Death Panels By Proxy
26th September 2009
Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee have refused to allow the final text of their health care bill to be posted online prior to their vote on it. They claim the language is too technically difficult for ordinary people to understand, so that releasing the text would just sow confusion.
More likely, the Dems don’t want people to see language like that which appears at pages 80-81 of the bill. There it says: ” “Beginning in 2015, payment [under Medicare] would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician’s resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization.” Thus, in any year in which a particular doctor’s average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor’s payments by 5 percent.”
So if a doctor authorizes care that a bureaucrat thinks is too expensive, the bureaucrat has the power to cut his reimbursement. So the doctor’s incentive is to provide cheap care in all cases, for fear of being shortchanged, since he doesn’t know what these national percentages are. Once again, we have bureaucrats second-guessing doctors. Oh, we won’t ration care! Heaven forbid. We’ll get the doctors to do it, so you can hate the doctors rather than us. If there are any doctors left after we get through with them. Death panels? We don’t need no stinkin’ death panels! Ha ha ha!