So it begins: Obamacare forcing states to cap, cut prescription drug benefits for seniors and the poor

But they're the party of compassion, don't ya know:

A new report from Kaiser Health indicates states are now moving in the direction of capping or cutting prescription drug benefits.

Illinois Medicaid recipients have been limited to four prescription drugs as the state becomes the latest to cap how many medicines it will cover in the state-federal health insurance program for the poor.

Sixteen states impose a monthly limit on the number of drugs Medicaid recipients can receive and seven states have either enacted such caps or tightened them in the past two years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KHN is a program of the foundation). The limits vary across the country. Mississippi has a limit of two brand-name drugs. In Arkansas adults are limited to up six drugs a month. Since June, Alabama has had the nation’s stingiest Medicaid drug benefit after limiting adults to one brand-name drug. HIV and psychiatric drugs were excluded. On Aug. 1 the state will relax the limit to its previous level — four brand-name drugs — after the restriction saved more money than expected and the state received money as part of a settlement with a pharmaceutical company.

Other states with Medicaid drug limits are Arkansas, California, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

 

Rationing issues in Obamacare have long been a concern of pro-life groups. Although the death panels — the voluntary advanced care planning that pro-life advocates have been concerned about because it could have doctors financially motivated to promote less medical care and lifesaving treatment — occupied most of the debate, the National Right to Life Committee says other provisions cause concern.

Joe Biden really was right for once. If your life depends on these prescription drugs, Obamacare really is a big f***in' deal.

Hat tip: BadBlue

Technorati Tags: Joe Biden,ObamaCare,prescription drugs,repeal and replace ObamaCare,Medicaid,death panels,Romney-Ryan in 2012

Biden, Obamas tell health care tall tales at Charlotte convention

Barack Obama's father, also named Barack Obama, and mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. (Photo: AP)

Daily Caller:

Vice President Joe Biden, first lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama all told a story during the Democratic National Convention about battles the president’s mother waged with health care companies as she fought a terminal illness in 1995. But the version of events presented Thursday night differs dramatically from others, including those of at least two biographers and Obama’s own previous account.

“Barack had to sit at the end of his mom’s hospital bed and watch her fight cancer and insurance companies at the same time,” Biden said.

The first lady added to the story, observing from the podium that “watching your mother die of something that could have been prevented — that’s a tough thing to deal with.”

“When my mother got cancer,” the president echoed during a video played inside the Time Warner Cable Arena before his entrance, ”she wasn’t a wealthy woman and it pretty much drained all her resources.”

But in 2004, the president told the Chicago Sun-Times that he wasn’t present during his mother’s final days at all.

“The biggest mistake I made was not being at my mother’s bedside when she died,” he said then. ”She was in Hawaii in a hospital, and we didn’t know how fast it was going to take, and I didn’t get there in time.”

David Maraniss, who later authored the best-selling book “Barack Obama: The Story,“ wrote in The Washington Post in 2008 that Obama did not visit her.

“He was into his Chicago phase, reshaping himself for his political future, but now was drawn back to Hawaii to say goodbye to his mother,” Maraniss reported. ”Too late, as it turned out. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, before he could get there.”

The story Democratic convention-goers heard in Charlotte, N.C., however, was not intended as a tragic remembrance, but to convey the tragedy of suffering in a hospital without health insurance.

This narrative, too, is contradicted by history: Stanley Ann Dunham, the president’s late mother, did have health insurance to cover her uterine and ovarian cancer, through her job with Development Alternatives Inc. of Bethesda, Md.

“Ann’s compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment,” according to Dunham’s biographer, New York Times journalist Janny Scott.

“Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”

Scott also wrote that Dunham’s compensation package for her work in Indonesia included $82,500 — about $132,000 in today’s dollars — plus a housing allowance and a car, making that amount well within her means.

The story told from the podium Thursday in Charlotte has been a persistent refrain from Obama and his surrogates since his presidential candidacy began in 2007. His campaign produced an ad that year for the Iowa caucuses in which Obama claimed his mother was ”more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well.”

