almost never been the case in any administration,” said Evan Tracey, CMAG’s chief operating officer.

Through mid-July, CMAG, which uses automated capture technologies to monitor the airwaves, identified $9.7 million supporting Obama’s recently unveiled health care plan, $4.7 million opposing it, and $19.7 million more in generalized spending by groups staking out positions either before Obama detailed his plan or not directly supporting or opposing it.

In other words, as the largely-imaginary deadline on passing a health care rationing bill looms, the Democratic party is planning to use the August recess to hammer at the opposition of… its own members.  Meanwhile, the Republican party is proving to be more than happy at reminding those members about why they’re in opposition in the first place; what makes it doubly entertaining is that, win or lose, tying ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative’ Democrats to health rationing will benefit the GOP in next year’s races.  As Jeff noted earlier, the American people are by and large not particularly upset with their personal level of care, and they are not going to enjoy having it taken over by the government. 

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If you haven’t, read Erick’s post about an Oregon public health plan (”public option”) administrator responding to a cancer patient’s request for subsidized chemotherapy with a denial of treatment but an offer to fund a physician-assisted suicide.

Now, know this: over the course of this decade, the state of Oregon has put in place a formal procedure for rationing care to patients whose health coverage is subsidized by government (i.e., who are enrolled in some form of the state’s “public option”). To date, they are the only government in the world to have formally done this, though many — from Britain to Canada to states here in the U.S. — work “cost-effectiveness” into their official denials of medical treatment.

After beginning the process of determining the cost-effectiveness (to the state) of hundreds of medical treatments and procedures in 2002, the Oregon Health Services Commission narrowed down the number they were willing to entertain offering coverage for to 680, ranked in order of state priority. This year — 2009 — the state will only reimburse physicians for performing procedures and offering treatments ranked in the top 503, in ascending order of priority.

Recipe for Denial of Care

WHAT THIS MEANS, of course, is that a patient enrolled in the “public option” who was in need of a treatment or procedure the commission decided to rank 503rd or below in priority would be ineligible for that procedure — period. Further, state bureaucrats balancing Oregon’s figurative checkbook could decide that the Beaver State only had enough health care dollars to fund some of the procedures on the list. This is where the prioritization comes in: under the state’s rationing procedure, a person in need of an emergency appendectomy (prioritized 84th by the the state of Oregon) would be denied that treatment before an individual in need of treatment for “tobacco dependence” (ranked 6th).

Does that sound a bit perverse to you? How about this: the state rationing board ranked abortion 41st overall in state-funding priority, meaning the bureaucrats who designed the priority structure in this “public option” program determined that the use of taxpayer funds for abortion is more important (and more medically necessary) than covering injuries to major blood vessels (ranked 86th), surgery to repair injured internal organs (88th), a “deep wound to the neck” or open fracture of the larynx or trachea (91st), or a ruptured aortic aneurysm (306th).

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The wonderfully indicting video of New Hampshire Democrat Carol Shea-Porter is below, courtesy of NowHampshire:

She says:

“I just wanted to make a couple of comments and say I heard one of my colleagues say ‘waiting in line’ — that people would be ‘waiting in line for medical care,’ and I would like to say that many of my constituents would love to wait in line for medical care.”

And folks like Obama, Shea-Porter, and the rest of the Capitol Hill Democrats wonder why their health care overhaul proposal is growing less popular among the American population by the day?
As Adam Bitely says at NetRightNation:

With news that the Senate will not be considering Health Care legislation until after the August recess, Shea-Porter will now be able to spend a nice month in New Hampshire where she will surely be getting the good treatment that she deserves for making comments like this below

A series of recent polls showing that his health care proposal has fallen out of favor with a plurality of the American people, and that a majority are no longer predisposed to support a “universal” health care plan as they were before finding out that such a sweeping program would cost them money, has caused President Barack Obama to shift the focus of his health care overhaul evangelism.

