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Health Last Updated: Jun 1st, 2009 - 12:13:45


Senator Rockefeller patterns a healthcare �reform� bill on the Federal Reserve
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor


Jun 1, 2009, 00:19

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Things are getting stranger and stranger in D.C. and the promise of change now definitely looks like the same old game with Medicare: invite the HMOs in to brainstorm cuts in services to people who need them most.

Behind this is a new bill submitted on May 20 by Senator John D. �Jay� Rockefeller IV (D, W.VA.), chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care. It authorizes the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC, created in 1997) to go even further and set lists of approved treatment standards and actually have enforcement powers over methods of healthcare delivery and reimbursement. You just think about that for a minute.

The bill is called, �The MedPAC Reform Act of 2009,� so beware when you hear words like �Reform� in an act as in �The Commodities Futures Trading �Modernization�� Act of 2000 (thanks to Larry Summers and signer Bill Clinton), which helped bring us �The Enron Loophole,� which helped bring down Enron and helped get us in the financial pickle we�re in today with derivatives.

This time �The MedPAC Reform Act� is calling for MedPAC to be made up of �independent experts� as an �executive agency modeled after the Federal Reserve.� Is that because the Fed has done such an incredibly super job of throwing our money after banks and other dinosauric corporations like AIG?

Do we need still another shark tank of �experts� with vested interests and little transparency over their actions, spending your money as they will, and as fast as they print it. Yes, just as the Federal Reserve serves private financial interests, so too the new health care reimbursement agency will serve the HMOs, demanding their (your) blood money. This is the opposite of what Obama promised in his �Change� campaign.

But then, politicians as we all know will and do say anything to get elected. Reality is another thing. And Rockefeller claims that an enhanced, empowered MedPAC would not be, and get this, subject to the �whims of Congress.� Excuse me? Jay said this and more about his bill in a recent interview with Washington Post healthcare writer, Ceci Connolly. He added, �To truly achieve transformative health care reform, we need to separate the special interests from the decision makers.� Think about that for a while.

He added �We must take Congress out of its current role [representing the people?] . . . It is inefficient and ineffective; we are not health-care experts, and being a deliberative body means that we cannot keep pace with the rapidly transforming health-care marketplace.� Congress is not made up of all arms experts yet they appropriate billions every year to the Department of Defense. When we leave it to the generals to do on their own buying pell-mell, we end up with them in bed with big defense corporations, creating multi-billion dollar white elephants that don�t fly, i.e, incredible waste.

In fact, in the true tradition of the Rockefeller family and their treasonous involvement and leadership in the Bilderberg Group, Jay Rockefeller is trying to circumvent the duly elected legislative body of the people to make side deals with private corporations, utilizing MedPAC�s �experts,� and hence have more money to pour down the corporations� ever dollar-hungry gullets, not to mention the bankrupt banks� maws.

The very idea of setting up an �independent� national commission to declare what doctors and hospitals can and cannot do is odious -- a step totally in the wrong direction for both the right and left sides of the Obama/Baucus health-care �reform� discussion. It is made to order to keep the money flowing right down the drain of the financial cadre behind the HMOs.

Until now, the very idea of this flagrantly �special interest� bill has not been permitted in the United States. Unfortunately, the model for it comes express-direct from Britain and is called the �National Institute for Clinical Excellence,� or NICE, more appropriately �Nazi-Inspired Citizen Eradication,� as statesman Lyndon LaRouche calls it. NICE was set up 11 years ago and passes on what medications, treatments, and services cannot be allowed to be given in the health-care system. It can easily become the �euthanasia express,� with its �Kevorkians,� excuse me, �experts� deciding who lives and who dies and when.

There is a distinctly inhuman, illegal feeling about this bill. But then Rockefeller�s latest bill is one of dozens that have been filed recently in Congress, each with various slants, but all consistent with the un-American, Nazi-medicine edge.

They will all be detailed soon in Obama/Baucus/Grassley�s �comprehensive health care reform� act in June. For instance, a version that was filed last week in the Senate called the �Advance Planning and Compassionate Care Act,� was to help citizens decide when to reduce expensive treatments in their �end-of-life� experiences. Can you believe it? It is again sponsored by Jay Rockefeller, Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), and others. This is not science fiction, folks. These geeks are for real. They just sound like they�re from another planet.

In fact, Rockefeller personally desires backing the principle of providing health care for all, especially kids, so they can practice these little tricks on everyone. He would also like to have Medicare open to enrolling people 55 years old and up, to get the �experts� hands on them earlier. But the caveat, my dears, is that he wants his NICE agency patterned on Britain�s model to �service them.�

NICE will decide when and how to cut care for the enrollees so that the HMO systems get their pound of flesh, yours or mine, and more. My advice, beloved fellow citizens, old, middle-aged and young, is to be careful of this Rockefeller, this elitist playing Democratic senator and his bunch. And be careful of all who offer your healthcare up as a honey-pot for the healthcare and Big Pharma bears -- just like the Federal Reserve does with taxpayer money for the banks.

As to Obama, he couldn�t care less. He just wants to cut a couple of trillion from his first term expenditures, the monies he�s already given away to the banks, so that he has more to spend next time around. Stay tuned. More to come!

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His new book, State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on� is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com.

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