Universal Healthcare - Bend Over

As Bruce says, be afraid... be very afraid.

Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

This has so many things wrong with it that it's actually very frightening. Why would I trust a federal government database to keep my information private? They can't even keep information that is supposed to be secret from reaching the press, not to mention when some political hack in the bureaucracy gets a hardon about you and does what they did to Joe-the-Plumber, you may be finding some concern.

How about having the government telling the doctor what is appropriate? Since bureaucrats are so good at analyzing detailed information. Second guessing the doctor's diagnosis from a database, which will be fraught with errors, like say the TSA database, makes me shudder.