British Doctor Warns of Human Toll from U.S. Health Care Reform

The British organization going by the acronym of NICE is anything but when it comes to its role in policing health care in the United Kingdom. It routinely denies the use of drugs that the United States and European nations rely on to prolong and save lives from chronic diseases such as cancer. NICE stands for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, Britain's model for what Obama and crew want to accomplish here in nationalizing and then rationalizing (and rationing) health care--true cost effectiveness. As British oncologist Karol Sikora points out, however, NICE manages cost effectiveness by keeping the nation in the medicinal dark ages. "If it costs too much, it can't be any good" seems to be NICE's motto when it comes to drugs. Writing in the Manchester Union-Leader, Dr. Sikora notes that Obama wants a similar mechanism for holding down costs and warns that it will cost thousands of Americans their lives in premature deaths and suffering:

As a practicing oncologist, I am forced to give patients older, cheaper medicines. The real cost of this penny-pinching is premature death for thousands of patients -- and higher overall health costs than if they had been treated properly: Sick people are expensive.

Sadly, the model upon which Obama is building is based on Tom Daschle's book, which praises NICE and slams old people for hanging on to their lives too long and costing taxpayers too much money (which presumably could be spent elsewhere in buying votes). The thing about bleeding-heart liberals (see Obama, Barack, Kennedy, Ted, and Baucus, Max, et al.) is that they only bleed for taxpayer dollars and for systems they can run--not for real people in suffering. "Build them a system, and they will be happy--and we can take credit for it forever." Or at least until the "happy" citizens die at 67 instead of 81.