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Stealth Rationing of Medical Care Sneaks Into the 'Stimulus' Bill, Says the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)

Posted on: Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 12:13 CST

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Unwanted "change" is coming to senior citizens and all those needing medical care if the stealth rationing in the "stimulus" bill becomes law. Rationing of medical care has nothing to do with stimulating the economy, but it was inserted into the bill before the public realized it.

As the disgraced Tom Daschle planned, the government will gain control over medical care incrementally. The stimulus bill seeks to lay the foundation for rationing and denying care to the elderly and the infirm by setting up the infrastructure for monitoring the treatment of all Americans. Doctors who are not "meaningful users" of the system will be punished by fee cuts.

Americans do not want to imitate Canada and England, where patients are told they are too old to receive a necessary operation or must sit on a long waiting list. It can take over a year in those countries before someone sees a doctor for treatment of a life-threatening condition, such as cancer.

But under the rationing inserted into the stimulus bill, Medicare will no longer pay for safe and effective care. Instead, it would apply a standard of cost-effectiveness in order to ration or deny care to the elderly and those who are sickest.

The stealth provisions of this bill create a massive new bureaucracy for controlling medicine, giving this new bureaucracy more money than the stimulus bill provides to all of our armed forces combined.

The lynchpin of this government takeover is to start building a national electronic database of medical records. Patient privacy will be impossible, and mistakes in medical records will be nearly impossible to delete.

This plan will lead to enormous new costs for doctors' offices and patients, but insurance companies are determined to have full access to patients' medical records, and the stimulus bill will enable that. Employers also want access to private medical records to prove fitness for work.

For more information, see: http://www.aapsonline.org/

NOTE: AAPS is a non-profit, professional association of physicians in all specialties, dedicated since 1943 to protection of the patient-physician relationship. It accepts no corporate or government funding, and its board members and officers serve without compensation.

SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)

Source: PR Newswire

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