On Fox News’s O'Reilly Factor 8/10/09 a story was put forward about a lady that had cervical cancer and was denied the cancer drugs by the state (they have universal healthcare) and she was told they would pay for the drugs that would terminate her life.
Say you got cancer. Say your doctor found a treatment that could prolong your life for years. It wouldn’t cure the cancer, but it would slow it down, giving you precious time. Say the state refused to pay for your treatment, yet told you they would pay for doctor-assisted suicide.
Welcome to the Oregon Health Plan.
Perhaps, in order to find out what we can look forward to under a single-payer plan, we should look to one of our very own states: Oregon. The Oregon Health Plan (OHP) is a government run health care system for low-income residents. To be included in the plan, you currently have to win a lottery — literally. Sounds relatively simple, right? Basic care is included with little to no co-payments.
But things aren’t all butterflies and flowers in the Oregon Health Plan, nor is the health care system in place in Oregon going well. Patients who are treated under the OHP or Medicaid get the joys of rationed health care. And if you are unlucky enough to be stricken with cancer, or need a major operation to save your life, the state’s response is to tell you to just die already. And they mean that literally.
Consider the case of Barbara Wagner. She is a lung cancer patient whose doctor prescribed her a revolutionary new chemotherapy treatment, one that slows the growth of the cancer and could possibly prolong her life by years. To most people, this would be good news. To the OHP, it meant just another drain on the system. They denied Ms. Wagner’s claim, and instead offered to pay for doctor-assisted suicide. Wagner, of course, was understandably outraged.
“Treatment of advanced cancer that is meant to prolong life, or change the course of this disease, is not a covered benefit of the Oregon Health Plan,” read the letter notifying Wagner of the health plan’s decision.
Wagner says she was shocked by the decision. “To say to someone, we’ll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it’s cruel,” she told the Register-Guard. “I get angry. Who do they think they are?” An OHP doctor tried to explain:
Dr. Walter Shaffer, medical director of the state Division of Medical Assistance Programs, which administers the Oregon Health Plan, attempted to defend the health plan’s decision. “We can’t cover everything for everyone,” he said. “We try to come up with polices that provide the most good for the most people.” Shaffer then addressed a priority list that had been developed to ration health care. “There’s some desire on the part of the framers of this list to not cover treatments that are futile,” he said, “or where the potential benefit to the patient is minimal in relation to the expense of providing the care.”
Under Obama’s government run health care plan, could the rest of the country be headed the same way? Be sure to read the whole thing.
Source: American Issues Project
Video: Oregon says no to chemotherapy, offers assisted suicide instead
HotAir.com ^ | 8/3/09 | Ed Morrissey
We knew it would come to this when Oregon insisted on passing its assisted-suicide laws. It doesn’t take much for assisted suicide to go from a humane option to a cost-saving device, especially when the state pays for the medical care. One patient in Oregon got a letter that made this all too clear, when in the same letter rejecting her request for life-extending chemotherapy, Oregon offered her “physician-aid-in-dying”. In other words, Oregon offered their customer a heapin’ helping of death:
Video: Oregon says no to chemotherapy, offers assisted suicide instead
The doctor interviewed by the news station seems offended at the suggestion that Oregon would decide to save a few bucks by denying expensive health care and offering a case of hemlock in its place. However, saving money was the raison d’etreof single-payer systems, and the incentives all drive towards that decision. Single-payer systems have to handle medical services as a shortage market, rationing them by using “comparative effectiveness” paradigms to determine who gets medical attention, and who gets “physician-aid-in-dying” instead of it.
The woman who drew the short end of the stick in this case wonders who these people think they are. They think they know better than us who needs to live and die. Has that lesson still not been made clear?
Update: I got this link yesterday and the KATU page is undated, but this story is from 2008, which I didn’t realize until I got an e-mail about it. I wrote about this last June, and I simply didn’t recall it.
Posted on Mon Aug 03 2009 07:35:40 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time) by Crazieman
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Posted: True Health Is True Wealth
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