Obama-Care: "The Policy Is, Accelerate the Death Rate"

While the Obama White House pushes Congress to give an "Independent Medicare Advisory Commission (IMAC)" the power to cut medical treatments by cutting Medicare payments, they are not waiting for Congress. The already-existing Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is making rulings to do the same thing. "The policy is, 'accelerate the death rate,' " said economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, the leading opponent fighting Obama's healthcare "reform." "It's the Hitler euthanasia policy," LaRouche said.

Obama and his chief bean-counter Peter Orszag want to make the CMS the ultimate force in driving Medicare and Medicaid spending down, able to overrule and cut even the IMAC decisions.

CMS has just promulgated (on July 13) rulings for deep cuts in payments by Medicare/Medicaid to various medical specialists starting in five months, on Jan. 1, 2010. For example: Payments to X-ray, CT, and MRI/MRT scan technologists are to be cut by 30%, on top of a 23% cut enacted (approved by Congress) in 2005. Far fewer such tests will be made as a result, and fewer diseases detected at an early state. Another example: Payments to radiation oncologists are to be cut 20%, which would cause many cancer centers to close, stop accepting Medicare patients, and reduce services to all cancer patients, according to the American Society for Radiation Oncology.

All these cuts are supposed to allow increased payments to primary care physicians, especially in rural areas, according to the Obama White House line. But an alliance of cancer treatment support groups exposed, in a press conference today, that the cuts will actually cause radiation treatment centers throughout rural — and poor urban — districts to close down.