RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events A right to Health Care

Since G-man mentioned the American Legion...


prnewswire.com

I'm very aware that some of you have emotional issues with Obama Rex but why should I care about it? I posted the quote because it was referenced earlier. You may not care for it but I could understand why vets would like the quote.

I'm very aware that some of you have emotional issues with Obama Rex but why should I care about it? I posted the quote because it was referenced earlier. You may not care for it but I could understand why vets would like the quote.

I know in your extreme partisanship it's hard to believe we don't have mental problems when we disagree with you.

But as much as possible, we just disagree with you, and pity you for your inability to read anything more objective than RAW and MediaMatters. I would prefer you to read the objective writings of foxnews, pat buchanan, the KKK and newsmax.

Funny how you never have a problem with pat Buchanan when Iggy or someone else quotes him. Only a problem when I quote Buchanan, right?

They aren't "emotional issues". They are factual things we have against him and his policies.

I may just repost this a couple of times since G-man is throwing one of his tranny posting fits.

Most of the time you just bitch about what other people post Rex and it's less about facts.

You aren't the only retard I make fun of here, stop acting like it.

I make fun of everyone that quotes him. Don't you ever read anything here? Or are you too busy looking for bouncing cock videos?

This post has been brought to you by Brain Aids, the aids of choice for all obamanauts.

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In the full press release, the Legion Commander calls the the book a "controversial publication" which "can be easily ... appear insensitive... the release of this publication demonstrates poor planning."

He also says that "we can understand how some might interpret" the book as "designed to influence veterans to end their lives prematurely."

...

In the full press release, the Legion Commander calls the the death book a "controversial publication" which "can be easily ... appear insensitive... the release of this publication demonstrates poor planning."

He also says that "we can understand how some might interpret" the book as "designed to influence veterans to end their lives prematurely."

Steele isn't just somebody though. He knew better but tried selling it as something it's not... it's dishonest.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.

“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients."

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.

The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.

Developed by Marie Curie, the cancer charity, in a Liverpool hospice it was initially developed for cancer patients but now includes other life threatening conditions.

It was recommended as a model by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government’s health scrutiny body, in 2004.

It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.

Under the guidelines the decision to diagnose that a patient is close to death is made by the entire medical team treating them, including a senior doctor.

They look for signs that a patient is approaching their final hours, which can include if patients have lost consciousness or whether they are having difficulty swallowing medication.

However, doctors warn that these signs can point to other medical problems.

Patients can become semi-conscious and confused as a side effect of pain-killing drugs such as morphine if they are also dehydrated, for instance.

When a decision has been made to place a patient on the pathway doctors are then recommended to consider removing medication or invasive procedures, such as intravenous drips, which are no longer of benefit.

If a patient is judged to still be able to eat or drink food and water will still be offered to them, as this is considered nursing care rather than medical intervention.

Dr Hargreaves said that this depended, however, on constant assessment of a patient’s condition.

He added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.

He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.

“It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway.”

He added: “What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying.

“It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking.”

He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.

Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, said: “Even the tiniest things that happen towards the end of a patient’s life can have a huge and lasting affect on patients and their families feelings about their care.

“Guidelines like the LCP can be very helpful but healthcare professionals always need to keep in mind the individual needs of patients.

“There is no one size fits all approach.”

A spokesman for Marie Curie said: “The letter highlights some complex issues related to care of the dying.

“The Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient was developed in response to a societal need to transfer best practice of care of the dying from the hospice to other care settings.

“The LCP is not the answer to all the complex elements of this area of health care but we believe it is a step in the right direction.”

The pathway also includes advice on the spiritual care of the patient and their family both before and after the death.

It has also been used in 800 instances outside care homes, hospices and hospitals, including for people who have died in their own homes.

The letter has also been signed by Dr Anthony Cole, the chairman of the Medical Ethics Alliance, Dr David Hill, an anaesthetist, Dowager Lady Salisbury, chairman of the Choose Life campaign and Dr Elizabeth Negus a lecturer in English at Barking University.

Rep. Maxine Waters of California said Democrats must push for the bill they want because Republicans don't want any bill to pass.

