The Illegitimate President nominated a certain enthusiastic marxist named Dr. Donald Berwick to be czar over rationing of health care in America. Berwick despises the free market, which means he utterly abhors the idea that people should choose what is best for themselves and their situation, and believes that only government regulators should decide which treatments are available, and who should receive care.
Berwick explained that there are three steps to “comparative effectiveness research.” The first is to determine whether a therapy works or not. The second is to determine how well the therapy works compared to other therapies. The third is to do a cost-benefit analysis.
“If a new drug or procedure is effective, and has some advantage over existing alternatives,” Berwick said, “then does the incremental benefit justify the likely additional cost?”
Now, in a free country where people freely chose to pay for their own health care with their own money, this is a good question for any prudent consumer. It is exactly that “free market force” that Berwick implored the British socialists not to put their faith in.
But in a country where the government has taken regulatory and fiscal control of the health care system—where the state is subsidizing most people’s care—and where government bureaucrats make the decisions about who gets what treatment, this question is not the animating moving force behind the invisible hand of the market, it is the dark materialistic spirit behind the iron hand of a life-and-death tyranny.
Berwick went on to say, “any health care funding plan that is just must redistribute wealth.” Meaning, of course, the wealth must be redistributed to the government which pays for the care. You and I will be taxed into poverty, with the hope that this will make us more reliant and subservient to our bureaucratic overlords.
via CNSNews.com – Obama Names Rationing Czar to Run Medicare.
And again, on the subject of vaccines and mandatory health care:
An advisory panel to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that every person be vaccinated for the seasonal flu yearly, except in a few cases where the vaccine is known to be unsafe.
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The H1N1 swine flu scare of the past year played a major role in the committee’s about face, both because the disease killed many people falling outside the current recommended vaccine demographic and because it raised public awareness of and demand for vaccines.
Truthfully, it was the government’s propaganda that raised public awareness and demand for vaccines. H1N1 was actually less dangerous than the normal seasonal flu, and it’s difficult to really say how many people were affected by it, because early in the season, the CDC instructed caregivers to stop testing for H1N1, and to just call every instance of “flu-like symptoms” another “swine flu case.”
via U.S. government panel now pushing “vaccinations for all!” No exceptions….
Chalk it up as yet another reason why it’s wrong to allow Congress to ignore Article 1 Section 8 and illegally enter the health care industry. $455 million taxpayer dollars wasted on a non-pandemic, and that’s not counting all the unnecessary doses people actually took, and all the government propaganda put into convincing people to go get the untested shots.
About a quarter of the swine flu vaccine produced for the U.S. public has expired — meaning that a whopping 40 million doses worth about $260 million is being written off as trash.
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About 30 million more doses will expire later and may go unused, according to one government estimate. If all that vaccine expires, more than 43 percent of the supply for the U.S. public will have gone to waste.
Federal officials defended the huge purchase as a necessary risk in the face of a never-before-seen virus. Many health experts had feared the new flu could be the deadly global epidemic they had long warned about, but it ended up killing fewer people than seasonal flu.
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The new H1N1 swine flu emerged in April last year, hitting children and young adults particularly hard. It was difficult to predict how deadly it might be or how easily it might spread. Federal health officials pushed five vaccine manufacturers to produce a vaccine as quickly as possible. What’s more, they wanted a lot of it — many experts thought most people would need two doses for it to work.
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In Europe, where nations also found themselves with millions of unused doses, some commentators have attacked the World Health Organization, which declared swine flu a global epidemic, or pandemic.
The critics have questioned the motivation of some WHO advisers who had links to the pharmaceutical industry.
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“Each time the so-called experts told us that millions of people would be killed worldwide by the respective viruses. We have learned that the experts were utterly wrong,” said Dr. Ulrich Keil, a professor at Germany’s prestigious University of Muenster and a WHO adviser.
via 40 Million Doses of H1N1 Vaccine Will Be Burned – H1N1 – FOXNews.com.
