Here is your preview of Nationalized Healthcare

[Bold_Fighter]

libs always say how wonderful it will be...well, here is what will occur (amongst other things) on a daily basis....


Scientist pleads guilty

NIH official made illicit deal with drug company

By Matthew Dolan
Sun reporter

December 9, 2006

Scientist made deal with drug firm

A senior government scientist originally from Baltimore pleaded guilty yesterday to accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed fees from the same drug manufacturer whose public-private research collaboration he oversaw.
As part of his agreement with federal prosecutors, Pearson "Trey" Sunderland III, chief of the geriatric psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, is expected to receive a sentence of two years' supervised probation and must forfeit $300,000 in illegal proceeds and reimbursements.
His ethical misdeeds came to light after a series of newspaper stories led to a congressional investigation into the federal government's premier collection of research centers based in Bethesda.
With proper disclosure and approval, NIH scientists are allowed to receive outside income. But the discovery of dozens of private financial arrangements between drug companies and publicly employed scientists has embarrassed the agency in recent years and led to yesterday's plea. "This case is not a technical mistake," Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said at a news conference after Sunderland's plea. "This case is not an honest mistake." ......

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-md.ethics09dec09,0,4347273.story?track=mostemailed link

[DesertFox]

Must be a Democrat. Republicans would never get off so easy.

[Bold_Fighter]

Tom Hamilton, a local radio lib guy here said that Pfizer MUST be shut down and investigated....hah! yah right, stupid lib

[Rhino]

Advertisement and extraneous code removed.

[DoctorDoom]

On June 23, 1995, a swarm of armed men invaded the Mason, West Virginia medical office of Dr. Danny R. Westmoreland. With their guns drawn, the intruders ordered everyone, including a nine-year-old child, to stand against a wall while the office was ransacked. The marauders were agents of the federal "health police," and they had violated the sanctuary of Dr. Westmoreland’s office — which is also his home — and terrorized patients at gunpoint in order to execute a search warrant against the physician.

Federal Assault

The armed siege of Dr. Westmoreland’s office was an outgrowth of the Clinton Administration’s Operation Restore Trust (ORT), which was launched after the stunning defeat of the "HillaryCare" plan for socialized medicine. Under ORT, federal and state inspectors investigated home health agencies, nursing homes, and medical suppliers across the country, supposedly seeking to wring fraud and abuse from our health care system. The real purposes of the initiative were less commendable: It was intended to break private practitioners to the saddle of federal authority, amplify the public perception of a health care "crisis" that only the central government could rectify, and generate revenue for the federal health care bureaucracy. ORT eventually produced $200 million in fines and settlements and criminal convictions of scores of physicians who had committed no crime against persons or property, but had merely run afoul of an obscure bureaucratic technicality.Overdose of Socialism (http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1999/06-21-99/vo15no13_overdose.htm)

The Clintons hotly deny that their plan would require rationing of care as other countries with socialized medicine do (in Great Britain, no one over the age of 55 can get honey dialysis on the national health plan), but after a close reading of the bill, scholar Elizabeth McCaughey, writing in The New Republic magazine, has conclusively demonstrated that it would.

She points to language in the bill, Sec. 1322(a)(2), requiring the plan to "reduce the amount of payments otherwise made to providers ... in such a manner and by such amounts as necessary to assure that expenditures will not exceed budget." What that means is, the squeeze will be put on doctors and hospitals if costs are running high in any given year. If providers don't get paid, they will not work. But perhaps Bill and Hillary skipped that class at Yale.

Under the Clinton plan, every American would receive medical coverage, but the government - not you and your doctor- would decide which treatments were available and which not. McCaughey has been smeared by the White House as a liar for asserting this in print, but she has responded with spirit and specificity. She quotes again from the bill itself to prove that only those services that the "National Health Board" -even the term should send a chill down your spine - deems to be "necessary and appropriate" will be provided. It will be nearly impossible to go outside the system and pay a doctor directly on a fee-for-service basis, thus the title of McCaughey's article - No Exit."The Real Health Care Crisis (http://www.speakupamerica.net/articles/1994/therealhealthcarecrisis.htm) (From 1994 - URL is no longer active.)

