America’s first Club Med president is temporarily back in Washington. Barack Obama’s New Year’s greetings to America’s elderly, however, is anything but happy.

The Medicare End of Life Counseling program, aka the “Death Panels” provision which public outrage drove out of the president’s healthcare legislation, was surreptitiously slipped into law as a Medicare rule effective January 1.

This mandate was issued by Dr Donald Berwick, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Dr Berwick is a controversial figure, known as a whole hearted supporter of Britain’s National Health Service and a proponent of increasing “end of life options”. Dr Berwick’s position requires senate confirmation which Mr Obama bypassed via a recess appointment.

That Barack Obama would flaunt public opposition and circumvent the legislative process certainly comes as no surprise. The president likely popped a cork with H & S Secretary Sebelius over this little coup. But in going to such lengths to initiate EOLC, the president is proving the point he steadfastly denied throughout the healthcare debate. A point we have often made.

No government controlled healthcare program, whether it be called Obamacare or Limbaughcare, can function without rationing of treatment in order to control costs.

Under the single payer type plan Obamacare is designed to bring about, the elderly, the chronically ill and the handicapped are viewed as drains on the system. Non-performing assets, zero return on investment. By necessity, quality of life enhancing surgeries for those beyond a certain age or with debilitating illnesses are simply denied. As our benevolent president stated “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the pain killer”.

End Of Life Counseling for Medicare recipients, the president’s propagandists harp, is “voluntary”. But the very fact the EOLC has been forced into law belies the contention. Medicare recipients routinely discuss end of life treatments with their doctors every day. For free. Why does the Obama administration want to pay for a service that is currently rendered at no cost?

To give medical practices, already strained by low Medicare reimbursement rates, a financial incentive to initiate end of life discussions. And under this supposedly benign rule, in 2015 physicians will be financially penalized for not initiating them.

EOLC is the first gentle push down the slippery slope. The goal is getting the elderly used to the idea that they need to justify the desire to live beyond a certain age when medical care becomes more costly and they begin to require more care in their daily lives. “Burdens” to their families and their country.

Further down the slope, it is easy to foresee a Medicare physician assisted suicide option, readily available to those for whom expensive surgeries or treatments are not considered “cost effective”.

“Healthcare reform” was never about improving the health of the American people. It was about socialist progressive ideology which places the interests of the state over the rights and well being of the individual. As Barack Obama himself so blasphemously put it “We are God’s partner in life and death”.

Let the Tea Party and other conservative members of congress know that we think otherwise. Demand that EOLC rule be stripped from Medicare.

Update January 6
Caught (as usual) the administration has announced that the EOLC rule has been rescinded.

Thanks to all who prayed and/or contacted their congressional representatives. This is no small victory.

“Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the pain killer.”- President Barack Obama

Barely three months after being bribed and threatened through congress, Obamacare is being exposed for the big lie it had always been. Health insurance premiums continue to increase, employer based plans are being discontinued, Obamacare taxes on business burden an already crippled economy, and not one uninsured American will be covered until 2014.

As our president and democratic congressional leaders have always known, socialized medicine has failed miserably in every country in which it has been implemented. And rationing of treatment, beginning with the elderly, followed by the handicapped and chronically ill, is by economic necessity part and parcel of every government healthcare program in existence.

So it begins in America with the Healthcare Reform Act’s well publicized $500 billion in Medicare cuts which will, in effect, lower the cost of Medicare simply by reducing the number of doctors willing or able to treat the elderly.

Since Obamacare’s passage on March 22, thousands of doctors have threatened to drop Medicare patients if the cuts were enacted. Congress hastily rescinded the 21.3 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements scheduled to take effect last week, and passed in it’s place a token 2% pay increase in the reimbursement rate. But the next scheduled cut, coming after the November elections, will likely be a different story.

One of most insidious of the many evils incorporated into socialized medicine is government control of doctors’ fees. The inevitable result is a drastic drop in the number of doctors and the quality of medicine practiced.