“She wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality,” he told an audience in Santa Barbara, Calif., during a 2007 campaign swing. “She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs. And she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a pre-existing condition.”

“I remember just being heartbroken,” the future president said then, “seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms. So I have seen what it’s like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system. And it’s wrong. It’s not who we are as a people.”

Related:

Fact Check: First Lady's False Fairy Tale of Struggle

DNC-Backed, $100K-Earning Union Member Hits Romney 

Technorati Tags: ObamaCare lies,ObamaCare,Joe Biden,President Obama,Election 2012,2012 Election,Mitt Ronney in 2012,Obama's Mother,Obama's family,watch the other hand,Obamaland,ObamaTax,healthcare insurance,Election 2012 falsehoods,speeches,Michelle Obama,repeal and replace ObamaCare

FYI: Every American Concerned With Health Care Needs To Read This Conversation

Every American concerned with health care needs to read this conversation

This should be sent to as many people as you can possibly think of. I heard this caller LIVE on the Mark Levin show last week. He was thoroughly vetted by Mark's producers. He's a genuine neurosurgeon, and his report is 100% accurate.

Recall Bill Ayres: "We may have to kill 25 million Americans in order for the socialist revolution to succeed....….." ............and Rahm Emanuel's physician brother who said in a speech that American citizens over 'a certain age' should simply be ‘comforted’ by telling them that they've lived a good life already....... (therefore it's their obligation to 'die with dignity?' Yes. That's what it means......... Joe-the-Mouth-Biden would call it 'being patriotic' and 'having skin in the game.' Dead skin & dead bones, I guess.)

Full Transcript: Neurosurgeon Briefed by HHS Reveals Obamacare's Death Panels (Hint: Patients Are Called 'Units')

directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/11/full-transcript-neurosurgeon-briefed-by.html

Full Transcript: Neurosurgeon Briefed by HHS Reveals Obamacare's Death Panels (Hint: Patients Are Called 'Units')

A caller -- "Jeff" from Chicago, Illinois -- spoke with Mark Levin on November 22nd regarding advanced neurological care under the auspices of the new health care law.

Junior Cub Reporter Biff Spackle transcribed the entire conversation (only excerpts had been published before).
Every American concerned with health care needs to read this conversation.

I heard you talk earlier about the government not knowing how to make pencils and you talked about brain surgeons. And I happen to be a brain surgeon, so I found your topic quite interesting.

I just returned from Washington, DC, where we were reading over what the Obama health care plan would be for advanced neurosurgery for patients over 70, which we all found quite disturbing. As our population gets older, the majority of our patients are getting over 70. They'll require stroke therapy, aneurysm therapy, and basically what the document stated is that if you're over 70 and you come into an emergency room... if you're on government-supported health care, you'll get "comfort care".

ML: Wait a minute... what’s the source for this?

Jeff: This is Obama’s new health care plan for advanced neurosurgical care.

ML: And who issued this? HHS?

Jeff: Yes. And basically they don’t call them patients, they call them units. And instead of, they call it “ethics panels” or “ethics committees”, would get together and meet and decide where the money would go for hospitals, and basically for patients over 70 years of age, that advanced neurosurgical care was not generally indicated.

ML: So it’s generally going to be denied?

Jeff: Yes, absolutely... If someone comes in at 70 years of age with a bleed in their brain, I can promise you I’m not going to get a bunch of administrators together on an ethics panel at 2 in the morning to decide that I’m OK to do surgery.

ML: Is this published somewhere where the general public could get a hold of it?

Jeff: Not yet.

ML: So this was just discussed with your community of neurosurgeons?

Jeff: Yes, the AANS [Ed: the American Association of Neurological Surgeons] and the Congress of Neurosurgeons, because everybody knows that cuts are coming in Medicare and medical reimbursement. And we're the most expensive out of all the fields in medicine. And we're the smallest field.

But at two, three, four in the morning, we're the ones in the operating room. And we have to wait for an ethics panel to convene, which are not made of physicians -- they're made of administrators. To decide whether a patient should receive our care.

ML: So Sarah Palin was right. We're going to have these "death panels", aren't we?

