I am posting this here for info only for anyone who is interested. It is not here to start an argument or even discussion on everyone's beliefs. If you disagre, and I believe that is definitely your right, ignore this. Anyone who is interested, here it is for you to read and use the links at the bottom. IMHO it is important to get this info out there for anyone who doesn't know it, or put it in article form for anyone who wants to put it in email form and send it on.
I want to say up front that I thought I was a democrat after reading and listening all through the last election. That just to let you know that this isn't just angry republican rhetoric. After seeing what a democratic president will do, and would like to do, without a republican majority in the congress to temper him, I have absolutely stepped out of the democratic party. I have never been a polital person, and now am losing sleep, and watching and reading the daily news over what the president is trying to do with our healthcare system. I am afraid, truly afraid,, and it seems almost unreal that it could be happening in America, the supposed land of the free.
I am writing this because every person deserves to know what is happening in healthcare reform. If you are like I always was and tried to stay away from the news and politics, you may not know. Or you think you know, but you may not know the truth, or the whole truth. I want to encourage you to find out on your own if you don't believe what I am writing here. but mostly I want to encourage everyone to let their voices be heard in whatever way you feel like you can. This is not the time to sit back and be worried or even outraged but not do anything. The ONLY thing that is going to get the congressmen to vote the way we want is for them to hear our voices, and for them to know that the ones who are calling, and writing, are the ones who will be voting for them or someone else if they do not vote the way their constituents want. They are supposed to be carrying our voices to capitol hill, not their own. The president is supposed to working for us, the Americans who he represents. But he is ignoring the polled 86% of the public that is happy with the healthcare system, and doing exactly what HE wants.
Please take the time to read this, and please take the time to write, email, call or even visit your representatives and let them know what you think. It is th only way to keep our basic freedom. 74% of Americans who have emailed their congressman have opposed healthcare reform. We need to add our voices and make it even clearer how we feel! I wanted to know what was truth and what was rumor, because according to the president we are all upset because we are hearing rumors. I guess that is why he wanted to quickly get this reform pushed through before Aug break, so we wouldn't be affected by all the "rumors". SO I went to the congressional website and took a look at the HUGE document that they are wanting passed. I urge you to do so if you don't believe what you read here. There is a table of contents, and a bunch of legal talk, but it is quite clear and easy to understand in a lot of places. Enough places to make me lay awake at night wondering if something like this could actually happen in this country. I do wonder though, how many of the congressmen are actually reading that bill huge bill? When asked in town hall meetings, they have varying answers as to how much they have read, but not enough unless they have read ALL of what they have in store for us.Scary, isn't it?
I feel for the people I this country who don't have insurance. I was one of those people not too long ago. I worked three part-time jobs and was putting myself through college to try to get my dream job. I needed insurance. I called the governent program and said I don't need free insurance, I just need to be able to buy into a group where I can afford it. The advice they gave me was quit a couple of my jobs and they would give it to me for free. Other than that, sorry, I made too much money. I refused to do that, and found Farm Bureau which I joined into their large group and had insurance I could afford. There are people out there who want to work and aren't, who want to pay for insurance and can't, but the HUGE majority of people who are going to get covered by the new governent option are going to be the people who will be given the advice, quit your job and we'll give it to you for free. A lot of the people who need insurance and can't get it due to pre-existing conditions are going to get a rude awakening at the kind of heathcare they will receive under their new plan.
How about the quote from "Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel New York Post article-He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. he says-"Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change," he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008). Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).
Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else. Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time. Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).
He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years" (Lancet, Jan. 31).
