Healthcare Comments by Jim Wetzel

The following letter from Jim Wetzel appeared in the Aiken Standard on November 26 .

Future looks poor for health care
11/26/2009 12:33 AM
By Jim Wetzel
Future looks poor for health care

The current controversy over the recommendation of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force as to breast cancer health care is only a harbinger of more serious consequences that might come to pass. I speak to the ominous shadow of medical care rationing cast by the Task Force that could come to fruition under the ObamaCare program.

That report is not about proper health care; it's about health care spending based upon what the panel considers to be life benefits versus costs in doing breast scans. In recommending the banning of mammograms for 40- to 50-year-old women, the report's data supports the conclusion that cases of breast cancer will go undetected in that group, to a consequence related to the individual case. If that consequence happens to be death from a lack of proper treatment, it puts money over the value of life and government as the arbiter of continued life.

This is serious because the U. S. Preventive Services Task Force is designated as a decisional participant in the ObamaCare scheme. On the basis of accounting exercises and impersonal assumptions, it will make recommendations, as it has done here, based upon costs and group data. The individual and his doctor will not be considered or even play a role. If a person dies because of their recommendations, it will be of no consequence to them; but the death will be of consequence to the person who dies and to his family and society.

The sum of this is that under ObamaCare, it is likely that if you are over 80 (even 70 if the health budget is tight), and you come down with an event that can't be cured with a couple of aspirin, you may find that you have crossed the government's cost-effectiveness line and be disqualified from further care.

The lesson is that if women under 50 can be scratched from mammograms at the whim of a health panel, a person over 80 with a bad health report and subject to the same whim, could find himself sliced from the rolls and made toast.

Jim Wetzel

Aiken