Why Obamacare scares Nat Hentoff

Syndicated columnist and liberal icon Nat Hentoff plans to publish a three-part series on the many troubling aspects of Obamacare. Hentoff is scared to death about a government takeover of health care and says you should be too.

The highlights below are from his first column, "Be scared: Obamacare endangers Americans' lifespans"

Hentoff writes:

Much of the press coverage of the Democrats' health-care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions, but the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship — eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans' lives for being too costly.

To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health-care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.

Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by "Change we can believe in?" Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you?

Remember those federal bureaucrats recently ruling on breast cancer screening? Dr. James Thrall, chairman of the American College of Radiology and a Harvard Medical School professor, said the resulting furor of dissent by doctors showed (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 18) that rulings "based on costs and large group averages, not individuals" lead him to fear that, "we are entering an era of deliberate decisions where we choose to trade people’s lives for money."

Is there anything you want to say to your representatives in the House or Senate before the final vote is taken? If you don't act urgently now, you may become part of another collective statistic — American annual death rates.

I'm scared, and I do mean to scare you.

We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.

Read the full column here.