In this video from the Heritage Foundation, Dr Martha Boone details how increasing the number of Americans on government health insurance programs under Obamacare may make it financially unfeasible for many doctors to remain in practice.

With fewer doctors willing to accept the only insurance they have available, the elderly will become less of a burden to America’s new government controlled healthcare program in relatively short order. Euthanasia by attrition. And in years to come, Doctor Assisted Suicide will become part of Obamacare’s benefit package. With a scarcity of medical care, a visit from Dr Kervorkian might very well seem to be the most attractive option available. Socialism has little use for the elderly.

Hippocratic oath for our officials
Not one major program or piece of legislation initiated by President Barack Obama, or his democratic congress, has been of any benefit to the nation. Most of the president’s initiatives have, in fact, exacerbated the ills facing the country on the day Mr Obama took office, or created new ones. The worst of these is the dismantling of the finest healthcare system in the world.

If we the people have learned anything from the Obama era it is this. Beginning in 2011, a phrase derived from the original Hippocratic oath must be inserted into the oath of office sworn by any government official: “First, I will do no harm.”

Under those terms, we could have cleaned house in Washington at least half a year ago.

The Pelosicare version of the president’s healthcare takeover bill is scheduled for vote on Friday. Speaker Pelosi’s pride and joy is everything the pro-life community, and the country, feared. HR 3962 is a socialist manifesto comprised of 1990 pages of business and personal mandates, business and individual taxes, penalties, new bureaucracies empowered to make medical decisions, and federal funding for abortion.

Throughout the summer and fall, democrat committee chairmen have squashed every amendment offered by pro-life members of both parties. The final attempt to eliminate funding for abortion is the Stupak-Pitts Amendment offered by Bart Stupak (D MI) and Joe Pitts (R PA).

The Stop The Abortion Mandate website conducted a webcast last night to rally support for the amendment via e-mails and phone calls to House members. Replays can be heard or downloaded Here.

Contact links to House members are available on our White House And Congressional Contact Information page.

It is incumbent upon us all to work for passage of the Stupak-Pitts amendment as a matter of principle. However, as predicted in Crying She Wolf, expansion of unrestricted abortion services, cloaked as essential healthcare benefits and fully funded, will be included in any “public option” signed into law by Barack Obama. Irregardless of passage of Stupak-Pitts.

The only way to stop the Abortion Mandate is to stop HR 3962. Stopping The Mandate Means Stopping The Bill

Rest assured that…
If Speaker Pelosi allows the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to come to a vote she will be confident that it will easily be circumvented. There are, no doubt, an abundance of loopholes and escape clauses buried in the bill that will allow for invalidation or by pass of any amendment that might restrict abortion in any way. The primary reason for the massive size of the bill is to camouflage HR 3962′s most insidious evils.

Anything contained in the House bill, including Stupak-Pitts if passed, can simply be tossed out when HR 3962 is reconciled with the Senate’s version of “healthcare reform”, before a final bill is produced and presented to the president.

Stupak-Pitts addresses only federal funding for abortion. Anyone who knows anything about Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and their cold hearted commitments to unrestricted abortion on demand, knows that nested nicely, somewhere within HR 3962′s 1990 pages, are the means to implement every single provision of the Freedom Of Choice Act by government mandate. Count On It

Last, but hardly least, Stupak-Pitts will not affect the life issues involving government rationing of medical care for the elderly, disabled and chronically ill. Barack Obama has boasted that under the public option “We are God’s partners in life and death” (False Witness). Government will separate the wheat from the chaff in choosing out those who merit the type of state of the art medical care received by Ted Kennedy from those in the swirling masses who warrant no more than a morphine prescription and fond farewell.

It is absolutely critical for the entire pro-life community to voice support for the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. The struggle to protect America’s unborn citizens will not end, even should HR 3962 pass in the House. Congress must be constantly reminded of the  mounting opposition to abortion in the country.