Cast for the duration of his presidential campaign and the first six months of his presidency as a solution to the no-longer ignorable “crisis” of the 45 million American uninsured, Obama abruptly abandoned so-called “universal coverage” as the raison d’être for his single-minded pursuit of a health care overhaul, deciding instead to focus on the cost of health care for all, insured or not.

Obamacare Falling Out of Favor

On July 13, Rasmussen Reports released a poll showing that more people (49 percent) opposed Obama’s health care proposal than favored it (46 percent) – the first time a major poll had produced this result. Further, according to a Rasmussen poll published July 18, 61 percent of Americans believe high costs are the biggest problem the nation’s health care system is currently facing. By contrast, only 21 percent had a lack of so-called “universal coverage” as their chief concern. 10 percent cited quality as the biggest problem with the health care system, and 2 percent said inconvenience in getting care.

These poll results seem to show that our health care system really isn’t in as much trouble as some would like us to think it is. After all, if the cost of lifesaving health treatments, rather than the quality of those treatments and access to them, is the biggest worry of a population, things just aren’t so bad, no matter what demagogues in Washington may say.

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Update by Jeff: Perhaps this comment will shine a bit more light on the import of this issue.

WHO SHOULD HAVE CONTROL over your medical care: your family doctor, or a bureaucrat you’ve never met whose sole job is to look out for the government’s financial bottom-line?

That question, which is the subject of today’s AOL Hot Seat poll, is being debated in court right now, as three states are currently seeking a ruling from a federal judge that the final say in an individual’s medical treatment lies with the government, not with that patient’s doctor.

In March, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama joined in an appeal of a 2008 U.S. District Court ruling that a patient’s physician was better positioned – and better qualified – to make decisions about that patient’s medical treatment than state bureaucrats.

The case centers on Callie Moore, a disabled teenage girl living in Georgia. A stroke Callie suffered in utero left her suffering from multiple conditions, including cerebral palsy and mental retardation. For the last decade, she has received around-the-clock in-home nursing care for her medical conditions.

IN 2007, THOUGH, the state of Georgia cut coverage of Callie’s in-home care by 15%, from 94 hours a week to 84 over the objections of her attending physician, who was intimately familiar with her case and her needs. State officials (who were not medical professionals) cited disagreement with the attending physician about just how much care Callie needed as the primary reason for this reduction in care.

Callie’s mother filed suit in 2007, arguing that the state had no right to contradict the orders of her personal physician and limit her treatment. However, because Callie receives her medical treatment under Medicaid, the joint federal-state administered health coverage program for low-income individuals and families, Georgia officials argued that Callie’s care was subject to rationing, as state bureaucrats’ need to ensure Medicaid resources were allocated “fairly” superseded her doctor’s care prescription or her personal medical needs.

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Betsy McCaughey has the goods on the Obama Administration’s efforts to establish a cookie-cutter approach to health care that will entail rationing, especially for seniors who, according to the Administration’s plans, have to be prepared to accept “the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.” In addition, according to the Administration’s policy designs–designs that were written into the language of the stimulus plan by Tom Daschle before his tax cheatin’ heart conspired to include him out of the Administration–we ought to be prepared to accept what Daschle calls “hopeless diagnoses” and as a consequence, “forgo experimental treatments.”

It isn’t often that I run across a set of policies that are positively ghoulish. But thanks to the Administration’s stimulus package, I have. If there were more time to consider the package and debate all of its particulars in detail, perhaps more people would have taken notice of these frightening health care provisions and enough support could have been ginned up to stop this flawed and inhumane package dead in its tracks.

But of course, the Administration will have none of that. Better–from its standpoint–to bully Congress and the public into accepting a flawed stimulus package than to allow its legislative proposals to be exposed and picked apart–as they surely would be. Add to this lack of transparency the decision by the President to break his promise and not allow legislation submitted to him to remain on the Internet for the public to examine and you have an Administration that is just as secretive as it claimed the Bush Administration was.

The Administration’s supporters can start calling shenanigans on this behavior any time now. I mean, presumably, they don’t like it when anyone undermines governmental transparency. Right?