The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts will be, the president's budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn't be accountable to the public. Since Medicare was founded in 1965, seniors' lives have been transformed by new medical treatments such as angioplasty, bypass surgery and hip and knee replacements. These innovations allow the elderly to lead active lives. But Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too "enamored with technology" and is determined to reduce access to it. Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending. Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they're "associated with longer waits" and "reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices" (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001).But he calls it "debatable" whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you'll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.) -New York Post article
Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically delivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective. " If you are gong to cost a lot, or if you don't have a high likelihood of returning to the workforce, you are going to be on the losing end. Remeber the Joe the PLumber saga, and spread the wealth around. Well, it'cans coming to healthcare. It's going to be where the money do the most for the most people, not what it can do for you. Your doctor will be deciding where he can do the most gpood with the money. If you have an expensive illness, you are going to be weeded out. A lot of the people who need coverage think it is finally going to be there for them, and it is not.
Where is all this money suppposed to come from that is going to pay for healthcare for ALL these people who need covered? Where does it all come from now. We already pay for the people who don't have healthcare, it will just be much much more. ANd those of us who have coverage will pay the price with OUR coverage. Coverage that is going to be taken away from us. My biggest fear about them getting this passed is losing the freedom to choose my own healthcare treatments. ANd please if you don't believe this, go read it yourself!!! When the government sets up their system, doctors will have to be paid A LOT less for their services. Now if you were a doctor who had spent 12 years in school and had hundreds of thousands dollars of school debt and the government told you that you were going to start making the same as the guy who went to trade school and was an electrician, what would you do? You would stop accepting insurance, right. You would be a self-pay doctor, of which there are already quite a few, especially doctors who already provide services not routinely covered by insurance. The patient pays the bill, gets the form to turn into insurance, and deals with the insurance compnay on their own. This is the way I do most of my doctors now, personally. SO what can the governement do to keep this from happening. They make it illegal for a doctor to not take insurance, they make it illegal for them to provide services not covered by insurance. And voila', you can no longer choose your own healthcare treatments.
If you are one of the many who only use treatments covered by insurance and never use treatments that are routinely denied by insurance, so you think this doens't really concern you, read on, here and on the congressional bill. The government is setting up a group called the Center. It is a panel of 15 people, not doctors, appointed by one man, not elected. This panel is allowed to have 3 people from big healthcare business, such as a drug company person, and a healthcare device manufacturer. These fifteen people will make the decisions as to what treatment you are allowed to have. it does not matter if your doctor says you need it. they make the decisions. there are no appeals, like with an insurance company. There are no lawsuits over denied care. You get what they say you get. Again, the idea that "where does the money do the most good". SOunds good on paper until you are dying or sick and you want the care you and your doctor think will do the best for you, but it cost too much for the Center so you get denied. That money that you should be entitled to since you are paying premiums to your insurance compnay if you are lucky enough to still have your own coverage, will do the most good over here paying for the people who didn't have coverage, so you don't get to have access to that coverage.
Just the idea that you can go to the corner market and buy pornography, or go to Vegas and buy sex, but you would not be able to buy the healthcare treatments of your choice, even if you paid for it out of your own pocket seems unfathomable to me. At first I thought it couldn't be true. It borders on the bizarre. Then I read it for myself. And for all of you who think you will still be able to access alternative healthcare through providers who retire their medical license and become healthcare practitioners like massage therapists, think again. they adress healthcare practitioners right along with doctors, in the same sentence in fact. A doctor cannot get around it by becoming a healthcare practitioner and practicing totally alternative medicine. And the wording is right there for all of us who have healthcare practitioner licenses to be put out of business unless you think you will be able to live on whatever you may be able to scrape from the insurance company. We are on the block to be next right after the doctors, they won't even need to pass a new bill. The wording is already there.
But don't let me make this sound like it only affects alternative medicine. Not at all. Alternative medicine will just be totally gone. Then we will be left begging for western medicine treatments that us and the doctors feel like we need. And when doctors stop making money that corresponds to the amount of time they put into school, how many people will want to be doctors. Countries with universal healthcare systems have huge shortages of doctors. Canada lost 40% of it's doctors the first year of government managed healthcare. WHy would you go to school that long to make the same as someone who goes a few years. WHy be a doctor when it is the governement that tells you how to care for your patients.