Jeff: Oh, absolutely. I'm German by heritage, and I've read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and -- basically, they don't call them patients, they call them units. And if you're a unit above a certain age, you get comfort care instead of advanced neurosurgical intervention.

ML: You went to a seminar in Washington, DC?

Jeff: Yes. Where a few of my former partners, two of them, have gone to work... one for the Veteran's Administration and one for the Congress of Neurosurgeons out of DC.

ML: And this information is based, you're certain, on representations and information provided by HHS and other government officials?

Jeff: Yep.

ML: And when will the rest of us become aware of it? After the [presidential] election?

Jeff: Probably. I mean, there's so many things that the government keeps under control that are used -- things called H.U.D. devices -- humanitarian use devices that we're allowed to use now because they haven't undergone full FDA approval. And they're used in surgery because people know it's the right thing to do. But the government can step in at any time, like they did two months ago with a device, and say, 'this device hasn't met what we want' and there's no exact criteria, and can therefore take it away from us.
ML: And the people telling you what to do -- they don't know how to make a pencil, do they?

Jeff: Exactly. That's what I'm saying. You know, we always joke around -- 'it's not brain surgery' -- but I did nine years after medical school, I've been in training ten years, and now I have people who don't know a thing about what I'm doing telling me when I can and can't operate.

The unintentionally satirical "Politifact" website hardest hit.

Source:  Before Its News

SHOCK CLAIM: New rule would give government everybody's health records...

New Rule Would Give Government Everybody’s Health Records

Obamacare HHS rule would give government everybody’s health records

By: Rep. Tim Huelskamp | 09/23/11 3:29 PM - OpEd Contributor

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has proposed that medical records of all Americans be turned over to the federal government by private health insurers.

It’s been said a thousand times: Congress had to pass President Obama’s  health care law in order to find out what’s in it. But, despite the repetitiveness, the level of shock from each new discovery never seems to recede.

This time, America is learning about the federal government’s plan to collect and aggregate confidential patient records for every one of us.

In a proposed rule from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal government is demanding insurance companies submit detailed health care information about their patients.

(See Proposed Rule:  Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; Standards Related to Reinsurance, Risk Corridors and Risk Adjustment, Volume 76, page 41930. Proposed rule docket ID is HHS-OS-2011-0022 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-07-15/pdf/2011-17609.pdf)

The HHS has proposed the federal government pursue one of three paths to obtain this sensitive information: A “centralized approach” wherein insurers’ data go directly to Washington; an “intermediate state-level approach” in which insurers give the information to the 50 states; or a “distributed approach” in which health insurance companies crunch the numbers according to federal bureaucrat edict.

It’s par for the course with the federal government, but abstract terms are used to distract from the real objectives of this idea: no matter which “option” is chosen, government bureaucrats would have access to the health records of every American - including you.

There are major problems with any one of these three “options.” First is the obvious breach of patient confidentiality. The federal government does not exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to managing private information about its citizens.

Why should we trust that the federal government would somehow keep all patient records confidential? In one case, a government employee’s laptop containing information about 26.5 million veterans and their spouses was stolen from the employee’s home.

There's also the HHS contractor who lost a laptop containing medical information about nearly 50,000 Medicare beneficiaries. And, we cannot forget when the USDA's computer system was compromised and information and photos of 26,000 employees, contractors, and retirees potentially accessed.

The second concern is the government compulsion to seize details about private business practices. Certainly many health insurance companies defended and advocated for the president’s health care law, but they likely did not know this was part of the bargain.

They are being asked to provide proprietary information to governments for purposes that will undermine their competitiveness. Obama and Sebelius made such a big deal about Americans being able to keep the coverage they have under ObamaCare; with these provisions, such private insurance may cease to exist if insurers are required to divulge their business models.

Certainly businesses have lost confidential data like the federal government has, but the power of the market can punish the private sector. A victim can fire a health insurance company; he cannot fire a bureaucrat.

