A Growth Vision for Health Reform

By NEWT GINGRICH

A 3-year-old boy was recently diagnosed with a rare, aggressive, soft-tissue cancer in his bladder. Radiation treatment would have stunted the growth of his pelvic bones, hips and bladder and left him disabled. Radical surgery could remove his bladder, prostate and portions of his rectum. That would have left him impotent, using a colostomy bag, and urinating through another bag in his abdomen.

His parents chose a third option—a new "unproven" therapy where a proton beam precisely targeted the radiation dose so that it didn't cripple their son for life. The boy is now cancer-free and his body functions normally.

This story would seem to be an example of our health-care system at its best. But it is incompatible with the left's vision for overhauling the health-care industry.

Despite all the well-documented problems with our health-care system, the United States is still the world's leading source of medical innovation. Since 1960, the U.S. age-adjusted death rate for heart disease has declined by 54% due to advancing technology and new drugs. Pacemakers have been transformed. They once required a user to wear a backpack to monitor the device's short battery life. Today, pacemaker batteries last more than seven years and are small enough to install in the rib-cage muscle wall.

Premature babies survive in America to live full lives more often than anywhere else in the world. New drugs now arriving on the market cure once-lethal leukemia. On the horizon there are vaccines to prevent other types of cancer. Modern science and technology offer even more exciting treatments in the future for diseases like AIDS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Standing in opposition to this world of hope is the vision of reform advanced by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. That vision would destroy the economic incentives that drive health-care innovation because it starts with a fundamental conceit: that government planners can spend health-care dollars better than patients and doctors in the marketplace. This planning is the foundation for the arbitrary insistence that spending 17% of our GDP on health care is "too much."

The new bureaucracies that would be set up to reduce health-care spending by slashing payments to doctors, hospitals, surgeons, specialists, drug companies, high-tech equipment makers and others will kill the innovation that has served us so well. The essential incentives for the huge capital investment necessary to develop breakthrough treatments will be gone. And so too will high-paying jobs that these investments create.
Indeed, the plan released by Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) last week would impose new taxes on medical device manufacturers of $40 billion over 10 years. That's more than industry venture capital investment.

Click here to read the rest.

URGENT ACTION ALERT: Ask Senators to vote Yes on Hatch Amendment to fund abstinence education

Senator Hatch (R-UT) has introduced an amendment into the Senate health care reform bill to reinstate Title V Abstinence Education funding for FY2010. This amendment will be offered this week in the Senate Finance Committee. (The vote could be as early as Tuesday of this week)

Background

Title V state block grants for abstinence education expired June 30, 2009. Since then, 2 actions in the House have been taken related to this funding:

1. Rep. Lee Terry introduced an amendment in the House to reinstate Title V Abstinence Education Funding. It failed by only 3 votes in anti-abstinence Waxman's Energy & Commerce Committee earlier this year.

2. An amendment was successfully inserted in the House health care reform bill to transfer former Title V funds to "comprehensive" sex education block grants to states.


Recent research analysis demonstrates that school based abstinence education is more successful in positive behavior change than so-called "comprehensive" sex education.


Action Item
•Call your Senators immediately. Ask them to vote "yes" on the Hatch Amendment if they serve on the Finance Committee. Ask them to urge their colleagues to do the same.


• Make a personal call to your friends and colleagues asking them to immediately call their Senators as well if they serve on the Senate Finance Committee

The United States Capitol switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. A switchboard operator will connect you directly to your Senators' Offices.

Continue to encourage unique calls to your Senators until the Senate vote is taken.

What to Say To Your Congressional Member

I am calling to urge Senator [name] to stand with youth in our state by voting "yes" on Senator Hatch's amendment to continue Title V abstinence education funding to states. This amendment will be offered as a part of the Senate health care reform bill. Abstinence alleviates millions of dollars in health care costs related to teen sexual activity. Can we count on Senator [name] support of the Hatch Abstinence Education amendment? Thank you.

Members of the Senate Finance Committee

Democrats
MAX BAUCUS, MT
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, WV
KENT CONRAD, ND
JEFF BINGAMAN, NM
JOHN F. KERRY, MA
BLANCHE L. LINCOLN, AR
RON WYDEN, OR
CHARLES E. SCHUMER, NY
DEBBIE STABENOW, MI
MARIA CANTWELL, WA
BILL NELSON, FL
ROBERT MENENDEZ, NJ

THOMAS CARPER, DE


Republicans
CHUCK GRASSLEY, IA
ORRIN G. HATCH, UT
OLYMPIA J. SNOWE, ME
JON KYL, AZ
JIM BUNNING, KY
MIKE CRAPO, ID
PAT ROBERTS, KS
JOHN ENSIGN, NV
MIKE ENZI, WY
JOHN CORNYN, TX

~ Via Pam Stenzel.

Christian health professionals address 'right of conscience'

The Christian Medical Association has sent a wake-up call to Washington. The communication is the result of a petition signed by over 10,000 individuals.

David Stevens, president of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, explains the objective of the petition.

"Well, we just sent a letter to President Obama as well as to members of Congress expressing concern over right of conscience and the fact that it's not protected in any of the [healthcare reform] legislation that's been proposed," he says. "In fact, there are direct attacks on right of conscience, which would force healthcare providers to participate in abortions as well as other procedures."

