Living document

All right, it is a living document. 

The founders never thought it was perfect or immutable. It grew under John Marshall.

It grew under Jefferson, for gosh sakes. He knew a limited reading wouldn't support Louisiana Purchase. But it was his duty to take the deal.

Polk stretched war-making power. Utah conservatives wouldn't regret being in U.S., would they? would they?

Then Lincoln and the postwar amendments.

Kennedy

Ted Kennedy died yesterday. I worked on his campaign in '80. I thought then he spoke for the forgetten people.

But, as Amity Shlaes (?) pointed out, the real "forgotten man" is the person who works, pays taxes, supports the community. Kennedy too often forgot about him, or at least took him for granted.

Yeah, we are scared

All the stuff we've been writing about is from proposed legislation, the president's own words in the New York Times, commentary from liberals such as Nat Hentoff and Mickey Kaus, and a Washington Post editorial writer, with more support from mainstream pubs such as the Wall Street Journal.

No blogs, no pols (aside from one quote from Palin).

Who decides? And when?

From kausfiles:

A debate on long-term cost control and end-of-life care--especially an emotional and acrimonious debate--is a highly useful debate to have. But it's not a useful debate to have right now. Right now it is killing Obama's universal care plans. ... And it wasn't a debate we had to have right now. It's a debate Obama has brought on himself by framing health care as an attempt to "bend the curve" of long term costs decades from now. He could have just said "Here's how I would guarantee health security for everyone. And here's how we're going to pay for it for the next ten years."

Kaus is one of the most insightful writers around. But here it's backwards.

We should have the discussion about cost control and end-of-life care first. How can we design change the system if we don't know what it will cover?

That's like saying: "Let's not worry about our destination. Let's just plan everything else about the trip."

Decide the destination first. Then decide the trip.

And Obama does bring up a good point. Why do we pay so much on the last weeks, when that neither prolongs nor betters life?

Most people don't want to be tormented at the very end of their lives. But they don't want a bureaucrat to decide when that will be.

But until we decide that, we can't really reform the system.

Just because you're paranoid ...

Death panels? from IBD:

Death panels are already here it seems, just as they have been for some time in Britain and Canada. The concept behind deciding who lives and who dies and how finite resources should be allocated was described by key Obama health care adviser Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

In his paper, "Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions," he expounds on what he calls "The Complete Lives System" for allocating treatments and resources.

"When the worse-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly," he says, "allocating to the better-off is often justifiable."

These are Dr. Emanuel's words, not Palin's. We're not making this up and neither is she. It is not hard to see this formula for rationing forcing children such as Trig and the elderly such as Barbara Morgan to take a number — a very high number.

White House for sale

Robert Reich on health care sellout:

But I'm appalled by the deal the White House has made with the pharmaceutical industry's lobbying arm to buy their support.

More scorn and contempt from Dems

Maybe Pelosi and Reid could start a new committee. Call it the ... oh, you know.

Health bill's 'end of life' clauses are scary

Lane has good insights in Post:

Section 1233, however, addresses compassionate goals in disconcerting proximity to fiscal ones. Supporters protest that they're just trying to facilitate choice -- even if patients opt for expensive life-prolonging care. I think they protest too much: If it's all about obviating suffering, emotional or physical, what's it doing in a measure to "bend the curve" on health-care costs?

Comment on Charles Lane:

His comments are very insightful. Still, you have to go farther. Look at the whole bill.

1. It clearly enmeshes every patient in a government-run system.

That makes the patient an object. Nothing in it will be voluntary, in a real sense. Read Sartre, all the modern thinkers. Subject and object: this makes us into objects of the government, which will the only true subject.

At one point I thought this bill would make us all serfs. (Mark Steyn has good insights here.) But it's worse than that: we just become things, statistics. And, for most of us over 50, bad statistics.

2. It makes every patient not a citizen but an expense. Look at the clauses that would take the money out of your account, or let government troll through your accounts and IRS returns.

This is what makes the end of life clauses so ominous.

And you have to read the whole thing. I don't care what one clause here or there says. The occasional reassuring sentence is negated by clause after clause, and, more important, the whole structure of the thing.

We wrote about it at Herald. Version also at:

http://tinyurl.com/DHhealthedit

Instapundit also links.

Sixties redux?

Thugs attack protestors? White House and Dems decry dissent?

Bad moon rising?

If VDH is mad ....

Nailing it:

There is, again, a mounting anxiety that the current federal expansion is politically-driven in rather radical ways—an effort to create a permanent new constituency of millions who either receive expanded federal largess or are gleefully employed in doling it out. The zealotry of expansive bureaucracy and dependency instills fears, rational or not, of a radicalized huge federal work force, a sort of national version of Acorn to the nth degree that in pack-like fashion is mobilized to target potential naysayers.

Internet watershed?

Is the fight over Obamacare another milestone in online connection?

I'm an editorial page editor. I get paid to look this stuff up. But I strongly doubt whether, pre-Internet, I could have accessed HR 3200 so easily.

And, until you look at the whole thing, you don't really grasp how all-encompassing it is. No summary or comment can convey that; but once you at least look at the whole thing, then and only then can you grasp how this will completely overwhelm any "private" aspect of health care. Everything, everything, will be run by the government. Any "private" aspect will be private in name only; doctors and hospitals and insurance companies will be mere proxies for Big Bro. And they can't last long anyway -- as we said in edit, any more than a tropical bird can last long in Antarctica.

More important, online info (from e-mails and on the Web) helped me navigate this monster bill better than I ever could have done on my own.

Perhaps most important, I was able to get a sense of how others felt, and that this was a winnable fight.

I'm old enough to remember the Great Society. I was only a teenager, but there was no sense of any debate or opposition, with this kind of scale or intensity. Maybe it was there, but now you can see it.

And, of course, we're no longer just throwing words out there on page, but connecting back.

So this is not only an important moment in politics, it's important in communications and political action.

Health care options

Yes, Obamacare would be worse than nothing.

And there are better options.

A patient-centered health-care reform begins with individual ownership of insurance policies and leverages Health Savings Accounts, a low-premium, high-deductible alternative to traditional insurance that includes a tax-advantaged savings account. It allows people to purchase insurance policies across state lines and reduces the number of mandated benefits insurers are required to cover. It reallocates the majority of Medicaid spending into a simple voucher for low-income individuals to purchase their own insurance. And it reduces the cost of medical procedures by reforming tort liability laws.

By empowering patients and doctors to manage health-care decisions, a patient-centered health-care reform will control costs, improve health outcomes, and improve the overall efficiency of the health-care system.

email to Mickey Kaus

Kausfiles: We pay 77 percent more on prescription drugs, we're paying $6,000 more per individual on health care than any other industrialized nation; here's all the failures in the delivery system that account for it. It's not just because we are somehow more obese or more unhealthy. It turns out actually we're a little bit healthier than most of these other countries because our smoking rates are lower and we're younger. So we should actually be paying less than they are.

kf wold be even more persuasive if could explain how the government is going to make things more efficient and effective, yet less costly.

You've been a trenchant critic of the auto takeover; you could explain why THIS takeover will be different.