"Where's your bill? What have you come up with? What are you offering as an alternative?" Waters asked Republican Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, another guest on the show. "It's bigger than health care. It's about President Obama, and the Republicans have decided to use this by which to bring him down."

Clinton's advice to Obama: Forget about Republicans
Posted: September 8th, 2009 03:47 PM ET

(CNN) — As President Obama gets set to address a joint-session of Congress on the issue of health care reform Wednesday night, former President Clinton says it's time to forget about the Republican Party's role in the process entirely.

"The president's doing the right thing. It is both morally and politically right," Clinton told Esquire Magazine in an interview published online Tuesday. "I wouldn't even worry about the Republicans. I'd worry about executing."

Though it increasingly appears the White House will win few if any Republican votes on a final health care bill, some members of the GOP say they remain open to supporting a potential version legislation, including Arizona Sen. John McCain.

"I look forward to what he specific proposals are," the former Obama rival said last week. "I think the disappointment a lot of Americans display is that we are not working together more."

Still, Clinton said Obama's chief worry should be ensuring the entire Senate Democratic caucus (59 members with the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy) is in support of the reform legislation, including Democrats from more conservative states, like Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.


"This electorate has suffered…and what they don't know is whether our guys are going to stand and deliver. And sooner or later you've got to stand and deliver," said Clinton.

The former president also compared Obama's initial months on office to his own perilous beginning, but predicted the current commander-in-chief would succeed where he had failed.

"Do I think he's doing the right thing, even though he's jamming a lot of change down the system? I do," he also said. "So there's a lot that's like my first year, but it's going to have a different ending — he's going to get health care reform.

Public disapproval of President Obama's handling of health care has jumped to 52 percent, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released hours before he makes his case for overhaul in a prime-time address to Congress.

With his health revamp moving slowly and unemployment edging ever higher, Obama's overall approval rating has also suffered a blow. The survey showed that 49 percent now disapprove of how he is handling his job as president, up from 42 percent who disapproved in July.

The grade people give Obama on health care also has worsened since July, when just 43 percent disapproved of his work on the issue.

The poll underscores how the president has struggled to win public support to reshape the nation's $2.5 trillion health care system and to put the brakes on a deep recession.

Forty-nine percent say they oppose the health overhaul plans being considered by Congress, compared to just 34 percent who favor them.

People are about evenly split over what lawmakers should do now on health care: About four in 10 say they should keep trying to pass a bill this year while about the same number say they should start over again.

Significantly, though, only about two in 10 say the health care system should be left as is.

There is a clear public desire for a bipartisan approach on the issue. Eight in 10 say it's important that any plan that passes Congress should have the support of both parties, while two-thirds want Obama and Democrats to try winning support from Republicans, who with few exceptions have opposed the Democratic drive.

Obama's marks are also poor on the economy, with 52 percent saying they disapprove of how he's handled that issue.

A similar number disapprove of his handling of taxes, some of which may rise to help finance his health overhaul. And 56 percent dislike his handling of the budget deficit, which has skyrocketed under the costs of the financial bailouts and a recession that has caused sinking federal revenues.

The survey of 1,001 adults with cell and landline telephones was conducted from Sept. 3-8. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

President Barack Obama used only-in-Washington accounting Wednesday when he promised to overhaul the nation's health care system without adding "one dime" to the deficit. By conventional arithmetic, Democratic plans would drive up the deficit by billions of dollars.

The president's speech to Congress contained a variety of oversimplifications and omissions in laying out what he wants to do about health insurance.

A look at some of Obama's claims and how they square with the facts or the fuller story:

• OBAMA: "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period."
  
  THE FACTS: Though there's no final plan yet, the White House and congressional Democrats already have shown they're ready to skirt the no-new-deficits pledge.
  
  House Democrats offered a bill that the Congressional Budget Office said would add $220 billion to the deficit over 10 years. But Democrats and Obama administration officials claimed the bill actually was deficit-neutral. They said they simply didn't have to count $245 billion of it — the cost of adjusting Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians don't face big annual pay cuts.
  
  Their reasoning was that they already had decided to exempt this "doc fix" from congressional rules that require new programs to be paid for. In other words, it doesn't have to be paid for because they decided it doesn't have to be paid for.
  
