Happy Birthday, Mom! Stay healthy!

My Mom will hit the big 7-0 in a few weeks, which made this all the more disturbing to me:

"I happen to be a brain surgeon..."

There's a complete transcript here in case you'd rather read than listen.

Basically, this neurosurgeon recently attended a conference in Washington DC with others in his field and they got a look at how the treatment they provide will be impacted by Obamacare.  I don't think he liked it.  Here are a few tidbits he provided:

• As our population gets older, the majority of our patients are getting over 70. They'll require stroke therapy, aneurysm therapy, and basically what the document stated is that if you're over 70 and you come into an emergency room... if you're on government-supported health care, you'll get "comfort care".
• ...“ethics panels” or “ethics committees”, would get together and meet and decide where the money would go for hospitals...
• ...and basically for patients over 70 years of age, that advanced neurosurgical care was not generally indicated.
• If someone comes in at 70 years of age with a bleed in their brain, I can promise you I’m not going to get a bunch of administrators together on an ethics panel at two in the morning to decide that I’m OK to do surgery.
• ...we're the most expensive out of all the fields in medicine. And we're the smallest field. But at two, three, four in the morning, we're the ones in the operating room. And we have to wait for an ethics panel to convene, which are not made of physicians -- they're made of administrators. To decide whether a patient should receive our care.
• ...they don't call them patients, they call them units. And if you're a unit above a certain age, you get comfort care instead of advanced neurosurgical intervention.
• You know, we always joke around -- 'it's not brain surgery' -- but I did nine years after medical school, I've been in training ten years, and now I have people who don't know a thing about what I'm doing telling me when I can and can't operate.

He also mentioned that this information is not currently available to the public.  Gee, I wonder why?

We have the best health care in the world (despite its faults) and Obama seems determined to reduce it to third world status.  You think only the rich get the best care now?  Wait until this crap kicks in.  You think HMO's are evil and heartless because they "manage" care to save money?  Obamacare will be an HMO on steroids, and without any competition to keep them in line.

Almost all the women in both sides of my family live to at least 90 and with that in mind I have every intention of having Mom around for a couple more decades.  I also plan on adding myself to the family's list of 90-somethings some day.  I'd hate to think either might not happen only because the American government decides to withhold care.  The American government, withholding available, lifesaving medical care from its own citizens.  Think about that.

Remember, they had to pass it so we could find out what was in it.  And now we're starting to find out.  And it's not pretty.  In fact, it may even turn out to be deadly.