How can an insolvent program like Medicaire stand up under the presidents plan to pull money from it($410 BILLION dollars) to fund healthcare for all the ones who need it for free? How could he have thrown seniors under the bus by making a deal with the drug companies to not cap the prices of presciptions for seniors? Take the people who generally make less, and take more meds, and use them as bait to get the drug company on your side. Let them suffer so more people can have welfare coverage? I think the seniors probably have a differenet opinion, . SOmeone said to me, don't these people making the laws have parents who will be affected by this? Can they be that heartless towards them? None of the democrats, when polled, would take the governemt option if asked. They don't have to worry about how it affects their family. It doesn't. It affects everyone else's families, who aren't politicians. They have special coverage, they're politicians.
I still think even as I write this that surely this can't even be a possibility, that I could no longer be allowed by law to continue with my healthcare the way I do now. For any of you that know me well, treatment called prolotherapy literally saved my life a few years back. After an accident, I was left with a SEVERE headache that I kept constantly for a year and a half, 24 hours a day. I was to doctor after doctor after doctor, from MD all the way to neurosurgeon. No one could help me, or cared to try mostly. They sent me home with a pain med prescription, and wrote my life off with hardly a thought. I hate to say it now, but I wanted to die. I couldn't imagine the rest of my life like that. I will dispense with the details of what was wrong, but one beautiful SUnday morning I was up early on the computer trying to find something, anything that could help me. I had refused to give up hope that I wasn't going to get rid of this horrible headache, even though the mainstream medical community hadn't helped me at all. And by the way, all this happily paid for by insurance.
What I found that day quite by accident was a doctor who by blessed miracle was in Brentwood, very close to me. I went to him, with not much hope anymore, but having to see anyway. he healed me, or God healed me through him. I knew when he prayed before my treatment that he was something different, something special. he treated me with a treatment called prolotherapy. He gave me my life back. he cured my headaches. he cured what every other doctor said wouldn't happen. My life expanded to where it had been.No it expanded to more than it had been because I had learned what a precious gift health actually was. I knew what it was like to live without, and it was mine again, by the grace of God and the skill of my doctor. I wanted to do all the things I had given up. I was healed, and happy for the first time in a long time. And to top it off, I told him about back pain that I had developed on my job, and he fixed that too. Now I didn't even have back pain. This was a true doctor.
Now years later, I work for this same doctor. I see patient after patient come through his doors, from the young to the elderly. I see him change lives everyday. I see him save seniors from joint replacements, and go on to win the gold in the senior olympics. Yes that really happened. I took the call from the guy who was so excited to have won. I see him put people back to work who were unable to work because of back or neck injuries. I see people get to enjoy their lives again, doing the activities that they love pain free because of his treatments. I see people forgoe surgury and be healed without it. he is an amazing doctor with an amazing therapy to offer.
He will be put out of business with healthcare reform. Insurance may or may not pay for prolotherapy. My personal experience was about half the time, depending on who was working on the claim. And that is usual. Medicare doesn't pay at all. They would rather pay $10,000 for a hip replacement and have a patient who needs long term care afterward, than maybe $1000 to heal a hip and have a healthy happy patient able to care for themselves. That is the mentality of the government. For me to think that if I ever injured myself in any way again that has to do with joints or connective tissue, that I couldn not access prolotherapy because of a governement program is outrageous and scares me to death.
My regular doctor, who used to work ay the Mayo clinic, practices a lot of preventative care, which is very popular nowadays. His idea is to keep you healthy instead of just treating you when you are sick. A lot of things that are preventative are not covered by insurance. He treats my food allergies with a non-covered treatment. there will come a time when I will be able to eat the things I am allergic to, I have already overcome some of them with this treatment. With Obama's reform, it will be illegal also. I will have to just deal with food allergies until I die, so that someone else can get their free entitled care. I asked him what he will do if this happens. His answer? Go out of busuness. ANother fantastic doctor, gone.
