Nice is synonymous with pleasant, good, kind and enjoyable. The British Health control system for which that acronym stands cannot be defined by any of those words; in fact just the opposite could be said. Hideous, on the other hand means repugnant, repugnant or dreadful.
The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (N.I.C.E) which is part of the UK's National Health Service (NHS), is merely one layer of a bureaucratic, government run collection of organizations that tells Great Briton’s doctors how to practice medicine and it is the kind of system which the Obama administration wants to use to tell you and your physician when, where and how your health issues are to be handled.
Not too long ago the N.I.C.E. released a consultation document regarding the treatment of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Although the document reverses some of its earlier negative recommendations to completely withdraw anti-dementia drugs from the National Health Service, it now proposes to limit treatment to the moderate stages of the disease and to exclude people with Alzheimer's disease in the mild and severe stages. If that dreaded disease is not “nipped in the bud” it will not be nipped at all.These proposals are based on cost-benefit reasons, not the acrimonious misnomer “Clinical Excellence.” True excellence in the practice of medicine is based upon the axiom, PRIMUM NON NOCERE, first do no harm, not “What is this going to cost.”
It was that same political organization, originally established in 1999, which recently decided to withhold a cancer chemotherapeutic agent from a relatively young man who had a malignancy of the kidney that had metastasized to his lungs. The patient/doctor unfriendly decisions made by N.I.C.E. The unfriendly decisions made by that government agency over the past ten years would fill a tome too voluminous to read were I to list them, but I do believe that the reader gets the point; we don’t want that type of system installed in the US.
Whether C.S Lewis was highly prescient, or it was by mere chance that he used the same acrostic in his 1945, science fiction novel entitled That Hideous Strength, the devastating effects of England’s N.I.C.E over the past decade and the tremendous power and gruesome effects of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments in the Lewis work of fiction are too closely aligned to be comfortable. Some two years before writing his own Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell reviewed That Hideous Strength for the Manchester Evening News, commenting: "Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters [the N.I.C.E. scientists], and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realizable"
Monday, April 20, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Dear Doctor: You’re fired
I am not a big fan of Donald Trump’s TV show known as The Apprentice, nor have I actually sat listening to the business spoof all the way through, but because of the commercials which advertise the program I am familiar with the ominous words shouted out by the dramatic host Trump, “You’re fired.”
Recently our federal government, now under the leadership of the Obama administration, fired General Motors’ chairman and chief executive Rick Wagoner. As The Chicago Tribune put it that move was “part of a sweeping plan to reshape the American auto industry and extend additional money to GM and Chrysler to give them more time to restructure.” Part of the reshaping process will be an “auto czar.”
Another brainstorm of the Obama administration is a “sweeping plan to reshape the American” medical care delivery system, as they move to nationalize the country’s health care and set up the bureaucracy to micro-manage every step that your doctor takes in trying to improve on your state of physical and emotional well being.
We have already tasted the bitter pill of bureaucratic medicine over the past twenty-five years with insurance company managed care organizations known as the HMOs. As the years have passed our hospitalization premiums have had an insidious rise while the HMOs have siphoned off 25% of the dollars spent on healthcare to run their medical administrators’ multilayered system.
If and when Obama succeeds in a government takeover of healthcare in the country, there will eventually be a rude awakening when the bills begin to arrive at the Congressional Budget office. Just as the makers of Medicare underestimated the price of that program ($66 billion in 1990 vs. the estimate of $9 billion), so too they will have fallen short of the actual cost of socialized medicine. When they do realize the price, tax increases, rationing and limited access to care will ensue and sweeping regulations regarding how and when your physician manages your care will be put into law. If your primary care physician, a government employee, puts your welfare above those regulations he or she will receive a letter from a Washington, DC healthcare czar saying, “Dear doctor: You’re fired.”
Recently our federal government, now under the leadership of the Obama administration, fired General Motors’ chairman and chief executive Rick Wagoner. As The Chicago Tribune put it that move was “part of a sweeping plan to reshape the American auto industry and extend additional money to GM and Chrysler to give them more time to restructure.” Part of the reshaping process will be an “auto czar.”
Another brainstorm of the Obama administration is a “sweeping plan to reshape the American” medical care delivery system, as they move to nationalize the country’s health care and set up the bureaucracy to micro-manage every step that your doctor takes in trying to improve on your state of physical and emotional well being.
We have already tasted the bitter pill of bureaucratic medicine over the past twenty-five years with insurance company managed care organizations known as the HMOs. As the years have passed our hospitalization premiums have had an insidious rise while the HMOs have siphoned off 25% of the dollars spent on healthcare to run their medical administrators’ multilayered system.
If and when Obama succeeds in a government takeover of healthcare in the country, there will eventually be a rude awakening when the bills begin to arrive at the Congressional Budget office. Just as the makers of Medicare underestimated the price of that program ($66 billion in 1990 vs. the estimate of $9 billion), so too they will have fallen short of the actual cost of socialized medicine. When they do realize the price, tax increases, rationing and limited access to care will ensue and sweeping regulations regarding how and when your physician manages your care will be put into law. If your primary care physician, a government employee, puts your welfare above those regulations he or she will receive a letter from a Washington, DC healthcare czar saying, “Dear doctor: You’re fired.”
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