Elizabeth McCaughey, one of the few who have read the entire 1,342-page Clinton plan, titled her article for the New Republic "No Exit." Rather than assuring us of compassion, specific page numbers of the plan are included throughout the article to document Clinton's true agenda: price controls through rationing based on age, illness and alliance-determined "quality of life." The plan also mandates new federal health care laws to discourage the development of black market health services for dissatisfied consumers.Health reform shouldn't mean end of compassionate care (http://www.cchconline.org/publications/compassion.php3)

The Canadian public health system is often put forward as an ideal for Americans to emulate. It provides all Canadians with free basic health care: free doctors' visits, free hospital ward care, free surgery, free drugs and medicine while in the hospital -- plus some free dental care for children as well as free prescription drugs and other services for the over-65 and welfare recipients. You just show your plastic medicare card and you never see a medical bill.

This extensive national health system was begun in the late 1950s with a system of publicly funded hospital insurance, and completed in the late 1960s and early 1970s when comprehensive health insurance was put into place. The federal government finances about 40 per cent of the costs, provided the provinces set up a system satisfying federal norms. All provincial systems thus are very similar, and the Quebec case which we will examine is fairly typical.

One immediate problem with public health care is with the funding. Those usually attracted to such a "free" system are the poor and the sick -- those least able to pay. A political solution is to force everybody to enroll in the system, which amounts to redistributing income towards participants with higher health risks or lower income. This is why the Canadian system is universal and compulsory.

Even if participation is compulsory in the sense that everyone has to pay a health insurance premium (through general or specific taxes), some individuals will be willing to pay a second time to purchase private insurance and obtain private care. If you want to avoid this double system, you do as in Canada: you legislate a monopoly for the public health insurance system.

This means that although complementary insurance (providing private or semi-private hospital rooms, ambulance services, etc.) is available on the market, sale of private insurance covering the basic insured services is forbidden by law. Even if a Canadian wants to purchase basic private insurance besides the public coverage, he cannot find a private company legally allowed to satisfy his demand.Socialized Medicine: The Canadian Experience (http://www.self-gov.org/freeman/8903lemi.html)

In 1993, (has it been that long?) Bill Clinton proposed a government takeover of our health care system, which constitutes one-seventh of the US economy. His liberal health care plan would have created huge new bureaucracies, taken health choices out of the hands of citizens, and paid for it with staggering new taxes on working Americans-- taxes that would have shattered the economy and cost over a million jobs. This type of rationed health care will not work.

CLINTON'S PLAN FOR GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE

On September 22, 1993, Bill Clinton proposed the most sweeping Big Government program in fifty years-- a 1,342 page bill for socializing America's health care system. The plan was born after months of planning by no other than Hillary Clinton, Ira Magaziner, and a hand-picked task force they created. Americans were given many assurances by the Clintons, but when the public found out what was really in the bill and what it meant-- huge government spending increases, equally huge tax hikes, massive new government bureaucracies, loss of freedom, and loss of jobs-- they rejected it overwhelmingly.

MASSIVE NEW GOVERNMENT SPENDING:

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Clinton Health Care Plan would have increased federal spending by $1.584 trillion over five years. (CBO Analysis, 2/94) Nearly all of this enormous cost would have been paid for with new taxes on working Americans.

GIGANTIC NEW TAXES:

The total new tax burden imposed under the Clinton Health Plan was a staggering $1.511 trillion over the first five years-- an economy-wrecking amount. (CBO Analysis 2/94) This gigantic tax increase consisted of two key amounts. The first, $1.384 trillion to pay for Clinton's mandatory health alliances, would have entailed a new payroll tax of between 14% and 17% on every working American. (Joint Economic Committee) In addition, the Clinton Plan would have imposed 17 other new taxes that would have cost $127 billion over 5 years, and $300 billion over ten years. Thus, the average American family would have faced a massive new tax bill of $3,056 per year to pay for Bill Clinton's plan.

BUDGET-BUSTING NEW ENTITLEMENTS:

The Clinton Health Plan would have created new federal entitlements that would have exploded the deficit. By 1998, just the second year in which Clinton's plan was to be in effect, the total cost of these government subsidies would have been larger than any federal program except Social Security and Medicare. (Senate Republican Policy Committee, 8/15/94) By the year 2000, and despite a tax increase of $1.511 trillion, Clinton's plan would have also added $74 billion to the deficit. (CBO Analysis, 2/94)Bill Clinton's Liberal Health Care Plan (http://www.gargaro.com/healthcare.html)

America cannot afford socialist health "care".