Read the rest here.

Is Abortion Health Care, or Is it Not?

The health care debate, the greatest challenge of the Obama presidency, has abortion at its epicenter, and no one realizes this more than the White House. In recent weeks, President Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have all insisted that the health care proposals under consideration would not cover abortion.

Nevertheless, that's not the reality we face on the Hill. Recently, we had a meeting with senior White House officials to focus on our serious opposition to the abortion mandate in health care reform. They reiterated the president's statement from his address before Congress and were noncommittal about specific language that would address the current concerns of pro-life advocates.

The truth is that the health care packages under consideration do include abortion funding. Without a specific statutory amendment that includes an explicit ban on federal funding and coverage, we face health care reform that includes abortion.

Lost in the debate over whether or not abortion is "in there" - whether or not you can flip to a certain page and point to a particular clause related to abortion funding - is an understanding among political elites that this is a watershed battle over definition. It's existential, if you will, and comes down to a very straightforward question: Is abortion health care, or is it not?[reference]

Part of the dishonesty in the debate is to maintain that since the current health care bill does not fund abortion in writing that effectively abortion won't be funded. Well abortion isn't funded in the Medicare law, but it takes the Hyde amendment each year to keep Medicade from in fact paying for abortion. Every amendment to the health care bill to pacifically forbid abortion funding has been struck down. The defenders of the bill just keep going on lying that the bill does not fund abortion. The Presidents reassurances mean nothing considering his track record and that the bill has yet been changed by his party. The trick has always been to leave the bills vague enough so that the courts could step in and define what it means. They let the courts do the dirty work for them.

Charmaine Yoest very good article goes on to how the attempt to define abortion as health care, as just another procedure, is going. If we let the culture of death to define the terms than the world health care will mean nothing. Just as the health of the women was broadened to include mental health so as to allow abortion this new definition will be disastrous.

US News says Catholics can make or break health care reform

When Jean named this blog she certainly knew what she was doing.
The Obama Adminstration knows what we know; in order to pass health care reform, Catholics must be on board.
US News states,
"That antiabortion, pro-universal healthcare stance—and the fact that a full quarter of the U.S. population is Catholic—make the bishops and the wider Catholic community a key swing constituency in the escalating healthcare reform battle. If they can allay Catholic concerns on abortion, Obama and the Democrats stand to enlist the church as a powerful ally in the fight. But if the bishops and other Catholic institutions wind up opposing the Democrats' healthcare plan because of its abortion provisions, they can help bring down the whole effort. Says Doerflinger: "People on both sides of the issue want us to join their coalition."
However, the problem is, there is a divide among Catholics, we are split nearly down the middle, between those who favor the Obama plan and those, like this group, who do not trust Obama to exclude abortion funding and death panels for the disabled and elderly in the legislation.
On Fox News today Fr Jonathan Morris made an important clarification. He corrected the host who said that the USCCB wants universal healthcare. He said the US bishops want universal access to health care, not necessarily this bill. There are many ways to improve access to health care, for example health care savings accounts, tax deductions for premiums, a group plan for the uninsured to buy into, etc.
Fr Morris assured the viewers of Fox News that the bishops are not sold on the current health care plan because of the threat of abortion funding. Obama will be working hard to seal the deal, and courting Catholics in various ways (Kennedy funeral, Notre Dame, Georgetown, visiting the Pope, etc). Don't be used by an administration who is expert at manipulation.
Catholics are a necessary part of Obamacare. Let's remember that and use our power unilaterally instead of cancelling one another's votes!

Read the entire article here.

Vera’s story must be a warning to us all

As doctors fear 'euthanasia by the back door' Felicity Smart describes her chilling experience when a elderly neighbour entered hospital

Hat tip to Father John Boyle

The case for killing granny

You just got to love a post that includes the sentence "nameless Mouth of the Dark Lord of Newsweek" as used by John C. Wright responding to the article by Evan Thomas on the "The Case for Killing Granny".

John C. Wright shows exactly why Mr. Thomas is wrong and is really being dishonest.

Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable.

We have often heard to explain things that Americans are afraid of death and in a culture that just about worships the body, or at least young bodies, so there is some truth to this. Though it would not explain why it is that many who are religious and who know we are more than just a body would object to euthanasia and doctor assisted suicide.

It is also rather interesting that he would talk about the need to "contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge." This of course exactly what the Church has done throughout the ages. St. Thomas Aquinas kept a skull on his desk to do just that and it is a good to think about our own mortality. But the contemplation of death unlike what Mr. Thomas asserts does not necessarily lead you to be more accepting of removing healthcare, but of understanding the proper respect for the human person whether they are at the end of life or not.

There are of course the distinctions in Catholic thought between ordinary and extraordinary care. Though often what was once considered extraordinary care can become ordinary care. Mr. Thomas is making no such distinction as the title of his article suggests. The problem with government healthcare is that it also does not make such distinction and will assign the divide between ordinary and extraordinary as to the costs involved.

John C. Wright's critique is much better than mine, just had to add my two cents.