Daschle is bad for America’s health

Tom Daschle was Senate Majority leader in the mode of Senator Harry Reid but with a softer sounding voice but what he said was as chilling as an ice cube on a bare back. After a few years of hibernation Tom Daschle has been awakened by President Obama and thrust onto the public stage where he can cause even more damage to the country than he did as a senator. Obama wants to entrust the future of America’s health care to this off-the-wall, big-government liberal and we are in jeopardy of having the health care we have now being replaced with a system where the government determines what’s good for us as Democrats are want to do but this time at the risk of our lives.

President Obama has nominated Tom Daschle for Secretary of Health and Human Services and has designated Daschle to be the “nation’s health care czar”. The Clinton-care system proposed by President Clinton and his wife, now Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, failed because the Clinton health care proposal was blatant and became known to public for what it was; a government takeover of our health care in place of the private care that has served us well enough to be responsible for increasing our span of life. Because the Clinton proposal reached the light of day in all its details it was derailed by public criticism. Daschle learned from this error and adopts the idea that the plan could have gotten past the public if the folks had not learned details of the scheme.

The “keep the specifics away from the public” however will be a bit difficult in the case of Daschle because he has revealed quite a bit of what he has in mind; that is if the public can be made aware of it. Daschle wrote a book entitled “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis” in which he describes his proposal for a Federal Health Board that would make the important decisions about what sort of treatment, drugs, technology and procedures Americans should receive.

Daschle’s Federal Health Board of political appointees would “oversee the health care industry and have the power to make complicated medical decisions and be independent of political pressures. Among the responsibilities the board would have is to “define evidence-based benefits and lower overall spending by determining which medicines, treatments and procedures are most effective and identify those that do not justify their high price tags”; in other words deny payment. Daschle says the Board would function like a “Supreme Court of Health”.

Rules for private insurers who participate in a newly formed national pool would be set by the appointed Board. They would also have the authority to determine benefit coverage under all government health care programs. Initially the Federal Health board would control only government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid but Daschle would have the Board’s authority to extend to all health plans that cover Americans.

The Daschle proposals reflect also the thinking of President Obama as a centralized government run national health care system where bureaucrats and an appointed board make the life and death decisions instead of individual medical practitioners. Daschle acknowledges this would weaken the doctor-patient relationship but for liberals the end justifies the means and to them it is more important to control people than do what is in their best interest. This will be ultimate of the government making decisions about what is good for us and what isn’t because it’s too expensive. Naturally older folks will see their health care curtailed because doing so is “cost effective”.

While the senate contemplates whether Daschle’s tax evasion should deny him appointment to office, they should also learn what Daschle has in mind to do to our health care and reject him for that reason alone.