Obama: 'End-of-Life' Care Too Costly

In an interview with the New York Times' Magazine, posted online on Sunday, Barack Obama expressed concern over the huge costs of "end-of-life" care. The president cited as a case in point his own grandmother - who received hip replacement surgery shortly after learning she had become terminally ill:

OBAMA: Now, I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care... is what you do around things like end-of-life care.

DAVID LEONHARDT - NY TIMES: Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.

OBAMA: Exactly. And I just recently went through this... My grandmother got very ill during the campaign...; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip... and she elected to get... hip replacement...

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. 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, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

LEONHARDT: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

OBAMA: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

LEONHARDT: So how do you — how do we deal with it? [ed. note: Why not euthanize all end-of-life patients?]

OBAMA: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Apparently, Barack Obama is more than willing to spend tax-payer dollars to help combat Global Warming and enhance the quality-of-life of his eco-friendly constituents, but when it comes to improving the quality-of-life of the chronically ill, well, that's just a little bit too costly for him.

Typical left-wing perversion.

Earlier in the interview, Obama reassures Mr. Leonhardt that a plan he had proposed to create a council of federal employees to conduct comparative-effectiveness studies of various medical treatments would not affect the "doctor-patient relationship" or reduce the quality of medical health care, but would solely be used to help lower the cost of medical expenses.

However, Obama's apparent willingness to alter 'end-of-life care' as we know it today, makes that claim appear to be disingenuous and dubious at best.

And, I assume that most 'end-of-life patients' [and 'born alive abortees'] would agree with that assessment...

Betsy McCaughey notes that Obama's proposed plan to create a federal council to conduct comparative-effectiveness studies "reflects the handiwork of Tom Daschle", who was once Obama's nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make...

The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system...

The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision...

Of course, Obama reassures us that - unlike the aforementioned UK health board- the federal council that he plans to set up will not have legislative powers and will solely make recommendations on how to cut medical costs.

But can we really be sure those recommendations won't be signed into law one day? Moreover, since Obama has expressed a willingness to alter 'end-of-life care' as we know it today", can we really trust him, or his panel, to make recommendations on cutting the costs of our health care? I don't think so....