Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today called on all Australians to emphatically reject Julia Gillard’s attempt to set up a “death panel” to control funding to Australia’s health care system.
“Julia Gillard is flashing her Fabian knickers by seeking to copy the British NICE [National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence] system, and Obamacare in the U.S., and place control over the life-and-death decisions of health funding in the hands of an ‘independent’, meaning unelected and unaccountable, commission,” Mr Isherwood said.
“She made a big show of ditching Kevin Rudd’s health plan, but she’s actually kept the evil heart of it—the death panel.
“Our health system is abysmal now, because it is chronically underfunded, but Gillard’s death panel will make it infinitely worse, by making the decision-makers unaccountable to the people whose lives are in their hands. At least when politicians make murderous decisions, the people can throw them out,” he said.
Britain’s NICE is murdering Poms by the thousands to drive down health care “costs”, by applying its death-calculus of quality-adjusted life years, to funding decisions.
A quality-adjusted life year, or QALY, scores health on a scale of zero to one: zero if you’re dead, one if you’re in perfect health. A medical procedure moves the patient up the scale. For example, a hip replacement may move the patient from 0.5 to 0.7, an improvement of 0.2. If it is assumed the patient will live for 15 more years, those 15 actual years are multiplied by the 0.2 improvement of the QALY scale achieved by the procedure, to arrive at a calculation of three quality-adjusted life years. The total cost of the procedure is then divided by the calculated QALY, to determine the cost per QALY: if the hip replacement cost $15,000, the cost per QALY is $5,000.
NICE chairman Sir Michael Rawlins gave an interview to Time magazine on 27th March, 2009, in which he admitted, “The most controversial area is where you place the dividing line between what is cost-effective and what is cost-ineffective. That is the ‘How much is life worth?’ question … The judgment of our health economists is that somewhere in the region of £20,000-30,000 per quality-adjusted life year is the [threshold], but it’s not a strict limit.” [emphasis added]
A March 2009 European Journal of Cancer editorial accused NICE of basing its funding decisions not on clinical effectiveness, but on cost-effectiveness. London Oncologist and professor of cancer medicine at the Imperial College School of Medicine Dr Karol Sikora wrote in the 12th May, 2009 New Hampshire Union Leader, “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”. [emphasis added]
Mr Isherwood called on every Australian to act to stop Gillard’s plan: “Fight this as if your life depends upon it, because it does. And deliver the message to your state and federal MPs that their political futures depend upon them defending the lives of their constituents, by rejecting this plan.”
To see what is in store for Australia, click here for more background on the Nazi methods being used in health care in both the U.K. and the U.S.
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