For some unknown reason, this story popped back up on the wires yesterday. Either way, old or new, it is a window into the future under Obamacare.
For those that missed it last June, the State of Oregon refused a woman enrolled in their state health care program her chemotherapy treatment because she wasn’t a viable candidate for recovery. They instead offered to pay for her to die via the assisted suicide program legalized in that state.
Now, I’m all for assisted suicide (and I don’t only mean what needs to be done to repeat child molesters). However, using that program as a replacement for cancer treatment just to save the government run health care program a few bucks is disgusting, to say the least.
There are two experimental healthcare programs in place now, one in Oregon and one in Taxachusetts. The Oregon plan, for which Oregon’s Medicaid dollars get spent, is a rationed-care system. It is designed so that enrollees have to live with the system dollars that are available. Every medical procedure which might possibly be provided is ranked with a priority number. If that number falls below a certain level (the current “float” level of the dollars in the system vs. the numbers of enrollees), that procedure is NOT performed on the patient. Could this case be that of an end-stage cancer patient? It sounds like it. Such a patient would have low priority numbers attached to chemotherapy.
The MASS program simply requires health insurance, at whatever cost it’s at for the enrollee (either private or State-arranged). It requires the enrollee to make room in his/her budget for the insurance premium.
The difference between the two systems is where the responsibility for budgeting comes. In Oregon, the State assumes that responsibility, and in MA, the State forces the individual to.
Neither of these systems is free-market, but the OR system at least bows to the reality of fitting the insurance to the money available. What the Oregon enrollees don’t realize is that the illegals are killing them, because the State system pays for illegals as well as citizens, and the priority level floats downward because of them.
If the Oregon system were to be adopted as the “Public Option”, there could at least be SOME semblance of cost control. The MA system is currently in a 30-40% cost over-run, after only it’s FIRST year.