Welcome To ObamaCare Rationing

From Judicial Watch:

Welcome to Obamacare Rationing




There is an old saying in politics that “personnel is policy.” And so when President Obama named “Death Panel Donald” Berwick to serve as his Medicare/Medicaid Czar, the writing was on the wall. Healthcare rationing is on the way. And probably soon, given that right now Berwick’s term is set to expire at the end of 2011.



Berwick has little time to implement his radical policies. And he’s apparently wasting no time.



On January 3, we filed a lawsuit against the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding a controversial decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to undertake a one-year review of the prostate cancer treatment Provenge to determine if the treatment is “reasonable and necessary” and should therefore be reimbursed.



(You better get used to that phrase “reasonable and necessary.” We’re going to begin hearing that a lot from the bureaucrats running Obamacare now that they’re in charge of who gets treatment and under what circumstances.)



Provenge, the first ever therapeutic vaccine cancer treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is shown to have extended life spans by an average of four months in clinical trials with few side effects. It costs $93,000 to administer the three necessary treatments.



But the cost of the treatment shouldn’t matter, at least so far as the approval process is concerned. Medicare and the FDA are legally prohibited from denying approval of a medical treatment based on cost. However, multiple press reports suggest that cost is the major factor in the unusual decision by CMS to undertake a review of the treatment which could signal a move by the Obama administration to begin implementing healthcare rationing based on the cost of treatments. In typical Orwellian fashion, the government wants to run health care, but not actually pay for it. The conservative solution is to rein in the government’s responsibility for providing health care. The liberal solution is to have unaccountable government bureaucrats ration care to control costs. And, if it means that a prostate cancer patient dies four months before his time, so be it. That is the price of “progress.”



Our original FOIA request, filed on November 9, 2010, seeks the following information: “All records concerning CMS’s national coverage analysis of the vaccine Provenge, including but not limited to the criteria being used to analyze Provenge.”



Health and Human Services was required by law to respond to Judicial Watch’s request by December 15, 2010. However, to date, the stonewalling Obama agency has failed to provide any documents or indicate why documents should be withheld. Nor has it indicated when a response is forthcoming.



As I pointed out after Obama installed Berwick as head of Medicare/Medicaid Czar, the former Harvard professor is unapologetic about his support for rationing healthcare based on cost. Check out what Berwick said in a June 2009 interview with Biotechnology Healthcare: “The social budget is limited — we have a limited resource pool. It makes terribly good sense to at least know the price of an added benefit, and at some point we might say nationally, regionally, or locally that we wish we could afford it, but we can’t… The decision is not whether or not we will ration care, the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”



You may recall that owing to the controversy surrounding Berwick’s statements, President Obama bypassed Senate confirmation and made Berwick a “recess appointment,” a decision criticized by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. (That’s why Berwick’s term is set to expire at the end of this year.) And now that he’s there, all we’re getting is stonewalling from CMS.



The Obama administration claims there is no merit to the charge that the Provenge decision is the first step in implementing healthcare rationing. So why not release these records? What does the Obama administration have to hide? Provenge is an FDA approved drug that has a proven track record and the Obama administration has no legal right to deny funding for this treatment based on its cost. But the American people are right to be concerned about this Provenge review, given the fact that a man dubbed “Death Panel Donald” Berwick is in charge of Medicare and Medicaid.