Paul predicts death of grandmothers under Obama plan
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul, a Bowling Green eye surgeon, assailed President Barack Obama’s proposed health insurance overhaul on The Glenn Beck Show on FOX News Friday.
Among other things, Paul predicted that Obama’s plan would cause the demise of grandmothers, whom the government would decide are too expensive to provide medical treatment. “Some committee is going to decide what is the cost-benefit analysis for grandma,” Paul said.
“Grandma is not just your grandmother; she’s a statistic and we have to decide what is the cost to society to keep her alive,” he said. “And I think she won’t get plugged in. Her ventilator won’t get plugged in if she’s 92-years-old because society may say we don’t have enough money to do that.”
PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning service of the St. Petersburg Times that fact-checks statements made by politicians and others, has found similar statements by the Club for Growth and Republican Sarah Palin to be “false” and “Pants on Fire” false, respectively.
Here’s Paul’s appearnace:
- John Stamper
Filed Under: Elections • Rand Paul • US Senate Race
About the Author: John Stamper is the accountability editor for the Lexington Herald-Leader. A native of Monticello, Ky., he has been with the Herald-Leader in a variety of roles since graduating from Western Kentucky University in 2000. Reach him at jstamper@herald-leader.com
This is a misrepresentation of Rand Paul’s statement. He stated that that Obama is correct in that there will be no Death Panels ordering that plugs be pulled. What happens instead is far more subtle, it will be the same method that is currently used by my own government provided health care system in the U.S. military. The military system decides IN ADVANCE what life-prolonging treatments it considers not cost beneficial – and those treatments are NOT OFFERED IN THE FIRST PLACE. We need reporters, not gov’t PR hacks.
phyre:
I reasonably presume that you are referring to the reporter.
Canuk in KY: Being from Canada does not make you an expert on the Canadian healthcare system any more than I am an expert on my own insurance coverage. The objections about Canadian coverage has to do with extreme or state-of-the-art health care interventions that one may need, not with routine general practice. Yes it is nice to walk into a clinic for a flu shot and not worry about dollar one – but there is a tremendous cost at the back end for that illusion. I will share the results of my tremendous amount of research into the Canadian healthcare system using only Canadian government information sources upon request. Too much to publish here, but it is not hard for you to do your own research. Quite the eye-opener, the types of procedures subject to waiting lists was far greater than even I expected.
Robert in DC
yellowdog: The ‘village’ is called Journalism school. You shouldn’t call the reporter an idiot though, just likely young and a victim of groupthink.
Rand paul is the furthest thing away from a neo-con.
Way to take this out of context. First of all, Rand Paul hasn’t shown up on PolitiFact.com, so you’re lying too. Secondly he isn’t talking about current legislation so much as the direction that bureaucratic price imposition and controls are headed. If you want to twist words in a semantics battle, President Obama also says that no new taxes will be levied even though the proposed bill declares the no coverage penalty to be a tax collected by the IRS.
Either government will bankrupt itself paying for whatever care anyone asks for (devaluing the dollar and decreasing everyone’s standard of living, which the Fed is already doing), or it will need to ration health care.
Dr. Paul is simply promulgating the viewpoint that allowing free market forces to actually affect care will drive down the costs of care. Few serious economists can really argue with the moral hazards presented when insurers, care givers and patients raid the government for their share of the pork, because they don’t have to bear the true costs.
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Either government will bankrupt itself paying for whatever care anyone asks for (devaluing the dollar and decreasing everyone’s standard of living,
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