  The administration also said that since Obama already had included the doctor payment in his 10-year budget proposal, it didn't have to be counted again.
  
  That aside, the long-term prognosis for costs of the health care legislation has not been good.
  
  CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf had this to say in July: "We do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount."
  
  ___
• OBAMA:"Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have."
  
  THE FACTS:That's correct, as far as it goes. But neither can the plan guarantee that people can keep their current coverage. Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and they'd be free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like, or drop insurance altogether. The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the health care bill written by House Democrats and said that by 2016 some 3 million people who now have employer-based care would lose it because their employers would decide to stop offering it.
  
  In the past Obama repeatedly said, "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period." Now he's stopping short of that unconditional guarantee by saying nothing in the plan "requires" any change.
  
  ___
• OBAMA: "The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." One congressman, South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson, shouted "You lie!" from his seat in the House chamber when Obama made this assertion. Wilson later apologized.
  
  THE FACTS: The facts back up Obama. The House version of the health care bill explicitly prohibits spending any federal money to help illegal immigrants get health care coverage. Illegal immigrants could buy private health insurance, as many do now, but wouldn't get tax subsidies to help them. Still, Republicans say there are not sufficient citizenship verification requirements to ensure illegal immigrants are excluded from benefits they are not due.
  
  ___
• OBAMA: "Don't pay attention to those scary stories about how your benefits will be cut. ... That will never happen on my watch. I will protect Medicare."
  
  THE FACTS: Obama and congressional Democrats want to pay for their health care plans in part by reducing Medicare payments to providers by more than $500 billion over 10 years. The cuts would largely hit hospitals and Medicare Advantage, the part of the Medicare program operated through private insurance companies.
  
  Although wasteful spending in Medicare is widely acknowledged, many experts believe some seniors almost certainly would see reduced benefits from the cuts. That's particularly true for the 25 percent of Medicare users covered through Medicare Advantage.
  
  Supporters contend that providers could absorb the cuts by improving how they operate and wouldn't have to reduce benefits or pass along costs. But there's certainly no guarantee they wouldn't.
  
  ___
• OBAMA: Requiring insurance companies to cover preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies "makes sense, it saves money, and it saves lives."
  
  THE FACTS: Studies have shown that much preventive care — particularly tests like the ones Obama mentions — actually costs money instead of saving it. That's because detecting acute diseases like breast cancer in their early stages involves testing many people who would never end up developing the disease. The costs of a large number of tests, even if they're relatively cheap, will outweigh the costs of caring for the minority of people who would have ended up getting sick without the testing.
  
  The Congressional Budget Office wrote in August: "The evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall."
  
  That doesn't mean preventive care doesn't make sense or save lives. It just doesn't save money.
  
  ___
• OBAMA: "If you lose your job or change your job, you will be able to get coverage. If you strike out on your own and start a small business, you will be able to get coverage."
  
  THE FACTS: It's not just a matter of being able to get coverage. Most people would have to get coverage under the law, if his plan is adopted.
  
  In his speech, Obama endorsed mandatory coverage for individuals, an approach he did not embrace as a candidate.
  
  He proposed during the campaign — as he does now — that larger businesses be required to offer insurance to workers or else pay into a fund. But he rejected the idea of requiring individuals to obtain insurance. He said people would get insurance without being forced to do so by the law, if coverage were made affordable. And he repeatedly criticized his Democratic primary rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for proposing to mandate coverage.
  
  "To force people to get health insurance, you've got to have a very harsh penalty," he said in a February 2008 debate.
  
  Now, he says, "individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance — just as most states require you to carry auto insurance."
  
  He proposes a hardship waiver, exempting from the requirement those who cannot afford coverage despite increased federal aid.
  
  ___
• OBAMA: "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage."
  
  THE FACTS: Obama time and again has referred to the number of uninsured as 46 million, a figure based on year-old Census data. The new number is based on an analysis by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, which concluded that about two-thirds of Americans without insurance are poor or near poor. "These individuals are less likely to be offered employer-sponsored coverage or to be able to afford to purchase their own coverage," the report said. By using the new figure, Obama avoids criticism that he is including individuals, particularly healthy young people, who choose not to obtain health insurance.