Arizona Death Panels: State Revokes Funding for Heart Transplants, Opts to Save Squirrels

Taking heartless insurance cuts to a whole new level, the Arizona legislature has decided to revoke the funding it authorized for nearly 100 transplant patients. Why did the state, after giving these people hope, decide to literally take their lives away? According to NPR, the state looked at the data and determined that transplant patients don’t usually live very long after the transplant so it wasn’t worth the investment. Yes, the same state whose representatives filed a lawsuit challenging the new health care law because it requires people to purchase health insurance has decided to cut the health insurance of heart transplant patients. Maybe if these people had to buy private insurance they wouldn’t have to depend on the whims of a seriously moronic state legislature. From NPR:

The patients receive medical coverage through the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), the state’s version of Medicaid. While it may be common for private insurance companies or government agencies to change eligibility requirements for medical procedures ahead of time, medical ethicists say authorizing a procedure and then reversing that decision is unheard of.

Now something is nagging me about this and the whole idea that a panel of people could get together and decide whose life was worth saving…. Oh, that’s right! I remember the wise sage Sarah Palin saying something like this:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil,” Palin wrote last week.

I guess if you live in Arizona you do have to stand in front of a death panel so the bureaucrats can decide if you’re really deserving of a new heart. I guess they’ve decided that heart transplant patients have already spent enough time living with their wife and 3-year-old son and don’t really need to see that kid graduate from high school. The patient probably won’t make it there anyway, right? No, that’s not evil at all.

What’s even worse is that NPR says Arizona cherry-picked the data they used to show that transplant patients don’t live very long:

The state’s data also show the procedures have poor outcomes and that most patients die after the transplants. But critics say the data was cherry-picked, as it included only patients enrolled in AHCCCS and only for a two-year period.

A coalition of Arizona transplant centers, including well-known programs at the University of Arizona and the Mayo Clinic, recently gave the state data for a broader patient group and a longer time period. It showed much better outcomes.

But, good news, the state will save about $4.5 million this year. Programs they didn’t cut that cost that much? They decided to spend $1.25 Million to “build bridges for endangered squirrels over a mountain road so they don’t become roadkill.” Yes, they are willing to spend more than a million dollars to save five squirrels a year, but not to give someone a new heart. Now that’s a heartless death panel.

You can listen to NPR’s story here:

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You Look Like Sh*t Megacut

The Next Three Days

The Dawn of the Same Old Era

Does the House GOP Leadership actually expect us to believe that they will somehow create change we can believe in despite being totally unable to articulate and carryout a vision in the previous two years?

The fact that there’s a huge split in the GOP leadership between Palin’s camp, the Tea Partiers, and traditional GOPers (whom I think still exist in the form of Jerry Moran) leads me to believe that it’s even less likely they’ll get their act together and present some sort of cohesive plan to “lead” the American people.

Just today, you had a directive go out from a top GOP strategist telling Republicans not to get too grandiose in their initial actions but rather target very specific provisions of the Obama Health Care Bill for repeal (which will never pass anyway as the Democrats retain the Senate). In response, Sarah Palin went off saying Republicans needed to be bold and tear down that wall of Obama Healthcare!

Then there’s former President George W. Bush whose starting to step back into the spotlight decrying the way he was treated while in office saying things like he thought about replacing Cheney and that the worst moment of his Presidency was when Kanye West called him a racist (yes, worse than 9/11, worse than Katrina, worse than the economic collapse). I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Obama draft GW for some sort of initiative that he would be willing to take on for the sake of proving he’s not the asshole everyone made him out to be. (Did you see all the shots of him during the World Series? Mr. Mopey.)

Bohner’s never been able to get the GOP to fall in line behind him even when his President was asking him to. How’s he going to coral the crazies like Michelle Bachman and all the other Tea Party Palindrones? I’ll see it when I believe it.

Until then, I expect to see a whole bunch more of what I saw the last two years: Eric Cantor giving great soundbites as the GOP leadership remains totally ineffective and out of touch.

Quote of the Day

Jon Stewart on Bill Clinton’s efforts to get Kendrick Meeks to drop out of Florida’s three-way Senate Race:

Historical note: first time Bill Clinton has ever tried to talk someone out of a three-way.

Kansas Candidate Sees Dead People

As I was standing in church on Sunday I overheard one of the men I go to church with say, “Just glad to find out I’m not dead.” Apparently at a debate between the two candidates for Secretary of State earlier in the week Idiot (with a capital “I”) Kris Kobach cited my fellow churchgoer’s vote in August as one that was cast by a dead man. He says it’s proof that dead people are voting all across Kansas. I’m sure they’re voting mostly Democratic as we all know how liberal ghosts can be. From the Lawrence Journal World:

But Bill Gale, Sedgwick County’s election commissioner, said the vote [cited as a fraudulent vote by Kobach] was cast by the deceased man’s son [my friend from church], now in his 70s. He said registration records automatically listed the voter’s date of birth as Jan. 1, 1900 because only ages, not dates, were required when he first registered in 1964.

Kobach, who has degrees from Harvard, Yale and Oxford, terrifies me. He has our “best interest” at heart and that means trouble. He’s also made huge money off of illegal immigration: he helped draft the outrageous Arizona immigration law and taught officers how to enforce it, he’s joined forces with immigrant hating, crazy sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County, and Kobach started a program at the Justice Department to force Muslims who were in the country legally as immigrants to re-register. He’s also a proud member of the “birther” movement.

I have already resigned myself to the fact that I must live with Sam Brownback as my Governor, but I’m really hoping the moderate Republicans in this state can pull this race out and keep Democrat Chris Biggs as our Secretary of State.