Perhaps you should ask insurance companies the same question.
Funny coincidence, my job is essentially to make sure claims sent to insurance companies get paid, thereby ensuring the continued fiscal solvency of our doctor client base. Generally if the patient follows the rules, reads their policy, and gets a referral as outlined in their plan, the insurance company will pay. Many insurance companies even allow backdated referrals, although that is getting curbed more and more these days.
In either case, you don't seem to have an intellectual problem with denying people care, you just have a problem if profit is involved in keeping the arbiter afloat. After all, you can't have a death panel that has the potential to become insolvent, right? Of course the death panel should be able to print its own money and have legal immunity.
There is also something called an appeals process, which is where we can correct claims because either the doctor or patient made an error somewhere along the way. Somehow I doubt a monolithic government panel concerned primarily with cutting costs will have a robust appeals process. After all, you can't shop around if government is the only player (and indeed, payer) in town.
The government doesn't get a bad rap if someone dies because they denied insurance coverage. People slip through the cracks, you see.
Trust us, and not your lying eyes.
There is nothing to worry about,
granny isn't going to die.
Quite frankly it sickens me how often "end of life" care comes up. The last group of people I want forming panels for euthanizing citizens is the government. If the most brilliant solution government can offer is to cut costs by slashing lives, clearly these Rhodes Scholars are unfit to administer health treatment of any kind.
Firestorm said:
A group of humans who are held responsible to the people they were put into power by? If they fuck up, they're out of a job. That's the point of democracy. I know you don't believe in it, but it's a pretty basic concept. The problem for me is more how it's set up right now than the idea of a person representing a neighbourhood.
Health care bureaucrats are not elected officials. If they kill your mother because they denied her care, tough luck. The next three elections probably aren't going to change the makeup of the death panel. You can't sue the Healthcare Operations Treatment and Evaluation (HOPE) commission, or the Life Options Vetting and Evaluation (LOVE) committee.
And who could oppose HOPE and LOVE? They already have NICE in Britain.
I do not agree with this plan by Max Baucus. I'd be more in line with Obama's no fines, public option idea for universal health care. Tell your president to stop trying to win Republican support. There's no working together when all they want to do is play politics.
Obama doesn't need Republican support.
He hasn't met with them since May. His problem is Blue Dog Democrats, not Republicans. The assertion Republicans are "playing politics" is laughable. They don't even have enough seats for a party-line filibuster in the Senate.
