Don't you dare call them Death Panels: White House to use backdoor monetary incentives to speed up end-of-life care

More great news for seniors: the all-powerful Department of Health and Human Services will create monetary incentives for medical professionals to accelerate "end of life care".

...the White House will create incentives for doctors to discuss “options” for end of life care through regulation, after Congress removed the incentives from ObamaCare...

Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.

There is, however, something at least vaguely disturbing about a government incentivizing doctors to do so as part of an expansive regulatory program that has, as one of its primary goals, cost reduction. The process used by Obama and Kathleen Sebelius to get this into ObamaCare is more disturbing, and in a very specific way. Congress made it clear that it didn’t want this incentive as part of the new law. However, thanks to the miles and miles of ambiguity in the final version of ObamaCare, with its repetitive the Secretary shall determine language, Congress has more or less passed a blank check for regulatory growth to Obama and Sebelius.

The implication is extremely easy to understand: "Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life."

“While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet,” Mr. Blumenauer’s office said in an e-mail in early November to people working with him on the issue. “This regulation could be modified or reversed, especially if Republican leaders try to use this small provision to perpetuate the ‘death panel’ myth.”

Moreover, the e-mail said: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists, even if they are ‘supporters’ — e-mails can too easily be forwarded.”

The e-mail continued: “Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response. The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

Education is the enemy of the Statist.

Unchecked power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats is precisely what our nation's founders intended to counter with a carefully constructed Constitution.

This disastrous excuse for a health care "reform" bill must be defunded, starved and repealed.


Hat tip: Memeorandum. Linked by: Michelle Malkin. Thanks!