Nevertheless, the only sure way to protect the lives of all of our brothers and sisters, from conception to the moment of natural death, is to stop HR 3962.

Replay of Monday’s Stop The Abortion Mandate Webcast

RadiantCross.org White House And Congressional Contact Information page

The “Healthcare Reform” hustle on abortion is now being aided and abetted by liberal religious organizations citing the Capps Amendment to HR 3200 as proof that President Obama has no intention to include abortion services in the “public option”. Congresswoman Lois Capps is seen at the left demonstrating against California’s Prop 8 initiative restricting marriage to one man and one woman.

Obamacare supporter Chris Korzen, executive director of Catholics United (Catholics-United.org) gave the group’s imprimatur to HR 3200 claiming “The inclusion of the Capps Amendment represents a positive step toward health care reform that preserves existing policies prohibiting federal funding for abortion services…”.

It remains to be determined whether groups like Catholics United, or Jim Wallis’s Sojourners, are intent on fooling themselves, bent on fooling others, or both. Even casual perusal of the text of the amendment bares it for what is intended to be. Legislative bait and switch, written in Clintonese and riddled with loopholes.

The “Capps Amendment” was actually written by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman’s staff. Congresswoman Lois Capps (D CA), “offered” the amendment. Neither being defenders of the unborn, both Waxman and Capps have received 0% ratings on pro-life issues from the National Right To Life Committee.

It doesn’t even seem to dawn upon Mr Korzen and Mr Wallis that this is, to say the very least, a rather unlikely team of legislators in which to trust the fate of America’s unborn under Obamacare. Congressman Waxman has personally squashed every amendment proposed by well known pro-life congressmen, both republican and democrat. Amendments that were written in such a way as to actually prohibit abortion from being any part, directly or indirectly, of a “public option”. Can Catholics United and Sojourners seriously believe that the good Mr Waxman has suddenly seen the light with the Capps Amendment?

Abortion IS the social justice issue of our time
Simple common sense renders statements of faith in the Capps Amendment, at best, gross naiveté in overzealous pursuit of a social justice issue. And adequate access to healthcare is a social justice issue. But a simple tax-payer funded plan, through a private insurer, could adequately address the problem of insurance for those unable to afford it.

So the insistence of Catholics United and Sojourners that it is a moral, even spiritual, obligation for Christians to support HR3200, rings hollow as nothing more than a politically motivated response to President Obama’s call for liberal and progressive religious leaders to help establish government control over healthcare in America.

And in leaving the fate of the unborn in the hands of prominent pro-abortion zealots such as Henry Waxman and Lois Capps, Christian liberal and progressive groups are effectively turning a blind eye to the greatest social justice issue, the greatest moral and spiritual outrage, of our time. The destruction of 50 million children by some of the most barbaric manners of death imaginable. Murders of Jesus’ “Little Ones”, which continue at the rate of over one million per year.

Doin’ the hustle
The opening line of the Capps Amendment is intended to seem blissfully straight forward: ABORTION COVERAGE PROHIBITED AS PART OF MINIMUM BENEFITS PACKAGE. It could of ended right there if that was the true intent of Mr Waxman and Ms Capps.

The amendment instead runs on ambiguously leaving a hole through the opening statement a mile wide:

“The plan is not required (or prohibited) under this Act from providing coverage of services..”

“Nothing in this Act shall be construed as preventing the public health insurance option from providing abortion services that would not be legal for Medicaid coverage…”

ABORTIONS FOR WHICH PUBLIC FUNDING IS PROHIBITED
“..is not permitted, based on the law as in effect as of the date that is 6 months before the beginning of the plan year involved”

ABORTIONS FOR WHICH PUBLIC FUNDING IS ALLOWED
“..is permitted, based on the law as in effect as of the date that is 6 months before the beginning of the plan year involved”

Nothing is required, but nothing is prohibited. If it’s ok for Medicaid, its fine under the public option. Everything and anything is open to change based upon however “the law” is rewritten six months in advance. Ironclad as Bernie Madoff’s handshake.

