I gave this post a provocative title so I’d get your attention. This isn’t a dissertation on death panels. Rather, it’s a look at the consequences of upcoming federal restrictions on health care. Thanks to Nat Hentoff’s article, we now know that the system being proposed has amajor flaw in it. Hentoff identifies it here:

In this country, bureaucrats keeping tabs on patients, without actually seeing them and their condition, will mean, as Tanner notes, that “every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: ‘Does the government think I’m doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?’”

By nature, Democrats look at groups. This isn’t automatically wrong. It’s just an observation. In this instance, that’s taking the wrong approach because it potentially obliterates the doctor-patient relationship. This is where statistics will be used to prevent doctors from treating individual patients. It won’t prevent them from treating everyone. It’ll just impose a quota on how many people will be treated as individuals and how many people will be denied treatment because a bureaucrat said no.

President Obama and his supporters in Congress insist that clinical studies prove how many needless and expensive tests and procedures are so often performed. But these are collective statistics. Individual patients are left out.

In health care, groupthink is potentially lethal.

Harvard Medical School faculty members Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband bring the individual back into this crucial debate in “Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care” (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31): “Data from clinical studies provide averages from populations and may not apply to individual patients.

“Clinical studies routinely exclude patients with more than one medical condition and often the elderly or people on multiple medications. Conclusions about what works and what doesn’t work change much too quickly for policy-makers to dictate clinical practice.” Everyone, regardless of political party, should keep in mind:

“If doctors and hospitals are rewarded for complying with government-mandated treatment measures or penalized if they do not comply, clearly, federal bureaucrats are directing health decisions,” Groopman and Hartzband wrote.

That’s a disturbing thought. I don’t trust bureaucrats as it relates to MY health care. I’ll trust doctors with providing my health care.

It’s time for Senate Republicans to start listening. There’s nothing worthwhile about this legislation worth saving. It’s time to kill this legislation. If GOP senators don’t start listening to their supporters, they’ll find their supporters quickly shifting their support to primary challengers who’ll listen.

If the TEA Party Movement should’ve taught everyone, it’s that We The People demand that our elected officials listen to us and that we expect them to base their decisions on what’s best for the nation, not what will ingratiate them to the Beltway echochamber. People who want to be popular with the Beltway crowd can’t represent their constituents because inside the Beltway people don’t think anything like real people.

It’s time to kill this legislation because Washington dictating what doctors can and can’t do is a disaster. Thinking that they know better than a physician is insulting, digusting and potentially lethal. That isn’t something we should tolerate.

Technorati: Quotas, Bureaucrats, Statistics, Health Care, President Obama, Democrats, Doctor-Patient Relationship

Cross-posted at California Conservative