A Preview Of Universal Health Care: Oregon Woman Denied Medicine, Offered Assisted Suicide Instead

One of the beautiful things about living in the United States is that with 50 states, we can compare and contrast varying policies to see how well they work or how miserably they fail. We can also predict how national policy will play out by observing how a similar policy affects a particular state.

Oregon is a state that has Universal Health Care. According to KVAL of Eugene, Oregon:

Barbara Wagner has one wish - for more time. "I'm not ready, I'm not ready to die," the Springfield woman said. "I've got things I'd still like to do." Her doctor offered hope in the new chemotherapy drug Tarceva, but the Oregon Health Plan sent her a letter telling her the cancer treatment was not approved. Instead, the letter said, the plan would pay for comfort care, including "physician aid in dying," better known as assisted suicide.

So, why was it not approved by a state that promised Universal Care?

One critic of assisted suicide calls the message disturbing nonetheless. "People deserve relief of their suffering, not giving them an overdose," said Dr. William Toffler. He said the state has a financial incentive to offer death instead of life: Chemotherapy drugs such as Tarceva cost $4,000 a month while drugs for assisted suicide cost less than $100.

And here is the real kicker:

[Dr. Som] Saha said state health officials do not consider whether it is cheaper for someone in the health plan to die than live. However, he admitted they must consider the state's limited dollars when dealing with a case such as Wagner's. "If we invest thousands and thousands of dollars in one person's days to weeks, we are taking away those dollars from someone," Saha said.

There is a sinlge word to describe the above situation: RATIONING.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Health Plan Covers Assisted Suicide But Not New Cancer Treatment
Susan Harding
KVAL.com
July 31, 2008

A Look At Socialized Medicine Through The Eyes Of A British Oncologist

Now that health care reform is back in the news, let's look at what is happening in countires that already have socialized health care, or more accurately, rationed health care.

The best way to do that is to get the information straight from someone who works within such a system. In this case, we have Dr. Karol Sikora, a practicing oncologist and professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College School of Medicine in London.

Dr. Sikora writes:

One of the more unproductive elements of President Obama's stimulus bill is the $1.1 billion allotted for "comparative effectiveness research" to assess all new health treatments to determine whether they are cost-effective. It sounds great, but in Britain we have had a similar system since 1999, and it has cost lives and kept the country in a kind of medical time warp. As a practicing oncologist, I am forced to give patients older, cheaper medicines. The real cost of this penny-pinching is premature death for thousands of patients -- and higher overall health costs than if they had been treated properly: Sick people are expensive.

And dead family members exact a heavy price from the heart. I've previously posted about many of the horror stories that come out of countries with nationalized health care systems. Here are a few:

Another Example Of The Horrors That Socialized Medicine Will Bring Us
84rules
March 19, 2009

A Look At Three Socialized Health Care Systems: Dr. Walter Williams Column
84rules
March 4, 2009

Socialized Medicine: Enforcing Your Duty To Die
84rules
February 16, 2009

Clearly, there is a major problem with socialized health care systems. Now, some of you libs would respond that the same thing is happening here in the U.S. with our privatized system. I say that would be a misrepresentation. You see, if 400 patients died at a U.S. hospital that way they did at Britain's NHS run Stafford and Cannock Chase hospitals, it would be the lead story on CNN and other leftist leaning networks for at least two weeks. But CNN isn't running any such story. From this we can conclude that the problems of a socialized health care system have not manifested themselves in our privatized system.

Continuing on with Dr. Sikora's analysis:

As the government takes increasing control of the health sector with schemes such as Medicare and SCHIP (State Children's Health-care Insurance Program), it is under pressure to control expenditures. Some American health-policy experts have looked favorably at Britain, which uses its National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) to appraise the cost-benefit of new treatments before they can be used in the public system. If NICE concludes that a new drug gives insufficient bang for the buck, it will not be available through our public National Health Service, which provides care for the majority of Britons. ... Partly as a result of these restrictions on new medicines, British patients die earlier. In Sweden, 60.3 percent of men and 61.7 percent of women survive a cancer diagnosis. In Britain the figure ranges between 40.2 to 48.1 percent for men and 48 to 54.1 percent for women.

And it is not only the restriction on new drugs that are having an effect. Delayed detection and delayed treatment also contribute the the low cancer survival rates in the U.K. These delays result from control of treatment procedures being passed from patient/doctor to some bureaucrats sitting in some air-conditioned office somewhere and none of whom have a medical degree.

Where do the bureaucrats get that control from? Read on:

Having a centralized "comparative effectiveness research" agency would also hand politicians inappropriate levels of control over clinical decisions, a fact which should alarm Americans as government takes ever more responsibility for delivering health care -- already 45 cents in every health-care dollar.

