Or so say I, over at National Review Online:
The $819 billion “stimulus bill” passed by the House includes $1.1 billion that has nothing to do with economic growth and everything to do with letting government control your medical decisions.…
Health and Human Services secretary-nominee Tom Daschle … propose[s] a new federal board that would … make “specific coverage decisions” for all government health-care programs and “exert tremendous influence on every … provider and payer, even those in the private sector.”
Daschle understands that refusing to cover specific services is “not so clean cut,” that patient advocates often view those decisions as “matters of life and death,” and that “doctors and patients might resent” the board’s decisions. He therefore proposes to have the board operate under “a decision-making process that is one step removed from Congress and the White House.”
That’s a delicate way of saying that Daschle wants government bureaucrats to have more room to ignore you, even if you have good reason to think your child would respond better to a non-covered chemotherapy agent than the average patient would.…
[The] “stimulus” package would give Daschle $400 million to get his rationing board going.
