Monday, August 16, 2010

Ok, so we have death panels by another name;

in this case, the FDA:
And now there is the anti-breast-cancer drug Avastin. Like Provenge, it has already been approved by the FDA. But that creates a political problem -- how can Obama control costs and reassure the public that he's not, as maintained by his critics, denying useful and effective drugs to seniors in order to free up money for ObamaCare?

Oh -- here's a great idea! We'll just get the FDA to rescind its previous approval of the drug so that Medicare and Medicaid don't even have to consider reimbursing for it, thus sparing Obama a political headache, and merely at the cost of taking off the market, from anyone suffering from breast cancer, a drug already deemed "safe and effective" by the FDA.
Federal regulators are considering taking the highly unusual step of rescinding approval of a drug that patients with advanced breast cancer turn to as a last-ditch hope.

The debate over Avastin, prescribed to about 17,500 women with breast cancer a year, has become entangled in the politically explosive struggle over medical spending and effectiveness that flared during the battle over health-care reform: How should the government balance protecting patients and controlling costs without restricting access to cutting-edge, and often costly, treatments? …

The FDA is not supposed to consider costs in its decisions, but if the agency rescinds approval, insurers are likely to stop paying for treatment.

“It’s hard to talk about Avastin without talking about costs,” said Eric P. Winer, director of the Breast Oncology Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “For better or worse, Avastin has become in many ways the poster child of high-priced anti-cancer drugs.”
This is criminal. To avoid a difficult political debate -- and the honest confession that "bending the curve" of Medicare costs to free up money for ObamaCare is going to require a lesser standard of treatment -- the FDA is killing a safe and effective drug and thereby outlawing for anyone, including those who can be helped by this drug and no other, and who are paying for the drug with their own private insurance or own out-of-pocket money.

In other words: He is doing exactly what he vowed he would not. He is "equalizing" health access not by bringing up care for those who have little, but by reducing care by full might of federal legal power for those who have "too much."
I'm wondering when somebody about to die, or a family member of someone who dies because of bullshit like this, will find some FDA weenie and terminate them? I mentioned once before, I wondered if the bureaucrats who'll be enforcing Obamacare have considered that THEY'LL be the ones people see telling them "Your mother could use this treatment, but we won't allow it; she's too old and it's too costly" or "Your father would live longer with this operation, but he's too old for it to be cost-effective, so have him take his pain meds and make him comfortable." Which means when somebody says "Enough, they want equality? I'll give them some equal suffering!" guess who they'll probably choose?

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