American Thinker: How the Stimulus Bill Could Kill You

Philip Dearmore's personal annotations on this page

Readmore77 bookmarked on 2009-02-04 politics economy stimulus-package liberalism

One has to keep a keen eye out for the components of the bill that don't just steal your money, but that may actually do you great physical harm, if not kill you outright.
Section 9201 of the stimulus package establishes the "Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research." This body, which would be made up of federal bureaucrats will "coordinate the conduct or support of comparative effectiveness and related health services research."
Once a panel of government experts decides what is and what is not cost-effective by their definition, the government will stop paying for treatments, medicines, therapies or devices that fall into the latter category.
Thus, if a handful of government employees deem a therapy not cost effective, no health insurance will cover it and it will become virtually unobtainable to patients at any cost.
If the feds step in and say, no, that new treatment is too expensive, it will never have the chance to become better, the supply will not increase and it won't become more cost-effective. It will just die on the shelf, and so will the patients who potentially could have benefited.

This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Feb 2009, by Philip Dearmore.