Coming to a Grandma Near You?
At around 4am on Monday, a friend of mine was woken by a call from the private care home in south-west London where her 98-year-old grandmother is resident.
“Mrs ——- has breathing difficulties,” the night manager told her. “She needs oxygen. Shall we call an ambulance?”
“What do you mean?” my friend responded. “What’s the matter with her?”
“She needs to go to hospital. Do you want that? Or would you prefer that we make her comfortable?”
Befuddled by sleep, she didn’t immediately grasp what was being asked of her. Her grandmother is immobilised by a calcified knee joint, which is why she is in the home. She’s a little deaf and frail, but otherwise perky. She reads a newspaper every day (without glasses), and is a fan of the darling of daytime television, David Dickinson. Why wouldn’t she get medical treatment if she needed it?
Then, the chilling implication of the phone call filtered through – she was being asked whether her grandmother should be allowed to die.
“Call an ambulance now,” my friend demanded
This is in Great Britain, but you can expect similar situations here as $500 billion is cut from Medicare to fund health care for the “uninsured,” including people that are in our country illegally.
Hat tip: Telegraph (UK)
Entire article.
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Watch it GRANNY
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sorry, off topic:
Berkeley may sign onto U.N. treaties
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/29/BA6519U02B.DTL
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You know it is coming… they need savings somewhere and the best place to find it is with the high usage/expense crowd.
I absolutely hate what I see has become of the US.
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For every group that suffers under these HC plans, there will be a group that benefits. It is not, however, a zero sum game. Mr. Taxpayer picks up the difference.
Example: How much from these medicare cuts will accrue indirectly to big labor?
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Big labor wants government health care because then the unions and their employers can off load the enormous burden of these cadillac health care plans off to the US. The cost of healthcare benefits for retired union workers and current union members has been a major cost in negotiating new contracts. The trouble is that the cost of these benefits diminishes the direct wages portion of the union contract and as a result reduces the amount union dues as a % of wages.
Dump these union cadillac plans onto the non-union US taxpayer and suddenly the union shows up at the negotiating table with higher wage demands. The manufacturer no longer includes the cost of funding these comprehensive healthcare plans in the total cost of the labor.
Union labor gets higher wages (and then is less competitive internationally)
Unions increase their wealth with increase union dues
Manfacturers pay higher wages and potentially fees and fines passing off the healthcare benefit to the taxpayer….
government gets bigger by providing another otherwise private sector service…
and the non-union taxpayer gets screwed again.
I sit here wondering where am I going to find another $1,000/$2,000 month or so to cover the cost of my health insurance and cap n trade increased energy costs.
My outrage is boiling over.
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boy, ya gotta LOVE the “News service that shall not be named”. Here’s their headline up now:
Another Republican senator is open to health care overhaul
Actually 100% or Republicans are “open to health care overhaul”…just not the NONSENSE being foisted upon us as ObamaCare! The Republican Plan which Obama has REFUSED to even consider…is indeed a “health care overhaul”…and a damn fine one!
But the headline is intended to make it seem like there are now only TWO Repubs who don’t want the “Status Quo”.
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judy – I think all I could add to that is amen.
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Itr will be interesting to see what is in the final bill (single payer, public option, abortion funding, illegal alien coverage, etc.). Personally, I am expecting the worst.
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Judy, that is an excellent post. Thank you.
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Judy
Since I’ve never been a part of unions and have mainly been self-employed, I don’t really understand all the ins and outs of these higher level negotiations. So, reading your post was insightful.
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From Newsbusters:
Robert Reich Speech 2007
“We’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”
Aha! So it turns out that Grayson was right when he said “Republicans want you to die quickly.” Only one “little” problem here. That quote did not come from a Republican. In fact it came from the very liberal former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who is now an economics adviser for Barack Obama.
In an audio recording from a September 2007 speech to an audience at the UC Berkeley, Reich reveals what he believes an honest liberal presidential candidate would say about health care. The “truth” about health care as Reich sees it is quite shocking and as you can hear on the recording, he is definitely not kidding. Here is a transcript of the brutal truth about health care as Robert Reich sees it:
I’ll actually give you a speech made up entirely, almost on the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what a candidate should say if we were in the kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship and they were educated in terms of what the issues were and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:
“Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I’m so glad to see you and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that’s true and what I’m going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people…you’re going to have to pay more.
“Thank you. And by the way, we’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”
Are you taking notes, Alan Grayson? Okay, now back to Robert Reich and his uncomfortably brutal honesty about health care.
“Also I’m going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid—we already have a lot of bargaining leverage—to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents. Thank you.”
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These people are the modern day Nazi party.
Dr Mengele, call your office. Robert Reich is waiting for his interview.