The massive health insurance industries, having kept policy holders terrified and optionless for so long, have had a field day treating good people like shit.
We’ve all read a jillion sad stories of normal folks coming down with diseases that prompt insurers to sweat them, wait them out, abuse them, cancel them, or just flat kill them. This is what happens when the business giants have convinced almost everybody that the health insurance business is about business rather than health insurance.
That’s why the public option is absolutely the only possibility for real healthcare reform. There’s no way to overhaul all these massive moneymakers without going into competition with them, and only the government is guaranteed to be big enough to compete and survive.
Which is exactly why industry peons are going to start vigorously lying their already lying asses off in the weeks to come. And one way to do that is just to tell you that if healthcare reform continues, you’re all going to die.
Today’s particular version of that lie is ‘old people will get culled from the herd’. The government is so bureaucratic and callous, they’ll just automatically withhold care from old people in order to kill them because it saves money. Yes, I’m sure we’re all familiar with how Medicare, that government program, has been doing it for decades; your Gramma goes in for a Medicare procedure, she usually dies within hours. Don’t know how her life expectancy is now something like 80.
The painful side effects of Obama’s healthcare reform
…In looking for a way to fund healthcare, Obama has set his eye on the oldest and sickest. You see, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, about 30% of Medicare spending — nearly $100 billion annually — goes to care for patients during their last year of life. What if there were no “last year of life,” the president seems to be asking. The Eskimos used to set their elderly and sickly adrift on the ice or otherwise abandon them during times of scarcity, and that, metaphorically speaking, is what Obama would like us all to start doing.
The scarcity of resources to pay for expensive medical procedures will only increase under a plan to extend medical benefits at federal expense to the 47 million Americans who lack health insurance. So why not save billions of dollars by killing off our own unproductive 
oldsters and terminal patients, or — since we aren’t likely to do that outright in this, the 21st century — why not simply ensure that they die faster by denying them costly medical care? The savings could then subsidize care for the younger and healthier.
Sound too draconian? Enter the ghost of Obama’s late maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who died of cancer at age 86 two days before her grandson’s election to the presidency. Dunham’s health issues first surfaced in a New York Times interview with the president on May 3. There, Obama questioned the appropriateness of a hip replacement that his grandmother had undergone after falling and breaking her hip shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer last year. The alternative to such surgery is typically excruciating pain and opiate dependency. Obama made it clear that he loved his granny and would have paid for the surgery out of his own pocket if he had to, but he said there ought to be a “conversation” over whether “sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model.” Obama suggested that such decisions be made not by patients or their relatives but by a “group” of “doctors, scientists, ethicists” who are not part of “normal political channels.”
Obama brought up his grandmother’s hip replacement a second time in his June 24 town hall event on healthcare on ABC. The “question was,” Obama said, “does she get hip-replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?” At that point I was thinking: If he says, “No hip replacement for you, Grams” one more time, it’s going to be a drinking game.
Boy that came full circle, didn’t it? Obama wasn’t being disarmingly honest in bringing up a painful episode from his own life that even 
he, as someone honestly wrestling with these difficult questions, felt he had to question. No. He’s just a callous sonuvabitch that can turn a good reporter into a cynical drunk at a moment’s notice.
Don’t fall into this trap, you know exactly what’s going on here, and it’s not that ‘Obama care’ will torture your Granny. It’s that if the insurance industry can scare you enough, the public option will get killed, reform will die, and insurance companies will go back to owning your future healthcare lock, stock and barrel. Which gives them back the option of killing you for profit which they’ll do in certain situations, just as before.
Another LA Times article, covering the exact same discussion, was more forthcoming about the whole situation:
…She fell and broke her hip, “and the question was, does she get hip replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?”
Obama’s grandmother died two days before he was elected president in November. It was unclear whether she underwent the hip-replacement surgery…
The audience — which included doctors, patients, health insurers, students and people with ailing relatives — clearly was unhappy with the current healthcare system. Gibson asked for a show of hands to see how many wanted to leave the system unchanged. No one raised a hand.
[...] As I’ve posted about before, the cowardly lackeys of the health insurance industries will try to scare the crap out of you to prevent the government from providing a ‘public option’ that competes with them. [...]
Pingback by Monday’s Republican Healthcare Scare–Rep. Paul Broun: Canadians and Britons “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, evidently” « thump and whip — July 13, 2009 @ 5:49 pm