While Democrats are over there champing at the bit to make their radical Medicare for All dream a reality: Guy Benson ✔ @gu...
While Democrats are over there champing at the bit to make their radical Medicare for All dream a reality:
107 House Dems have introduced a single-payer healthcare bill that is even more "ambitious" than Bernie's. It would:
- Outlaw ~all private health insurance
- Eliminate 1-2 million jobs
- Cover abortion
The proposal includes no price tag & no pay-fors.townhall.com/tipsheet/guybe…
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People over here who understand what that would actually mean for Americans are terrified. Yesterday, pediatrician Joe Silverman, whose 12-year-old son is struggling with a life-threatening medical condition, laid the future those Democrats want bare in chilling detail:
I promised you all a thread on the state of modern American healthcare from the unique perspective of both a pediatrician and a father of a gravely ill child undergoing surgery. This won’t be my typical tweetstorm for a few reasons. (Cont)
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In specific, these tweets won’t be coming that fast today and I don’t plan to number them. Normally I get angry about something and slam out a series of tweets. Today, I’m not angry. Mostly I’m simultaneously scared and hopeful.
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Our 12 year old son just went into the operating room at Mayo Clinic and he will be there for much of the day. My wife and I are here in the waiting room and this thread will be slower and maybe somewhat intermittent as a result.
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Let me give you a bit of background. My son is my 4th child. When he was an infant, one of my partners noticed during a routine well visit that he had a heart murmur. We got an echocardiogram - which is an ultrasound of the heart - and found out that he had thickened heart walls.
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After some further evaluation, he was diagnosed with a disease called Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). HCM is a genetic condition that is actually rather common. Maybe as many as 1/350 people have it. However, it is extremely variable in severity and when it shows up in life.
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Most people who have it live normal lives and many only find out they have it when they’re adults or even elderly and are having their hearts evaluated for other reasons. I have a friend whose dad was a CEO and it was found at 60 on an executive physical.
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My son is the other extreme. In fact, he is one of the youngest and most severe cases ever encountered. When I was a medical student, a patient like my son would have died at a young age. The two ways patients died was from heart failure or from a sudden death rhythm event.
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However, during the last two decades a small number of dedicated doctors and researchers have advanced the medical care of HCM to the point where patients like my son can live essentially normal lives that are compatible with normal life expectancies.
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But here’s where the meat of my rant begins: the medical procedures and devices required to achieve this outcome are very expensive and specialized. In a Medicare for all system as promoted by @AOC, @BernieSanders, @CoryBooker and all the rest of @TheDemocrats, my son would die.
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Moreover, they *want* him to die.
You think maybe I’m being extreme? Hyperbolic? Ok, let me prove my point.
Let’s start with a man who’s simultaneously the creepiest and most honest of @TheDemocrats, Ezekiel Emanuel, MD.
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Who is Dr. Emanuel? He’s none other than the brains behind ObamaCare. During the Obama presidency, his title was (get this) Special Advisor for Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Wanna hide someone in plain sight? Give him that kind of title.
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From that obscure office, he served as the chief architect of our current mess of a medical system. Interestingly, he’s also Raul Emanuel’s brother and I personally think the parallels between the ruin of healthcare and the ruin of the City of Chicago are striking.
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How did “Zeke” (as he’s known to his pals) get this kind of power? Well, he’s been a far left health care policy guru for most of his career. As such, he’s left a meaningful trail of writings that we can reference to understand the doctrine of leftist healthcare in America.
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The article Zeke is best known for is entitled “Principals for the allocation of scarce medical interventions.” It was published 2009 during the lead up to ObamaCare in the Lancet (which is oddly a British journal). Here’s a link to the article academia.edu/454991/Princip…
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I’m going to take a break here. Take a look at that article and think about what it means and what you think about it. I’ll give you my thoughts in a little while.
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Ok, I’m back. Many of you picked up on the creepy nature of what Zeke is suggesting. If you don’t have social worth, you’re screwed. If your medical care is very expensive, you’re screwed, if you’re young or elderly, you’re screwed.