Exactly how much of this amendment did Misters Korzen and Wallis actually read before calling upon Christian America to clammer on the President’s healthcare bandwagon?

The abortion head tax
The Christian liberal and progressive accolades bestowed upon the amendment focus almost entirely on federal funding for abortion, now prohibited under the Hyde Amendment. As if that should be the only concern. Rep Capps claims that her amendment “preserves the status quo” in that area. This is a Clintonesque parsing of words.

Should the Hyde Amendment ever just happen to be repealed under a democratically controlled congress, the federal floodgates are opened.

For the time being, abortions covered under the public option would be funded by a surcharge added to the premium of every participant. The funds accrued under this levy will be segregated from the dollars flowing into federal coffers so that technically the government will not fund abortion procedures. This will be of great comfort, no doubt, to the babies whose lives are terminated by the vacuums, surgical shears and poisons of Abortion Incorporated via President Obama’s “public option”.

The Wall Street Journal concluded that such accounting flim flam amounts to nothing less than a slightly indirect method of taxpayer funding for abortions under the public option. “An amendment approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee would allow coverage of abortion”. Funding for abortions, The Journal confirmed, would “come from the portion of the premiums that are paid by the individuals. A sliver of those monthly premiums would be segregated and abortion services would be reimbursed from that separate account.”

The FactCheck web site, run by staff at the University of Pennsylvania, also verifies this conclusion pointing out that abortion services would be provided “so long as the plans took in enough private money in the form of premiums paid by individuals or their employers. The Capps language also would allow private plans purchased with federal subsidies ‘affordability credits’ for low-income families and workers to cover abortion.”

In short, the Capps Amendment amounts to nothing less than an abortion head tax on every participant in the “public option”.

In False Witness we reported upon President Obama’s arrogant assertion, during a teleconference call with liberal and progressive rabbis, that “we are God’s partner in life and death”. This virtually blasphemous statement, alone, should give Christian organizations such as Catholics United and Sojourners overwhelming grounds for concern over such a man’s intentions.

We remind Misters Korzen and Wallis that Christian Americans are united in spirit, under Our Savior, in the quest for social justice in every aspect of our society. Adequate access to healthcare is a goal that can easily be achieved without extending government’s inefficient, heartless, greedy grasp into America’s healthcare system. If that is the real goal here.

And it can be done without taking one step backwards in facing the challenge God has given us to achieve victory in the greatest social justice issue our time.

The US Senate finally got it’s mind right. The Senate Finance Committee announced it will drop section 1233, the Death Panel provision, from the senate’s version of “healthcare reform”. The announcement came after indignant denials from the distant left that any such provision existed anywhere in the various versions of “Obamacare” under consideration.

While section 1233 was euphemistically titled “end of life counseling”, anyone familiar with any of the government controlled healthcare programs in existence understands the concept for what it truly is. Guidelines for the rationing of medical care to the elderly, and eventually, the chronically ill and the handicapped. Death Panels.

This victory for life can primarily be attributed to the undaunted courage to speak out of one private citizen. Sarah Palin.

Having optimistically written off Palin as a future force to contend with, after her resignation as governor of Alaska, the distant left was blindsided by the virtually overnight success of Palin’s lightening strike, launched out of her new Facebook page. Severe cases of Palin Envy have reemerged in the bewildered, enraged leftist media.

