Tag Archives: Medicaid

“In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.” Dr. Jacques Cousteau

“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.” -Professor Maurice King

“I’ve been a cancer doctor for over 30 years, and I think the proper role for a doctor is to take care of the patient. Assisted suicide should not be in the realm of medicine.” Dr. Kenneth Stevens

Living Wills

The first living will was conceived in 1967 by Luis Kutner, a human-rights lawyer in Chicago, and cofounder of the pro-abortion Amnesty International, in conjunction with the Euthanasia Society of America. The living wills were distributed by the Euthanasia Society.

Luis Kutner’s musings about death anticipated the day when medicine would cross the line from prolonging life to prolonging dying. In 1967, he wrote his first ”living will,” a document that allows a person to specify under what conditions life-support systems should be discontinued. In 1930 Mr. Kutner helped found an American chapter of the Euthanasia Society, modeled after an English counterpart that included, playwright and eugenic extremist, George Bernard Shaw and Julian Huxley (the first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and a member of the Eugenics Society).

The idea did not catch on, but in 1938 the Rev. Charles Potter founded the Society for the Right to Die. In April, 1984, a team of prominent doctors published in the New England Journal of Medicine a set of guidelines for treatment of gravely ill patients, concluding it was ethical to withhold nutrition and even medicine if it only prolonged a painful death.

Anyone who doubts that the Living Will, which is urged upon all Americans, comes from the Euthanasia Society can read the main article proposing its adoption written by attorney, Luis Kutner in 1969 entitled, “Due Process of Euthanasia: The Living Will, A Proposal,” [Indiana Law Journal v. 44, 1969, p. 549] The Living Will was written to create a due process of euthanasia. In addition, in 1970, the Euthanasia Society of America distributed 60,000 living wills. They knew where they were leading American society, but the misguided, trusting Americans couldn’t see it.

Kutner’s intention in creating the Living Will was to provide a way that governmental authorities could allow a form of euthanasia. The living wills were “sold” to the public as patients determining what type of care they would or would not want, but their main effect is to limit care that might allow them to live longer, an incremental step toward open euthanasia. The euthanasia-supporting organizations gave us the Advance Directives and the Living Wills, and now we have the P.O.L.S.T. forms (Physician Orders for [Limiting] Life-Sustaining Treatment) which are spreading across the country.

Even though the public today never thinks they are agreeing to “euthanasia” when they make out a living will, the effect of filling one out can interfere with getting treatment if you change your mind and want care. For example, some physicians will “write off” patients who have a Do-Not-Resuscitate order or a Living Will and simply provide “comfort care” while refusing to treat easily-treated problems. The result is ultimately death for the patient.

If you are having any form of surgery, one of the first questions you’ll be asked is if you have a “living will.” If you do, I’d suggest you destroy it. If you don’t, then congratulations, you’re one of the few who have refused to be brainwashed into providing a way for the medical industry to deny you care, and perhaps bring about your early demise.

Medicare

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R.3590) has already modified how Medicare will be run. Under Section 3021, “Establishment of Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation,” the Secretary of Health and Human Services “shall adjust the payments made to an eligible safety net hospital system or network from a fee-for-service payment structure to a global capitated payment model.” [H.R.3590 p.205] Going from a Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement system that pays fees for each service provided, to a system that has a cap on payments made for all services provided to a patient is one of the most significant changes to Medicare ever made and will certainly result in drastic changes. In Part 2 of this series I told about the Geisinger Hospital programs President Obama has praised. They have already moved away from the medical standard of fee-for-service.

Hospitals will have to change what tests, surgeries and treatments they provide if they know the amount they will be paid is capped for each patient they serve! This certainly will result in more people dying for lack of care, or needed life-saving surgeries, or even for surgeries like knee or hip replacements.

The changes to Medicare/Medicaid are not being seen by the majority of the public, nor are they being reported by the controlled media. These changes are also being made to all health care. We are quickly moving from a sanctity-of-life society to one that closely resembles Hitler’s eugenics program, targeting the elderly and disabled for early death. The changes aren’t for efficiency, they’re for something else.

Those of us on Medicare or Medicaid are already experiencing the decisions made by unelected bureaucrats in D.C. (Remember, in older dictionaries, “Soviet” is defined as unelected councils.) America’s seniors are stuck with Medicare even though in 1965 when it became law, it was a “voluntary” program. Lyndon Johnson pressured all private health insurers to cancel all policies available to seniors. And get this, if a senior wants to opt-out of Medicare they have to give up their Social Security, even though we’ve paid into it all our lives. Only the very wealthy (think politicians) can opt out. Medicare is a monster program that has NEVER been run efficiently and has been crippled by fraud from day one, and is in enormous debt. Link

Both political parties are silently promoting the stealth euthanasia already begun long ago in America. The past generous benefits of Medicare are to be phased out to make the program more “efficient.” The politicians tell us there is no rationing of care, and truly there are no “formal” death panels. However, they have set in motion the processes that reduce reimbursement under the guise of “limiting expenditures,” or “keeping costs down,” and these processes will result in rationed care. The HMOs, and private health insurance companies will make decisions knowingly resulting in denied tests, denied treatments, and certain death in many cases. When the federal government completely takes over health care, test and treatment denials will be the equivalent of death for many.

