October 14, 2005

Ted Kennedy's Cure for What Ails

Ted Kennedy has a grand plan for health care in America: let the government take over.

We've been hearing bleatings about this from the left for some time now, and Kennedy is sponsoring a bill that is supposed to succeed where Hillarycare failed.

Kennedy's bill, along with a host of others presently winding through Capitol Hill, seeks to tweak the so-called "administrative simplification" provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and

Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA, Title II).
HIPAA required the Department of Health and Human Services to, over time, establish national standards for electronic health-care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health plans, and employers.

It also addressed the security and privacy of health data, resolving that such standards would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation's health-care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data interchange in health care.

Some are concerned with not only privacy issues, but that by imposing a national standard, doctors might only treat patients whose chances for recovery are high.

What I find amusing is that Kennedy wants the government to have a more involved role in healthcare, taking more and more away from the private sector, when he recently blasted the government for its response to Hurricane Katrina victims:

This is a disaster of biblical proportions. The dimensions of this tragedy almost are beyond human comprehension. And the failures by our government to prepare and to respond run deep and wide.

[...]

Any corporation faced with such devastation and incompetence by its leadership would have its board and its shareholders demanding an independent assessment of the failures and demanding accountability for its leadership. It would not be business as usual.

That's right Teddy, and you'd be right up there with the rest of the corporate honchos.

Democrat logic: The government can't manage disaster relief, but we want it to manage healthcare?

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