Obama Wants to Kill your Grandma

Democrat health “reform” Nazis want to kill old people! It’s right there in their bill, Section 1233 of H.R. 3200. You want federal health care? Just sign off on your own compulsory euthanasia.

Who says? House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) in a joint statement. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said on the House floor that the bill would “force Seniors to be put to death by their government.”

Reality check: Section 1233 of HR 3200 allows doctors reimbursement for patient counseling once every five years on Advance Care Planning. It isn’t mandatory.

Congressman Boehner is from Ohio, where state law permits Advance Care Planning (Ohio Durable Power of Attorney for Healthcare and State of Ohio Living Will Declaration) but federally-funded Medicare does not presently cover counseling for it.

Congressman McCotter is from Michigan, where state law permits Advance Care Planning (Michigan Designation of Patient Advocate for Healthcare) but but federally-funded Medicare does not presently cover counseling for it.

Representative Foxx is from North Carolina, where state law permits Advance Care Planning (North Carolina Healthcare Power of Attorney and North Carolina Advance Directive for Natural Death [“Living Will”]) but federally-funded Medicare does not presently cover counseling for it.

In fact, almost all state governments have provisions for Advance Care Planning, but Medicare won’t pay for it. The G.W. Bush Administration’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded studies on the issue and published a report in 2003 recommending Advance Care Planning, with detailed guidelines for practitioners.

“But the consultations wouldn’t be mandatory” under the Obama plan, explains Mike Madden of Salon, “if your grandmother doesn’t want to go talk to her doctor about end-of-life care, she won’t have to.”

 Because Medicare doesn’t pay for this kind of planning now, only 40 percent of seniors who depend on the government insurance say they have an advance directive that tells healthcare providers what measures they do and don’t want used to prolong their life, even though 75 percent say they think it’s important. The lack of planning actually costs a lot of money. Medicare spends billions and billions of dollars annually on expensive treatment during the last year of a dying patient’s life. Without allowing Medicare to pay for end-of-life consultations, it’s hard to know whether patients even want to go to such expensive lengths.

He hasn’t read the bill, of course, but that doesn’t stop Rush Limbaugh from telling his vast audience of credulous seniors that the bill contains a compulsory euthanasia clause.

 More on this issue here, here, and here.

 

Image ( “La Vecchia” [“The Old Woman”], after Giorgione) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Tags: disinformation, euthanasia, fear-mongering, Healthcare, John Boehner, Republicans, Thaddeus McCotter, Virginia Foxx