The Senate Finance committee will drop the controversial end of life counseling provision from its version of ObamaCare:
I’m surprised it took them this long. If it had been Palin and the right tossing rhetorical grenades, they might have gone to the mat to keep it in there, but as the ‘Cuda herself noted in her response to Obama last night, it ain’t just conservatives who are freaked out by these provisions. Eugene Robinson and Charles Lane at WaPo also concluded that having “outside” input into end-of-life decisions when the government’s desperate to cut costs could lead to abuse; Mickey Kaus and Camille Paglia have hammered The One about it too. And Obama’s done himself no favors trying to explain what he has in mind, as Tom Maguire reminds us. From an interview in April:
THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
DAVID LEONHARDT: So how do you – how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
This is actually a sideshow issue to the real problem, I think. While this provision reeked, the one that has a world-class stench to it is the one putting an independent, unelected and unanswerable board in place to decide what treatments are allowed for people. That is the provision that has the greatest potential for abuse.
Don’t count this as all that big a victory, folks. This is not the thing to worry about. There are much deeper issues and the left is conflating them to mask the real intent.
This section of the proposed legislation was always a problem for me. We already have “end of life counseling” when we get to that point in our life. My Dad chose hospice, he could have waged a hopeless battle for a few more months but it would have only been (even more) agonizing and the end would have been the same.
This proposal offered people nothing more than what we already have. The difference is that we now get such counseling when we need it … when we have a terminal illness or are diagnosed with something that we know will take our senses away from us.
Counseling EVERYONE who enters a nursing home is offensive and dehumanizing. It is a very subtle way of saying “you know, you really aren’t producing anything are are an overall drag on your community. Have you ever considered suicide? It might be a nice gift for the children.”
Sick and despicable.
This provision can always be put back in.
The Senate Finance committee can do anything it wants; so can all the other Senate committees – and then there’s the
House.
Besides, The provision everyone is talking about was introduced by a Republican, the
Democrats simply like the idea of not having folks pay for End Of Life Counseling out of their own personal pocket.
Who wouldn’t?
In the case I am most familiar with there was no separate charge for “end of life counseling”. It was a regular part of a discussion of treatment options when it was determined that chemotherapy wasn’t working.