What my family's cancer tragedy highlights about ObamaCare
Americans got a taste of what is to come if ObamaCare makes it into law when the U.S. Preventative Services task force, a federal panel, recommended against mammography for women under 50.
This report struck close to home.
My mother succumbed to breast cancer at age 52. She was first positively diagnosed with the cancer at age 46. Sadly, she first discovered the lump in her breast at age 39 after sustaining injuries to her upper chest in a car accident. Had she not gone seven years before acting on what she found at age 39, she might still be with us today.
The notion that we should be screening people less rather than more for various forms of cancer and other diseases is foolish, yet we're likely to see many more such proposals as government dramatically expands its role in health care as envisioned by liberals in Washington. Command and control decisions about cancer screenings will not work in the U.S. any better than they worked in Canada (producing a massive shortage of MRI diagnostic equipment), or in the Soviet Union (producing a massive shortage of everything).
In this great health care debate taking place, statistics are impersonal and likely to be matched with statistics from the other side, or glossed over altogether. Yet it is the personal side of health and medicine that impacts people's lives, and should inform the debate.
The federal panel justified its recommendation by concluding that the costs of "overdiagnosis" (too many tests leading to other tests and treatments that are ultimately unnecessary) is greater than saving a few lives through early detection. As the Wall Street Journal noted, "this makes little sense unless financial costs are a priority." Financial costs to a government, of course, which will be calling the shots.
The "public option" in ObamaCare is a big step toward the government run health care system Democrats envision, which is why their most liberal members are so adamantly for it while reasonable people like Sen. Joseph Lieberman are opposed. The government entering the health insurance market to compete with the private sector, at the same time it also sets the rules by which that competition takes place, is to guarantee the government eventually "prevails" and the private, competitive sector is crushed. The government side is also aided by the fact that it will have access to one resource the private insurers cannot use: the U.S. Treasury.
Ultimately, the issue here is one of options and alternatives. Will people have choices for diagnosis and treatment of health problems, or will they be limited to whatever choices the government makes for them, as in Canada? The ultimate result of the Democrats' health care plan will be fewer choices for patients, and more edicts from government panels.
This report struck close to home.
My mother succumbed to breast cancer at age 52. She was first positively diagnosed with the cancer at age 46. Sadly, she first discovered the lump in her breast at age 39 after sustaining injuries to her upper chest in a car accident. Had she not gone seven years before acting on what she found at age 39, she might still be with us today.
The notion that we should be screening people less rather than more for various forms of cancer and other diseases is foolish, yet we're likely to see many more such proposals as government dramatically expands its role in health care as envisioned by liberals in Washington. Command and control decisions about cancer screenings will not work in the U.S. any better than they worked in Canada (producing a massive shortage of MRI diagnostic equipment), or in the Soviet Union (producing a massive shortage of everything).
In this great health care debate taking place, statistics are impersonal and likely to be matched with statistics from the other side, or glossed over altogether. Yet it is the personal side of health and medicine that impacts people's lives, and should inform the debate.
The federal panel justified its recommendation by concluding that the costs of "overdiagnosis" (too many tests leading to other tests and treatments that are ultimately unnecessary) is greater than saving a few lives through early detection. As the Wall Street Journal noted, "this makes little sense unless financial costs are a priority." Financial costs to a government, of course, which will be calling the shots.
The "public option" in ObamaCare is a big step toward the government run health care system Democrats envision, which is why their most liberal members are so adamantly for it while reasonable people like Sen. Joseph Lieberman are opposed. The government entering the health insurance market to compete with the private sector, at the same time it also sets the rules by which that competition takes place, is to guarantee the government eventually "prevails" and the private, competitive sector is crushed. The government side is also aided by the fact that it will have access to one resource the private insurers cannot use: the U.S. Treasury.
Ultimately, the issue here is one of options and alternatives. Will people have choices for diagnosis and treatment of health problems, or will they be limited to whatever choices the government makes for them, as in Canada? The ultimate result of the Democrats' health care plan will be fewer choices for patients, and more edicts from government panels.
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