WHY PENNSYLVANIA BOOS OBAMACARE
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ARLEN SPECTER
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Specter: Saved by high-end care that "reform" would ration.
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hide topics Last updated: 6:42 am
August 5, 2009
Posted: 2:58 am
August 5, 2009
POLITICS rarely gets more per sonal than this.
On Sunday, furious Phila delphians shouted down Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius at a health-care town-hall meeting.
The anger wasn't simply over the threat of ObamaCare. Both Specter and his colleague, Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr., have had to struggle with well-publicized health-care issues -- crises resolved by lifesaving treatments that simply wouldn't be available to average Americans under an Obama "public option."
In 1993, Specter, 63, was hurriedly operated on to remove a 2-inch growth, a benign meningioma (a slow-growing brain tumor) from inside his skull.
In 2005, he was diagnosed with an advanced Hodgkin's lymphoma. He lost his hair thanks to chemotherapy, then appeared to recover -- only to have the Hodgkin's reappear in 2008, albeit in a less advanced form. He underwent another round of chemo and is today running for re-election. (Though the anger over ObamaCare only makes his prospects more dicey.)
At the same time Specter's brain-tumor battle was announced in 1993, then-Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey, the father of today's senator, underwent surgery for Appalachian familiar amyloidosis, described as a genetic condition resulting in the destruction of bodily organs by proteins.
Headlines proclaimed the state on the verge of losing both its governor and senior senator. The state's lieutenant governor took the reins as Gov. Casey underwent a dramatic heart-liver transplant -- whose success allowed him to live another seven years.
The controversial core of ObamaCare is a so-called "public option" that critics insist would eventually wipe out the ability of average Americans to get the kind of care Specter and the senior Casey received. This already is being set up, with the establishment in the Obama stimulus bill (passed with votes from both Sens. Casey and Specter) of the ominous-sounding "Federal Coordinating Council for Effectiveness Research."
Modeled after European equivalents such as the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the council is supposed to assign a monetary value to your life. This is done through a "QALY" -- a "Quality-Adjusted Life-Year." In Britain, The Wall Street Journal reports, NICE refuses to pay more than $22,000 "to extend a life by six months."
In other words, had Obama's plan been in effect in 1993, given the QALY of the 63-year-old Arlen Specter and the 61-year-old Bob Casey Sr., and had they been private citizens on the Obama public-insurance plan, both might, literally, have been allowed to die.
In the world of government-rationed care, the board of bureaucrats would surely decide that scarce resources were better spent on, say, a 25-year-old woman with the same problems. She'd live longer, potentially have children and contribute to society. By 1993, both Specter and the senior Casey had been there and done that.
This was even more strikingly so 2005 and in 2008 as Specter, at 75 and 78, battled Hodgkin's.
Pennsylvanians are well aware that the Specter and Casey families have benefited directly from high-profile medical treatment that the Obama plan would deny to average folks. So the question for Sens. Specter and Casey is: Would they be willing to enroll themselves and their families in the public plan the president is pushing?
Would they give up the quality health care that extended the senior Casey's life by seven years and quite literally saved Specter from death -- not once but three times?
That crowd of angry Philadelphians was an answer all by itself.
Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to the American Spectator and a former Reagan White House political director, lives in Pennsylvania. jlpa1@aol.com