And would socialized medicine really mean universal coverage? No. It would mean rationed coverage with the most politically powerful ailments getting the most treatment:

In Britain, the reality is that life-and-death decisions are driven by electoral politics rather than clinical need. Diseases with less vocal lobby groups, such as strokes and mental health, get neglected at the expense of those that can shout louder. This is a principle that could soon be exported to America.

So, are you ready for the government to deny treatment to your pneumonia-suffering child because the gay lobby demanded that more resources go to treat (i.e. be rationed for) AIDS patients? Or are you ready to see your wife, mother or sister suffer from breast cancer because the government delayed the tests that could have detected the disease, delayed the treatments and denied the medicines that could have cured the disease?

If so, you are ready for socialized (rationed) medicine.

The majority of us do not want this to happen.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Karol Sikora: This Health Care 'Reform' Will Kill Thousands
Dr. Karol Sikora
New Hampshire Union Leader
May 12, 2009

The Stem Cell Debacle: Ideology Over Science

If there was any doubt that Doug Kmiec is now officially a useful idiot, Obama erased them when he signed an order allowing taxpayer money to be used for research on embryonic stem cells.

Never mind the fact that embryonic stem cells have never successfully been used in any kind of therapy whereas adult stem cells have been successfully used in hundreds of different treatment for hundreds of thousands of patients. In fact, most physicians agree that embryonic stem cells are so unstable that the outcomes of treatments using them cannot be accurately predicted.

Such was the story of a nine-year-old Israeli boy who was treated for ataxia-telangiectasia, a disease that causes degeneration of parts of the brain, with fetal stem cells. those fetal (i.e. embryonic) stem cells developed into a brain tumor. Doctors removed the tumor, but it has been gradually growing back since the surgery.

From Scientific American:

The theory is that because these stem cells are fetal cells, they are designed to proliferate and give rise to new tissue, which means they have the potential to produce tumors. The case, write the authors of this week’s case study, should serve as a warning that more research is needed to gauge the safety of these novel therapies. Other stem cell experts echo their concerns and worry that scientists don't yet understand exactly how stem cells used in such treatments behave once inside the body. Treating neurological disorders with stem cells from fetal brains is a "great scientific goal to pursue," but there is simply not enough evidence from animal studies, let alone human studies, to prove it is safe or effective for treating these diseases in children, says Sean Savitz, a neurologist at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

Scientific American predicted this is June of 2006:

Stem Cells: The Real Culprits In Cancer?
Michael F. Clarke and Wichael W. Becker
Scientific American
June 2006

But, is there any hope from any kind of stem cells?

The answer is: Yes. Adult stem cells offer a better hope than embryonic stem cells.

Savitz has just begun enrolling patients in a study on treating adult stroke victims with their own—adult—stem cells. The intent of the boy's treatment must have been to use these fetal stem cells to regenerate tissue lost in certain areas of the brain, Savitz speculates, but he adds, "we don't have a full understanding of how [brainlike] stem cells can generate different cells in the brain." Savitz says that the stem cells used in his trial are not likely to cause cancer because they are adult cells taken from bone marrow that die once they have accomplished their mission of repairing brain tissue. In their study, Savitz and his colleagues will remove cells from the bone marrow of patients 24 to 72 hours after they suffer a stroke, isolate hundreds of millions of stem cells from that marrow and then re-inject the stem cells into the bloodstream. Once inside the body, the stem cells will migrate to the brain and promote new blood vessel growth, reduce inflammation, and rescue neurons at risk of dying, Savitz hopes. And once they have done their job, they will basically commit suicide—unlike fetal neural cells, which tend to set up camp and proliferate, setting the stage for possible tumor formation, he explains.

And Dr. Savitz is not the only physician that feels this way.

Dr. Bernadine Healy recently wrote a blog piece about why embryonic stem cells are obsolete. In her essay, she notes the example of the nine-year-old Israeli boy:

His experience is neither an anomaly nor a surprise, but one feared by many scientists. These still-mysterious cell creations have been removed from the highly ordered environment of a fast-growing embryo, after all. Though they are tamed in a petri dish to be disciplined, mature cells, research in animals has shown repeatedly that sometimes the injected cells run wildly out of control—dashing hopes of tiny, human embryos benignly spinning off stem cells to save grown-ups, without risk or concern. That dream was still alive only a few weeks before this report. Within days of Obama's inauguration, the Food and Drug Administration approved its first-ever embryonic stem cell study in humans: the biotech company Geron's plan to inject highly purified human embryonic cells into eight to 10 patients with acute spinal cord injuries. (The cells are from a stem cell line approved by Bush because it predated his ban.) The FDA should now be compelled to take another look: Are eight to 10 patients enough, or one year of monitoring sufficient, to assess safety? And doctors who participate in the trial will have to ask what every doctor must ask before performing research on a human subject: Were I this patient, would I participate? Would I encourage my loved ones to do so?