What happens to the federal government if it loses a laptop full of patient data or business information? What recourse do individual citizens have against an inept bureaucrat who leaves the computer unlocked? Imagine a Wikileaks-sized disclosure of every Americans’ health histories. The results could be devastating - embarrassing - even Orwellian.

With its extensive rule-making decrees, ObamaCare has been an exercise in creating authority out of thin air at the expense of individuals’ rights, freedoms, and liberties.

The ability of the federal government to spy on, review, and approve individuals’ private patient-doctor interactions is an excessive power-grab.

Like other discoveries that have occurred since the law’s passage, this one leaves us scratching our heads as to the necessity not just of this provision, but the entire law.

The HHS attempts to justify its proposal on the grounds that it has to be able to compare performance. No matter what the explanation is, however, this type of data collection is an egregious violation of patient-doctor confidentiality and business privacy. It is like J. Edgar Hoover in a lab coat.

And, no matter what assurances Obama, Sebelius and their unelected and unaccountable HHS bureaucrats make about protections and safeguards of data, too many people already know what can result when their confidential information gets into the wrong hands, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Republican Tim Huelskamp represents the first congressional district of Kansas.

Source: the Washington Examiner

*This is exactly the type of thing that GOP Candidate and Congressman Ron Paul warned about in the GOP Orlando debate.  Massive data bases for medical records and National ID Cards in the hands of the U.S. Government will ultimately be used to spy on “We the People” and then against us.

Just look at the situation with GM (Government Motors’) OnStar Tracking Systems that continue to track you… even after cancellation of the service.

Obama… Little Change On His Side… But Demanding Major Concessions from GOP

“Baby steps don’t get you where we want to go”, said to Obama and the true underlying stand of the President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid the Dems is that in the end they are going to push their agenda, if the GOP doesn’t make major concessions that that majority of the American people don’t want.

President Obama, trying to make the Republicans look like the party of “NO” one last time, said they would move forward with or without them. Translation: We will do whatever we need to do, implying reconciliation, if the GOP does not make dramatic concessions. Is that really what bipartisan compromise is all about??

President Obama admitted that he has a plan two… a scaled down version of healthcare reform that might be both more palatable to the American People and closer to a bipartisan bill… but Democratic leaders (Pelosi and Reid) have convinced him not to go down that road, but instead to make another attempt the Obama/Pelosi/Reid ideological takeover of both U.S. healthcare and one sixth of the American Economy using reconciliation an option that was created for and intended to be used for budget bills and measures, not social legislation that will transform America… and the Dems know that, but choose to ignore it, just as they choose to ignore the will of the majority of their constituents and the American People.

Karl Rove said that this summit was going to be Kabuki theatre… and sadly it appears he was right!!

Snorefest 2010 – Obama’s HealthCare Summitt

So the healthcare debates have finally come to C-SPAN, but Glenn was correct in predicting it would essentially be a bunch of political grandstanding. Which makes for some pretty boring television as politicians read their talking points. In particular, this exchange between McCain and Obama was a lowlight. McCain painfully demonstrated why he got dominated in the election. Is this just another dog and pony show, or can something good actually come out of these talks? Glenn talks about it on radio today. ( Transcript, Insider Audio)

Guess We Might Be In Trouble… But Let’s Try to Scam the GOP and the American People Anyway!!

Amazingly, Reid said at today's Summit that nobody has talked about using reconciliation except for the GOP... HMMM?!? Amazingly it sounded that was what President Obama was saying during his final 5-minute... join me or else speech!?!

"You can put lipstick on a pig... but it is still a pig... and this bill is a pig!!"

Charles Krauthammer said, “In the last few minutes after 7-hours that the whole summit was a show to justify reconciliation, which is what they wanted to do all along!!”

Please keep up the good fight. The president intimated that his would be the final chapter on this Bill and HC Reform, at least for now. Let us make it is the final chapter of ObamaCare type of reform and that it doesn't pass. Right now they don't have the votes!!!

Related: 2/3 of the HC Bill Passed Already! Hidden in the Stimulus Package that No One in Congress Read… Done Deal!!! – With Back-up Research But they need some kind of actual HC Bill to activate most of these diabolical measures… Wake-up America!