Here's a snip:
To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.
Not only Medicare doctors will be monitored for their cost effectiveness. In the House bill, as Cato Institute's health care specialist Michael Tanner explains (New York Post, Nov. 8), "111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies -- all overseen by a new health-care czar," the commissioner of Health Care Choices, will keep watch on what the president has called excessive, wasteful health care expenditures.
Moreover, President Obama has made clear that eventually he desires a U.S. equivalent of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, a commission that decides which drugs and procedures for patients are within the national budget for health care. The current baseline expenditure for each Briton, according to Michael Tanner, is $44,305 per year.
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?"' (Disclosure: As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I have access to its continuing research.)
http://www.zanesvilletimesrecorder.com/article/20091203/OPINION02/912030312/1014/OPINION/Obamacare-endangers-Americans--lifespansLink to the article as it appears in my local Gannett fishwrap, which is slightly better than providing a link to World Nut Daily.
Looks like Hentoff has given up all pretense of moderation after the
Village Voice gave him his walking papers earlier this year. Anything you have in the way of debunking Hentoff's RW talking points would be appreciated.