Is there a DEATH PANEL?

What was Sarah Palin thinking? She believes there is a DEATH PANEL!!

Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!

Obviously, she has not read hb 3200. There is no DEATH PANEL mentioned anywhere in the 1018 pages.

There is a DEATH COMPUTER!!

So she isn’t too far off the mark.

Here’s how it works. In a previous post, I talked about Comparative Effectiveness, cost-benefit, and quality-adjusted life years( QALY). TRILLIONS of our dollars have been (or will be) given to various governmental groups to study medical procedures. The results which come from these “consensus-based” organizations will be put into the master-computer data base. This is done by ‘‘TITLE XXX—HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND QUALITY” which was part of the Stimulus Bill. It established the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. I call it HITman (or woman).

So CE info is in the master data base. Now let’s put all of your heath info in there, too. Can they do that? Check this:

Sec 3000 (13)
QUALIFIED ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD.—The term ‘qualified electronic health record’ means an electronic record of health-related information on an individual that—
‘‘(A) includes patient demographic and clinical health information, such as medical history and problem lists; and
‘‘(B) has the capacity—
‘‘(i) to provide clinical decision support;
‘‘(ii) to support physician order entry;
‘‘(iii) to capture and query information relevant to health care quality; and
‘‘(iv) to exchange electronic health information with, and integrate such information from other sources.

HITman has put info about CE, cost-benefit, and now your personal data. With that, your QALY is calculated.

So you go to your doctor because you have a serious problem. He dials up the computer and inputs your current situation and the computer sends back an answer. Let me remind you of page 58 paragraph.

…such standards shall…
“(D)enable the real-time (or near real time) determination of an individual’s financial responsibility at the point of service and, to the extent possible, prior to service, including whether the individual is eligible for a specific service with a specific physician at a specific facility, which may include utilization of a machine-readable health plan beneficiary identification card… “

There you go!! It’s a DEATH COMPUTER.