Death Panels. Yeah, I said it....

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn recently suggested that seniors will die sooner if Congress passes the medicare cuts in the health care bill. He has gotten all kinds of grief about that from the left, but I think they may have forgotten that Coburn was a practicing physician for 25 years. I think he knows how Doctors see things. He explains in a piece at the WSJ today (emphasis mine):

Doctors respond to government coercion instead of patient cues, and patients die prematurely. Even if the public option is eliminated from the bill, these onerous rationing provisions will remain intact.

For instance, the Reid bill (in sections 3403 and 2021) explicitly empowers Medicare to deny treatment based on cost. An Independent Medicare Advisory Board created by the bill—composed of permanent, unelected and, therefore, unaccountable members—will greatly expand the rationing practices that already occur in the program. Medicare, for example, has limited cancer patients' access to Epogen, a costly but vital drug that stimulates red blood cell production. It has limited the use of virtual, and safer, colonoscopies due to cost concerns. And Medicare refuses medical claims at twice the rate of the largest private insurers.

Let's see... an independent Medicare Advisory Board that decides rationing practices. Gosh, that sounds like a...(dare I say it?)..a death panel. Sure it's hyperbolic, but it's certainly true. This panel will limit access to certain procedures and/or drugs based on such things as cost concerns, and some seniors will die sooner. Sarah Palin was right, and any honest person looking at that part of the bill would admit that she was indeed.

But this "death panel" won't just affect seniors. We are all at risk. Coburn points out that the health care bill explicitly states that health insurance plans "shall provide coverage for" services approved by the U.S Preventive Services Task Force. You may have heard of them lately. They are the ones responsible for advising women under 50 not to have mammograms. So in a world where this health bill is implemented and those guidelines for mammograms accepted for example, health insurance plans wouldn't cover mammograms for women under 50. That saves money for them for sure, but who do you think would die sooner there? By the task force's own numbers, 47,000 women under 50 could die under these guidelines.

Death panel indeed.

Read Coburn's piece. He has much more on the tragic consequences of the government run Medicaid as well.

But this part struck me. In the bill there is a penalty of $750 if you do not buy insurance. As Coburn points out, how long until savvy consumers realize that it's much cheaper to pay the penalty than the $5,000 in annual premiums when they know that coverage can't be denied if they get sick? Not long.

These are just a few of the things horribly wrong with this bill. It's time to start over. It's time to do this right. The Democrats are trying to rush this through for their own political agenda, and that is just wrong. All of us want to fix things in health care. There is agreement on many many things, but the Democrats are shutting out the Republicans and the American people on this.

We aren't happy. If this passes, I don't think you will see the usual resignation of defeat from the American people. This is different. We are done being railroaded. We are done being ignored. There will be the largest non violent protest since the days of civil rights.

You just wait and see.