And not to mention the small businesses who are going under at an alarming rate, who are struggling to survive in this economy. Seems on paper to be a good idea to force small businesses to provide heath insurance. Everyone should have access if they are working right? The number of businesses that I know who will go under when forced to take on the the expense of providing insurance makes me wonder just how many millions across the nation will go under, adding another burden of uninsured people to the neverending list. And hurt the economy further.
How do we pay for all this. have any of the bailouts worked so far? Did banks start to loan money when the govenment gave them a huge pile of taxpayers money? No, they bought out other banks, and raised the rates on everyone's credit cards. They didn't care that they were getting our money in the bailout, with the government operating the purse strings. How about the Put the Americans to Work program. Anyone travel across the country lately? The amount of lane closures is astronomical. But there aren't any workers ANYWHERE. Seems the government may have left some loopholes like they did with the bank bailouts. Seems like just having the projects started may be good enough to get the money. Is anyone getting hired by the state to work in these deserted construction zones. Now we are supposed to take on the financial strain of a whole new healthcare system that is somehow supposed to pay for itself. Medicare isn't even solvent, add in the veteran's programs, and throw in some welfare, and then add all the people who aren't covered now but will be under the new plan. Has the government come up with some new funding source? We are always the funding source when the government spends money, except this time on top of taxes they will take away our coverage to give it to someone else. And sadly A LOT of those people are going to be the same people we are already paying for, in welfare.
There is even talk of having access of some kinds for illegal aliens. Remember the arguments over the swine flu when it was still called that? Illegal aliens were afraid to come for treatment because they might be deported, so the government was afraid they would stay here and be infecting us. SO give them free healthcare with no worries about being sent back. Come to America, and get free healthcare even if you're illegal.
Is this what the soldiers across the ocean are fighting for? WHat is freedom when your basic right to choose your healthcare tratments are gone. WHat freedom will be gone next? Do we really want to be a socialist country? If you want to run a socialist society, why try to become president of a democracy. The majority of Americans when polled are happy with the healthcare system, 86%. Is that not a majority? 14% of canadians are happy with their government run healthcare. They wait for services that are needed. They wait for healthcare that they need. A shortage of doctors, beaurocratic redtape, is that what we want here? it is scary to think of what kind of healthcare the disabled veterans would get. they already have a poor system, then add that to the fact that many of them won't be tax-producing members of society again, and it is worrisome to think of where they will fall on the entitlement list. How much money will they be allotted to recover and live. And they are the ones fighting for us, for our freedoms as Americans. And while they are over there fighting for it, the president is over here trying to take it away.
It is our right to choose our own healthcare, the same as it is our right to cary a firearm, which is in danger, along with the freedoms and the rights of all Americans that were put down to paper a long long time ago. No president, no unbalanced congress, should be allowed to take away those freedoms, the rights that we hold dear. But they are trying to do just that. And we need to fight and let our voices be heard. This is not the time to sit back and think that your voice won't mean anything, that you don't have the time, or someone else will do it for you. EVERYONE needs to stand up and tell their reps just what they think. I will be letting mine know what I think, and that anyone who votes for a plan like this will not be getting my vote. That is what truly matters to the politicialns, re-election, and we need to let them know in no uncertain terms that we will not support anyone who supports scocialized healthcare. or any form of direct government control in something so personal as our healthcare choices.
Please stand up and be heard, even if it is just sending an email. It can be simple, and in fact shorter is better. Just let them know what you oppose, and that you won't re-elect anyone who votes for reform that takes away our individial rights to choose. This is not rebublican and democratic, it is American. or rather UnAmercian. No matter what party you claim, this is not right. our country cannot bear the financial burden, and give up so basic a freedom.
Here is a very good website for articles that have appeared in the NY post, ets. if you do nothing else, read the first page. It will tell you more than you ever cared to know. http://www.defendyourhealthcare.us/
The actual congressional website. http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/
A website to type in your zipcode to get contact info for everyone that represents you from the president on down to your local reps http://www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/officials/
If you agree with this, please send it on and try to get the word out to as many people as you can while we can still have time to try to make a difference. Julie