In his annual year in review, humorist Dave Barry declared that 2010 was “the worst year ever” — narrowly beating out the end of the Cretaceous Period, when Earth was struck by an asteroid that wiped out about 75 percent of all of the species on the planet. The reasons 2010 was so bad include the BP oil spill, vuvuzelas, “Jersey Shore” and a host of concerns overseas, including North Korea, which Barry said “continued to show why it is known as ‘the international equivalent of Charlie Sheen.’”
Sarah Palin deserves an apology. When she said that the new health care law would lead to “death panels” deciding who gets lifesaving treatment and who does not, she was roundly denounced and ridiculed. Now we learn that a rule issued by the recess-appointed Donald Berwick, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, calls for the government to pay doctors to advise patients on options for ending their lives. These could include directives to forgo aggressive treatment that could extend their lives. This rule will inevitably lead to bureaucrats deciding who is “fit” to live and who is not. When life is seen as having ultimate value, individuals and their doctors can make decisions about treatment that are in the best interests of patients. But when government is looking to cut costs as the highest good and offers to pay doctors to tell patients during their annual visits that they can choose to end their lives rather than continue treatment, that is more than the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent. That is the next step on the way to physician-assisted suicide and, if not stopped, government-mandated euthanasia. — Cal Thomas
If you’ve ever watched a spouse, son or daughter struggle with decisions about what an aging, comatose or terminally ill patient would want — feeding tube? ventilator? resuscitation? — then you know the importance of the patient himself or herself thinking through those issues beforehand. So it’s good news that Medicare regulations now will reimburse doctors who advise patients on those complex, heart-wrenching, end-of-life questions. The regulation will allow voluntary, yearly consultation. That means patients can change their minds as they age and their medical condition changes — or have no consultation at all, if they’d rather avoid the topic. And thus will end, we hope, the ludicrous blather over death panels. A provision to let Medicare reimburse doctors for such voluntary consultations set off the wildly misinformed “death panels” flap during 2009 debates over the health care reform legislation. Those death panels were a fiction. Here’s the fact: If Medicare patients opt to take advantage of the new rule, they’ll have more thoughtful discussions with loved ones and doctors about what care they’d prefer as their lives near a close. — Charlotte Observer
In arguing that the military shouldn’t be exempt from budget cuts, columnist Nicholas Kristof highlighted the following facts about military spending:
– The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, including more than six times as much China, which has the next highest budget.
– The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago.
– The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.
– The United States will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.
Troubling warnings from a New York Times article about how states and cities have mounting debt loads: “The finances of some state and local governments are so distressed that some analysts say they are reminded of the run-up to the subprime mortgage meltdown or of the debt crisis hitting nations in Europe. Analysts fear that at some point — no one knows when — investors could balk at lending to the weakest states, setting off a crisis that could spread to the stronger ones, much as the turmoil in Europe has spread from country to country.”
In his annual year in review, humorist Dave Barry declared that 2010 was “the worst year ever” — narrowly beating out the end of the Cretaceous Period, when Earth was struck by an asteroid that wiped out about 75 percent of all of the species on the planet. The reasons 2010 was so bad include the BP oil spill, vuvuzelas, “Jersey Shore” and a host of concerns overseas, including North Korea, which Barry said “continued to show why it is known as ‘the international equivalent of Charlie Sheen.’”