I wouldn't want any of my loved ones participating in something like this. Given the track record of embyonic stem cells, it seems more like a death sentence than any kind of avenue for hope.

Again, is there another ray of hope?

According to Dr. Healy:

To date, most of the stem cell triumphs that the public hears about involve the infusion of adult stem cells. We've just recently seen separate research reports of patients with spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis benefiting from adult stem cell therapy. These cells have the advantage of being the patient's natural own, and the worst they seem to do after infusion is die off without bringing the hoped-for benefit. They do not have the awesome but dangerous quality of eternal life characteristic of embryonic stem cells. A second kind of stem cell that has triumphed is an entirely new creation called iPS (short for induced pluripotent stem cell), a blockbuster discovery made in late 2007. These cells are created by reprogramming DNA from adult skin. The iPS cells are embryonic-like in that they can turn into any cell in the body—and so bypass the need for embryos or eggs. In late February, scientists reported on iPS cells that had been transformed into mature nerve cells. While these cells might become a choice for patient therapy in time, scientists are playing this down for now. Why? These embryonic-like cells also come with the risk of cancer. James Thomson, the stem cell pioneer from the University of Wisconsin who was the first to grow human embryonic stem cells in 1998, is an independent codiscoverer of iPS cells along with Japanese scientists. Already these reprogrammed cells have eclipsed the value of those harvested from embryos, he has said, because of significantly lower cost, ease of production, and genetic identity with the patient. They also bring unique application to medical and pharmaceutical research, because cells cultivated from patients with certain diseases readily become laboratory models for developing and testing therapy. That iPS cells overcome ethical concerns about creating and sacrificing embryos is an added plus.

So, what we have here is that adult stem cells offer better hope for treating ailments and induced pluripotent stem cells don't have to overcome any ethical hurdles for use. Also, fetal stem cells have a track record of being unpredicatable and are known to cause cancer.

So, why are the leftists so intent on spending money and resources on embryonic stem cells?

Because its keeps the abortion agenda moving forward. No other reason.

If this were about medicine and science, the major push would be to fund adult stem cell research and iPS research.

You can access the two articles on-line here:

Fetal Stem Cells Cause Tumor In A Teenage Boy
Coco Ballantyne
Scientific American
February 19, 2009

Why Embryonic Stem Cells Are Obsolete
Dr. Bernadine Healy
U.S. News
March 4, 2009

A Look At What's In Store For Us If We Adopt Socialized Medicine

Hundreds of horror stories about the absurdities and inadequacies of socialized health care are coming out of the United Kingdom and Canada. Well, we can add one more to the list.

This comes from David Altaner and Bruce Rule at Bloomberg:

Jack Rosser's doctor says taking Pfizer Inc.'s Sutent cancer drug may keep him alive long enough to see his 1-year-old daughter, Emma, enter primary school. The U.K.'s National Health Service says that's not worth the expense.

If you read that right, then you know that under a nationalized health care system like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton envisioned, doctor's would not be making decisions but government bureaucrats would. The above shows exactly how heartless such a nationalized system really is.

More :

The NHS, which provides health care to all Britons and is funded by tax revenue, is spending about 100 billion pounds this fiscal year, or more than double what it spent a decade ago, as the cost of treatments increase and the population ages. The higher costs are forcing the NHS to choose between buying expensive drugs for terminal patients and providing more services for a wider number of people. About 800 of 3,000 cancer patients lose their appeals for regulator-approved drugs each year because of cost, Canterbury- based charity Rarer Cancers Forum said. The U.K. is considering whether to make permanent a preliminary ruling that four medicines, including Sutent, are too expensive to be part of the government-funded treatment of advanced kidney cancer.

There is a reason why the U.K. is in last place among the industrialized nations for cancer survival rates. Delayed detection and delayed treatment of various diseases and conditions are part and parcel to a socialized health care system. Government run health care offers too little too late.

And this telling fact illustrates what people in the U.K. really feel about the NHS:

South Gloucestershire, the trust that includes Rosser's home, accepts applications for Sutent funding only for exceptional cases, said Ann Jarvis, director of commissioning at the trust, in an e-mail. "Unfortunately for very expensive drugs, if they are proven to only provide a small benefit we have to prioritize other treatments."

The people joke, "We don't have socialized health care, we have rationed health care."

Yes, they do. And we do not want it over here. It is a disaster.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Cancer Patients Lose Shot At Longer Life In U.K. Cuts
David Altaner and Bruce Rule
Bloomberg.com
November 18, 2008

And there is more information at the following website:

Big Government Health

And learn some not-so-well known facts about government run health care:

Learn The Facts