Overnight Open Thread: Something to Think About When the Topic of Socialized Medicine Comes Up


A good ad from Rick Scott’s gang:

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Do bear in mind that Tom Daschle, who has returned to lobbying for a living, is still guiding “anti-lobbyist” President Barack Obama on health care “reform” even though his tax evasion lost him the spot of HHS chief and White House health care czar. Do also bear in mind that Daschle wrote in his book that Britain’s national health service is a system America should aspire to.

Then do the math.


Daschle’s revenge?


They cast him out. They mocked his greatness. They laughed at him. HIM! But he'll show them!

He’ll show them all.

This is one time where excerpting isn’t going to cut it: let me summarize this article (”Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan: Betsy McCaughey*“) (H/T: AoSHQ) and then you can go read both it and the soon-to-be-federal law (here is the original, and here is the Nelson/Collins amendment).  Essentially, McCaughey argues that the bill contains stealth provisions within it that will create a bureaucratic commission that will regulate acceptable medical treatments for patients.  She then states that these provisions are “virtually identical” with those in Daschle’s book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, which supposedly advocates adopting a system where “approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit.”  In other words: the older you get, the cheaper your treatment has to be in order to get the same consideration as someone younger than you.  A helpful reminder of the bureaucratic wonders that can breed in the British health care system, and a suggestion that Daschle snuck this in deliberately because of his experiences with Clinton’s health care fiasco, and away we go.

So, is it nonsense?

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