Maureen Dowd penned out another of her vitriolic Sarah, Sarah, Two By Four columns, likely muttering to herself as she chugged cosmopolitan cocktails in a lower eastside dive. Keith Olbermann, blood pressure slowly stabilized, managed to chip out a patriotic opinion piece for OMSNBC’s website in which he termed Sarah Palin a servant of evil and “a clear and present danger to the safety and security of this nation”. (Wonderful originality. You go dude)

Labeling evil for what it is
On August 7, citizen Sarah posted an entry in her Facebook page criticizing President Obama’s plans to initiate government controlled healthcare in America. “The America I know and love, is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

This simple, unequivocal statement struck at the heart of the most intrinsic evil of socialized medicine. Rationing. And despite all of the diatribes to the contrary, no government controlled healthcare program can function without rationing of treatment in order to control costs. “Controlling costs” is indeed one of the snake oils being promoted to run the whole healthcare swindle past the American people. And there is only one way to control healthcare costs in a significant way. Limit the amount of dollars expended on expensive treatment. And who in society typically requires the highest expenditure of healthcare dollars? The elderly, the chronically ill and the handicapped.

Current government controlled healthcare programs do, in fact, allocate treatment based upon a patient’s projected “return on investment” of government healthcare dollars. And not just in Europe or Canada. How about in the “progressive” state of Oregon?

A dose of socialized medicine
As detailed in Mark Levin’s best seller Liberty And Tyranny, “Barbara Wagner was diagnosed with a recurrence of lung cancer. Her doctors recommended a specific drug to help prolong and improve the quality of her life”.”However, Barbara is a resident of Oregon and therefore, part of the state-run Oregon Health Plan. The state refused Barbara Wagner’s request for the drug since it doesn’t cover drugs that are meant to prolong the life of individuals with advanced cancer. After all, when the Oregon Health Plan was established in 1994 it ‘was expressly intended to ration health care’ to save money. But Oregon also has legalized assisted suicide, and in an unsigned letter from the state, Barbara was informed that the health plan would pay to cover the costs of a doctor to help her kill herself, but not give her the drug to prolong her life. ….It seemed she had reached a dead end until a pharmaceutical company that invented the drug learned about her case and stepped in to provide Barbara with the drug free of charge.”

And we can be sure that it was not a board of physicians who established such policies in Oregon. These decisions were made by state bureaucrats. And citizen Sarah labeled them for exactly what they are. Death Panels whose members maintain their positions by subordinating the individual citizen’s right to life to the perceived best interests of the state.

The Christian-Judeo based democracy, upon which our country was founded, values the lives of our most helpless citizens- the elderly, the Barbara Wagners and the Trig Palins -as much as the lives on any other citizen. Though, to our nation’s shame, our unborn citizens are currently denied this consideration.

Socialism dictates acceptance of one’s place as defined by the state. And socialism, especially socialized medicine, views these “least of our brethren” to be unproductive consumers of government’s largesse, best left to a speedy, pain-free demise.

The transparency of defaming of the messenger
Immediately following the Senate Finance Committee’s announcement to drop the death panel provision, numerous democratic “strategists” were pushed onto television talk panels, trying in vain to discredit the messenger while forcing derisive grins through the egg running down their faces.

The lone talking point was that Sarah Palin had helped her grandmother compose a “living will” to provide guidelines to her loved ones in the event she is unable to render medical decisions on her own. This, it was righteously claimed, rendered Palin a hypocrite for speaking out against the death panels provision at the same time, as several democratic empty noggins phrased it, she was “putting grandma down”.

Such a comparison was nothing less than apples to thoroughly rotted oranges. Typical of the elitist left’s condescending view that the average American does not understand the difference between someone drawing up a living will and that same person being told by a postal worker type government employee that further cancer treatment just doesn’t make sense financially to Uncle Sam.

The message and the messenger, however, have continued to resonate with the American people to the point that white flags are beginning to pop up on the issue of the “public option”. This is likely not sitting too well in certain quarters, from where Elmer Fudd (or Barney Frank) like cries pierce the night: “Ooo that rrotten Paywlin“.

The struggle to keep our medical treatment out of government’s inefficient, heartless, greedy grasp is far from over. But thanks in large part to the efforts of one proud private citizen, the healthcare debate in America is trending in favor of the sanctity of life.

Citizen Palin 1, Obamacare 0