Obama Care creates several methods which are likely to result in rationed care. The “Independent Payment Advisory Board” (IPAB) is allegedly not allowed to make recommendations that result in rationing, but it can and will exert pressure on providers by reducing how much they get paid to provide a service. It’s all about our money folks.

PJ Media states, “The IPAB would consist of 15 members appointed by the president (and confirmed by the Senate), empowered to decide what medical tests and procedures Medicare would cover and how much it would pay providers. However, giving this power to the IPAB would put tremendous medical decision-making in the hands of unelected officials with minimal accountability. We’ve already seen a foretaste of this when a federal government medical panel attempted to save money by restricting screening mammography to women over age 50, even though decades of medical research has shown clear benefits to starting annual mammograms at age 40.”Although the Obama administration stated that the IPAB would not ration medical care, its power to set payments to doctors and hospitals would give it de facto rationing power.

Once the feds take over management of the entire health care system, (as in Medicare and Medicaid), it will have control over how care is delivered, what care is available, and who receives the care …. or not. It controls how much providers are paid…the very reason physicians are being driven from the field! According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, America will face a shortage of more than 90,000 doctors in 10 years. With the growing population of baby boomers and the shortage of doctors, anyone with a brain can see what will happen. The Agenda 21 planners will eliminate a good many of us just because we can no longer receive life saving care.

Politicians of both stripes are promoting palliative and hospice care as the destination for us all. There is no need for the “death panel.” Rationed care will result in early death for the elderly, ill, and disabled.

Ione Whitlock of The LifeTree Organization tells us, “Thanks to Big Death - a collection of heavily funded non-profit hospice and palliative care groups - the line between palliative care (pain relief; symptom management) and imposed death has become blurred.”

Hospice Growth

“There were more than twice as many Medicare hospice patients in 2008 than in 1998.” — Hospice Data 1998-2008 - Centers for Medicare Services. With the number of patients, i.e., “customers,” increasing by 10% every year, without fail, the Corporate Hospice industry will grow exponentially. “Expenditures for the Medicare hospice benefit have increased approximately $1 billion per year. In fiscal year (CY) 1998, expenditures for the Medicare hospice benefit were $2.2 billion, while in CY 2008, expenditures for the Medicare hospice benefit were $11.2 billion.” (Source: Health Care Information System (HCIS)].” — Hospice Data 1998-2008 - Centers for Medicare Services).

In 2009, only about 40% of hospice patients were cancer patients. However, in the 1980s, almost all of them were! Patients are now being shunted into hospice because they are elderly, some may be weak, others with minor non-Alzheimer’s forgetfulness, and not always with terminal diseases. Sometimes the elderly are not receiving proper care, either by family or in nursing homes and become frail and weak. Then they are shunted into hospice. The plan is for 100% of Americans to die in Hospice. The cost for acute care is much too high to be “sustainable,” according to our government. Some private insurers are creating “Advanced Illness” programs where patients are admitted for care by a hospice agency even though they are not expected to die within six months. This appears to be a move to save money by having patients die sooner with fewer or no hospitalizations, thereby saving the private insurance company (and the government) significant expenditures and increasing profit.

What used to be a strictly volunteer program for the dying patient is now very big business. The CEO of the largest nonprofit hospice in the country, Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, is Mary Labyak, and she has told her staff, “We’ve got to corner the market.” This is corporate mentality, and it’s all about money, not caring for the patients at end-of-life. Labyak’s salary in 2009 was $320,347. Labyak is regularly placed on the board of directors of the nation’s largest hospice lobbying group, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

Hospice of Michigan, Inc., the second largest nonprofit hospice in the U.S., reports it paid $447,008 in 2009 to its CEO, Dorothy Deremo.

Hospice of the Western Reserve, Inc., the third largest nonprofit hospice in the U.S., reports it paid $323,740 in 2008 to its CEO, David Simpson.

The top level policymakers, most of them unelected, have decided that people will die in hospice or palliative care units, and that they will be pushed into hospice through a wide variety of means. Researchers at Duke University found that hospice reduced Medicare costs in 2009 at about $3.6 billion. With the baby boomers aging, imagine the increase in “cost savings” for the government as hospice doubles in the years to come.

The nation’s most prominent hospice physicians (such as Joanne Lynn, MD and Ira Byock, MD) are proponents of terminal sedation to hasten death. Link Link Willard Gaylin, MD, co-founder of the Hastings Center is a proponent of euthanasia who applauds the efforts to expand the definition of “death” in order to overcome obstacles to legally performing euthanasia. Gaylin is widely accepted in the mainstream media and policymaking circles, and the Hastings Center is one of the organizations that has most influenced the modern American hospice industry to betray its original mission to care, not kill.

If patients are hurried along toward death, the savings skyrocket. Obama Care’s cost savings will come from the baby boomers being euthanized quickly rather than being treated for illnesses, chronic or otherwise, at the end of their lives. Not only is this part of the United Nations Agenda 21 plan of population reduction, but this will rid America of those who still remember what this country was founded on and our God given rights. We are considered “useless eaters.” The plan is a fait accompli.

In Part 7, we’ll discuss the policy makers and those who fund the euthanasia and assisted suicide through the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, one of which is, of course, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.