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This graph from the article is particularly interesting to me. I’m 52
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Sooo, who gets to decide on all the fine print of this fancy “allocation” algorithm? Why, you’re friendly neighborhood bureaucratic committee of course! (But you’re a crazy wingnut if you call it a Death Panel, amirite?).
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(I also wonder if being a member of @TheDemocrats party will get you extra healthcare social worth points but that’s a bit off topic)
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Let’s bring this down to my son. One of the expensive interventions specifically targeted by the American left and its doctrinal architects are implantable cardioverter-defibrillators. These are the pacemaker like devices that shock hearts back into rhythm from the inside.
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HCM is most famously one of the handful of diseases that cause people to die suddenly. If you hear of an athlete sliding to a stop on the basketball court and dying it often turns out he has undiagnosed HCM. Unfortunately, portable automatic defibrillators don’t work on HCM.
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In other cases of fatal rhythm problems, if you get an automatic defibrillator on the person’a chest within a few minutes, the chance of survival is about 50%. In the case of HCM it’s about 10%. In my son’s case, he is at high risk for one of these fatal rhythm problems.
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As a result, one of the things he’s getting today is his own implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD). The device will monitor him constantly and give his heart a shock if he needs one. They are extremely good at preventing sudden death in HCM.
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For a bunch of reasons we don’t need to explore, he’s having a special kind of ICD implanted behind his abdominal muscles just under his rib cage by his liver. Due to the extremely early onset of his HCM, my son’s ICD installation is going to be done in an “unapproved” fashion.
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We actually do all sorts of things in an unapproved manner in pediatrics. Even in the rest of medicine, doctors prescribe medications and recommend “off label” treatments regularly. Modern American medicine is a moving target. We’re always trying to optimize what we do.
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In my son’s case, the ICD and the defibrillator pads around his heart are not approved for this purpose. That’s because there aren’t enough patients like my son to do the kind of huge study that the FDA require for government “approval.” However, we know they work great.
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In addition to not being approved by the FDA, the use of ICDs in children like my son is not specifically described in the official cardiology guidelines. If every uncommon but well proven therapy was added to medical guidelines they’d end up being 1000 pages long.
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Roll the clock back to the Obama years. Like I said, for some reason leftist “thinkers” got it in their head that ICDs were being implanted in far too many patients too great a cost. As a result, they decided to aggressively go after hospitals and MDs who used them off label.
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To do this, for the very first time in history, the Obama Justice Department decided literally prosecute anyone not following the guidelines for ICDs. Remember, guidelines are just that - guidelines. They’re never intended to be rigid and doctors deviate from them regularly.
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This prosecution went on for years and eventually wrapped up 100s of hospitals and 1000s of cardiologists. This is important: the basis of the prosecution was that all these institutions and doctors were installing off label ICDs in Medicare patients to commit actual fraud.
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The situation got so bad that in 2013 the cardiology societies updated the ICD guidelines to say that off label use should be allowed based purely upon physician judgement if the patient is unusual because the life saving potential of the devices is so great.
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Despite that, the Obama Justice Dept pushed forward and finally in 2015 settled the case for a fine of $250 million dollars again at 457 (!!) hospitals. Here’s the Heart Rhythm Society’s statement on this travesty: hrsonline.org/index.php/News…
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Now, please note this was purely for Medicare patients. Private insurance companies continued to willingly pay for off label, off guideline ICD placements as long as there was appropriate medical justification. But the key point is @TheDemocrats decided to prosecute for fraud!
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(As a side note, we just got notified that my son’s surgery is going extremely well and he might be out much sooner than we thought. If that’s the case, this thread will come to screeching halt).
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A brief glimmer of hope amidst the horror.
Silverman continued:
Fast forward to 2021. @BernieSanders is President, @AOC is speaker of the house and @chuckschumer is majority leader. They cram Medicare for All (MFA) down our throats. One month later, a boy just like my son is diagnosed with HCM. Guess what, he will be flat out denied an ICD.
