Jo's Cafe

Diabetes News v4-09

Monday, 16 February 2009, 6:00

I apologize that I haven’t put any of these posts out lately. The goings on in Washington and the attempted total destruction of the American way of life has been foremost on my mind lately.

Part of the “stimulus” bill was a portion about health care and how records are maintained. Pelosi & Reid put in a section for the maintenance of medical records being done electronically. Now that is something I can get my head around and agree with. What I can’t support is the part the U.S. Government will be the record keeper. They have no business managing my records, and frankly I don’t trust them. Just ask any military family how badly the US Government manages their medical records and you’ll understand what I mean. They would never give me my records until I had a doctors appointment and then half the time they couldn’t find them. Okay, they weren’t on computer yet and that is another point toward having them on electrons. BUT – do you really want to hand over your private information to a Government that can’t even figure out that when you loan $750 million to banks you need to have some rules attached to it?

Another part of the bill has people on both sides understanding it differently. There are sections that read “national standards of treatment“, to reduce cost. To me that reads, “if your treatment is not standard for the rest of the country, and too expensive, you’re not getting it.” Doctors will be subjected to heavy fines if they don’t “cooperate” with the government and we could lose access to doctors who care about us. Each patient, no matter that condition, has to have their medical treatment tailored to them, not to the masses. Government intervention in my treatment smacks of government control, ala Hitler era.

The biggest fear a lot of us have is once we get a certain age or come down with a condition deemed too expense to treat, what happens then? Are you just sent home to die? (BTW, this part of the bill has nothing to do with job creation).

Fortunately, the part of the bill where the government takes over your treatment from the doctor probably won’t start taking effect until around 2014. Hopefully by that time the country will have come to its senses and ousted the liberals in congress in 2010 and we can get the wrong stuff in this bill reversed.