What your health care is worth

Think things will improve in the nation’s health care system now that a new administration promises coverage for everyone? Think….Great Britain.

Wesley J. Smith explains:

Uh, oh: Here it comes. Incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle wants to create a US Agency to control costs based on the UK’s Orwellian-named National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which substantially controls the ethics and medical availability of care under the NHS.

This is surreal. Look at the WSJ report, at how President Obama and House Democrats have worked some clauses into the stimulus bill that the average American wouldn’t even know about, ‘cost effective’ sorts of measures relating to how medical decisions are made and health care resources are…rationed.

They claim that they don’t want this to morph into a British-style agency that restricts access to medical products based on narrow cost criteria, but provisions tucked into the fiscal stimulus bill betray their real intentions.

The centerpiece of their plan is $1.1 billion of the $825 billion stimulus package for studies to compare different drugs and devices to “save money and lives.” Report language accompanying the House stimulus bill says that “more expensive” medical products “will no longer be prescribed.” The House bill also suggests that the new research should be used to create “guidelines” to direct doctors’ treatment of difficult, high-cost medical problems.

The bill gives incoming Health Secretary Tom Daschle wide discretion to set priorities, and he’s long advocated a U.S. approach modeled on the British agency,

that NICE one.

Mr. Daschle argues that the only way to reduce spending is by allocating medical products based on “cost effectiveness.”

And they’ll do this with a “federal health board” that will decide who gets what treatment…or not. And it can be a cold calculation.

“[Under NICE standards, an] assessment is made of the cost of the treatment per additional year of life which it brings, and per quality adjusted life year (QALY) . . . which takes into consideration the quality of life of the patient during any additional time for which their life will be prolonged.”

What?! Wesley explains:

In other words, medical care is effectively rationed by the National Health Service under guidelines set by bioethicists based on their beliefs about the low quality of life of patients whom they have never met.

If this is a new world order, we don’t want to go there.