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It will be outside the guidelines and unapproved by the FDA. There will be no insurance company there to pay for it and no one will take cash. That kid - my son’s doppelgänger - will likely die a sudden death as a youth. Screw @TheDemocrats and their sick communist dreams.
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One more thought. Our son’s cardiologist is the world expert in HCM. When we saw him last week, he told us we needed this done now. He also told us Mayo Clinic was the only place that could do this right for him. In fact, Mayo Clinic is that way for many problems.
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One more thought. Our son’s cardiologist is the world expert in HCM. When we saw him last week, he told us we needed this done now. He also told us Mayo Clinic was the only place that could do this right for him. In fact, Mayo Clinic is that way for many problems.
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In fact, this private medical system out in fly over country is the best hospital and physician group practice on the planet. Do any of you remember my thread on what happens to medical practices with MFA? twitter.com/joesilverman7/…
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FYI, that thread applies to Mayo Clinic as well. In fact, they recently had to make the unprecedented decision to prioritize private insurance over Medicare because they can’t survive on the much lower reimbursement from public insurance. statnews.com/2017/03/15/may…
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Mayo Clinic is not just the best medical system in the world, it’s also the birthplace of modern medicine. It’s fitting that @KamalaHarris, @BernieSanders and @AOC want to drive them out of business.
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When that happens, my son’s heart team will disband. Some will retire, others will scatter. The next kid like my son won’t be able to go to that one place in the world where he can be helped. It simply won’t exist.
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This is what they want for us all. They will get it if we let them. This is a literal fight for the lives of our children and loved ones. Modern American free market medicine where people like my son can live and thrive vs their communist fever dream of death.
-The End
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There are no words.
A remarkable and frightening thread.@MrsCasey6 @patrickmadrid
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As it should. Because it’s absolutely terrifying.
In the meantime:
Prayers for your son, his medical team and your family.
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SS 's other TweetsMay your whole family he held in peace and strength today.
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Praying for successful surgery and as painless a recovery as can be had.
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First and foremost, I am praying for your son and your family.
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Praying for a successful surgery and complete healing for your son.
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Amen.
If an ILLEGAL gets one foot into America THEY get full Constitutional Rights
ReplyDeleteIf an ILLEGAL’s BABY gets BORN/one foot into America THEY get full Constitutional Rights
If a Duly Born American Child gets one foot in America they can be MURDERED?
Post-Natal Abort THEM.
Every Religious Leader that I know of believed life began at conception. They have even NOW, recorded the "spark of life" an actual flash at the moment of fertilization.
YOU will be reduced to walking & busses so THEY can control your travel.
Just as SERFS were never allowed to leave the farm.
They have a very bloody cleansing in mind. To get rid of all the trouble makers.
Arrogant, Empty headed, Self Righteous,.... how DARE you question their Superior Ideas based on NO life experience and NO actual knowledge. Their Mommys told them they are special and you BETTER believe Mommy.
THEY will still fly their private jets to "global warming " conferences and the BANKERS will be free to travel.
We are at WAR and if you do not recognize the Communist onslaught you WILL.
It should be called the "BROWN New Deal" because SHIT is brown, not green.
Pol Pot & the Khmer Rouge 3?million dead in the KILLING FIELDS.
China's "Cultural Revolution" and the holocaust of intellectuals.Between 30 and 60 million people starved to death during the great leap forward during the 1960s under MAO.
The Bolshevik-Jewish holocaust of 60 million Christian Ukrainian/Russians.
Now AOC, who "amazingly discovered" her Jewishness, wishes to follow their path to chaos and bring a Bolshevik-Jewish holocaust of White Christians to the New World. https://www.henrymakow.com/...
Their "BROWN New Deal" is the same as their predecessor's ---- destroy civilization, massacre millions, drive everyone back to an agrarian subsistence level while THEY live FAT
There will no doubt be a "political correctness" score for the allocation of scarce resources like food and water. Don't believe the correct things NO food and NO water.
ReplyDeleteWhy screw around with care for the dead.