Death Panels: The ObamaCare Real-Life Nightmare

Originally posted at The Blacksphere

It started out as an ‘I have a dream’ come true in 2008, but it’s nearly 2014 and that dream has transformed into a nightmare.

Five years after openly weeping in response to America rejecting its racist past, people are weeping again, but not for sentimental reasons.

In 2010, despite a complete lack of Republican support and contrary to the will of the American people, the Affordable Healthcare Act was signed into law. Liberals were so elated at the potential for the progressive dream of socialized healthcare coming to pass, that as a symbol of triumph, then-Speaker of the House Queen Nancy Pelosi strutted around Capitol Hill with a huge gavel in her hand.

The Affordable Health and Patient Care Act, which was sold as long-overdue bureaucratic benevolence toward those without health insurance, is currently absorbing the healthcare future of one-third of the US population.

Such a monumental takeover translates into control of 1/6th of the US economy and, if truth be told, limits healthcare choices, intrudes upon freedom and privacy, and forcibly pilfers the blood, sweat and tears of hardworking Americans.

At that time, America didn’t know that Pelosi’s gavel would become an oppressive sledgehammer used to bludgeon the living daylights out of the perfectly acceptable American healthcare system.

Initially, in an attempt to issue a warning that liberal insistence on altering the health insurance of 270 million already-insured Americans as an excuse to insure 40 million uninsured Americans was a bad omen, vocal conservatives spoke out. Realists like Sarah Palin were scoffed at as alarmists and publicly ridiculed for insisting that costs would inevitably take precedence over patient need.

What started out as 40 million uninsured has grown to 45 million uninsured Americans, five million of whom were the first victims of the Obamacare lie. Next in line it’s predicted that 100 million already affordably and adequately insured Americans will lose their employer-provided healthcare and be forced, along with the first five million, into an Obamacare exchange scam whose suffocating grip restricts quality, access, and doctor choice.

It doesn’t end there though. Regulations, mandates, and government intrusion are forcing physicians to retire early rather than have government so thoroughly impact their patient care.

It gets worse. Obamacare marketplace policies also will limit access to the nation’s most prominent hospitals, including two world-renowned cancer centers, Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, as well as top research and teaching hospitals such as Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, California.

As industry experts confirm that insurers are being forced to limit patients’ choices by pushing them away from hospitals that provide treatments that are considered too expensive, those who warned about impending “death panels” are being vindicated.

Health and Human Services hid behind the excuse that ‘health insurance companies are notorious for canceling policies’ when five million Americans were left without insurance. HHS is again passing the buck by saying, “Decisions about which private health insurance plans cover which doctors is a decision currently made by insurers and providers and will continue that way.”

How typical. Obamacare imposes “new costs,” and then, when access and quality are limited by insurance companies because of those higher costs – that famous gavel cudgels insurance companies.

Health policy expert Tim Jost explained that in order to cut costs, it’s necessary to limit the sickest patients’ access to certain high-end facilities that offer “the most cutting edge medical care.”

In other words, thanks to Obamacare, insurance costs have sky rocketed. As a result, it’s necessary to compensate by placing the focus on cost control rather than necessity. That means hospitals that cater to “life threatening illnesses” will no longer be able to provide high-cost “innovative care” to those who require specialized attention and will choose not to participate in Obamacare.

As it now stands, the people who decided American consumers were incapable of selecting their own individual health insurance plan and so cancelled those plans and then provided them with choices made by someone else, will be the same people who will choose the extent of care every American gets based on the bottom line.

Barack Obama is right. Healthcare is about to become more affordable because, more often than not, out-of-pocket costs for many will be the onetime fee for funeral expenses.

Too harsh? Not really, because persons with pre-existing conditions won’t be denied healthcare outright. They’ll just be denied access to lifesaving treatment at top-notch research and cancer hospitals.

That’s why denying a sick person the right to access the best specialist or hospital is really not much different than a “death panel.”

Either way, like it or not, the healthcare apocalypse is due to arrive on January 1st.

In the weeks remaining the hope is that Americans will come to realize that after being grossly manipulated by Barack Obama’s ‘if you like your …you can keep your’ falsehood, all our lives hang tentatively in the balance.