Most healthcare dollars are spent on the sick — that’s obvious. So if Obamacare is going to cover more people but cut costs and not add to the deficit, as Obama claims, somebody is going to get less care. Who might that be? President Obama said this in the NYT:

when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip…the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible. And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting…

So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here…

I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Note that last paragraph. It sounds so emotionally detached and android-like, with its abstractness and lack of clarity. (It’s not the first time that Obama has spoken “oddly without affect“.) Just what is this “difficult democratic conversation”? What “normal political channels” is Obama speaking of? What happens if you don’t agree with the “doctors, scientists, and ethicists” and the politicians empowering them? Reading this makes us want to sic the trial lawyers on every last one of them. Just who does this Obama fellow think he is?

Feel free to decide for yourself just what Obama means in that last paragraph of his. Tom Maguire thinks that he knows the answer to that.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 4:10 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Law, Republicans, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.