Interesting details about the Democrats’ health care bills keep emerging. Examples:
According to the Red State blog, Section 1233 of the House bill requires senior citizens to meetat least every five years with a doctor or nurse practitioner to discuss dying with dignity, living wills, durable health care powers of attorney, hospice care and the like. Red State’s Eric Erickson sees this as a step toward encouraging euthanasia. “Government,” writes Erickson, “wants seniors to make sure seniors know it is time to commit suicide to save the system money.”
Blogger Suzanna Logan (hat tip to Instapundit) reports that the Senate HELP Committee bill gives the Health and Human Services Secretary the power to develop “standards of measuring gender,” as opposed to the traditional and biological male and female categories.
The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack reports that the House bill would require both public and private health insurance policies to cover abortion.
Many will see these provisions as repugnant on moral grounds. I see them as evidence of unnecessary busybody micromanaging. Abortions are among the least expensive surgical procedures, so why not let private insurance providers decide whether to cover them? Transgender individuals are very rare, so why not let them and their health care providers determine how to treat them? Most seniors and their physicians give some thought to living wills and the like, so why require them to punch a federal time clock?
In 1994 University of Virginia political scientist Martha Derthick wrote this in the Washington Post about the Clinton health care program: “In many years of studying American social policy, I have never an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naivete . . . with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me.”
History seems to be repeating itself.
