Obama’s stimulus bill contains $1.1 billion for “comparative effectiveness research”.  Here’s what socialized health care advocate Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) had to say:

The new research will eventually save money and lives, although it may very well shorten the lifespan of some senior citizens who would not be allowed to receive some treatments even if they volunteer to pay for them themselves. (Robert Pear, New York Times 2/15/09)

We won’t be able to say that we were not warned.

Ignoring mountains of evidence showing that electronic medical records will not save our health care system any significant amount of money, our new President is still promoting EMR as a panacea.

This is becoming too much even for some of the people who voted for him. Doctors Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, for example, are so irritated by this BS that they wrote the following in the WSJ:

We need the president to apply real scientific rigor to fix our health-care system rather than rely on elegant exercises in wishful thinking.

In addition to pointing out that EMR won’t save the money projected by the Obama administration, Groopman and Hartzband also point out that the technology does not, as is also claimed, improve quality of care:

In a study of orthopedic surgeons, those using handheld PDAs had seven times as many errors as their paper-based cohorts.

A study of 15,000 heart patients found EMRs produced little improvement in the quality of care.

A study of 1.8 billion ambulatory care visits found EMRs produced no improvement in the quality of care.

Unfazed by all of this, Dr. Obama is still peddling his EMR snake oil. I guess he figures that the “news” media will aid and abet him in the fraud, and the Hopium eaters are too stoned on “change” to notice.  

Two facts should give us pause as we move into the brave new world of health care reform: (1) universal heath care is fiscally unsustainable if we continue to provide care at the level expected by most Americans (2) we spend huge amounts of money on elderly and terminally ill patients.

John Griffing at the American Thinker believes that these realities, combined with the kind of central government control of health care that is the obvious goal of the Democats in Congress and in the White House, will push us further and further toward the sort of heath policies adopted in Holland:

Holland has already slipped the slope. Holland’s healthcare system is so cash-strapped that it views humans as liabilities.  A patient must formally request “no euthanasia” before simple outpatient surgery.

And this is no mere formality:

Involuntary euthanasia accounts for over 1,000 deaths in Holland.  In addition, 8,000 people in Holland die every year because they are given intentional overdoses of pain medication, not to control pain, but to end life.

Don’t think this can happen here? Better wake up and smell the coffin.

Too hear the advocates of “Universal Healthcare” tell it, the U.S. government would never ration medical care. All the while, they blather on about holding down spending and the virtues of government-sponsored “comparative effectiveness” studies to determine “appropriate” (read bureaucrat-approved) care. In this morning’s New York Post, Sally Pipes shows where Obama’s plan is inexorably headed:

As the costs for his health reforms mount, Obama will be forced to employ the same strategies that Canada and Britain have to cut spending. That means the rationing of care (and significantly higher taxes).