"Expert panels" will provide 'guidelines' for doctors on what procedures to perform on a patient. The recommendations of these panels will inevitably be seen as 'best practices,' and would therefore be adopted as blueprints for which procedures health insurance should cover. A doctor who does not follow the guidelines could face reductions in their insurance and medicare payments. The goal of all this, of course, is to reduce costs.
If adopted, expert panels will become a third party in every doctor-patient consultation. The third party will be the expert-panel guidelines, from which there can be no deviation without penalty. Thus, this third party is not an equal participant. The third party is the one with veto power, and moreover there is no appeal from the third party determinations.
More than anything else in the proposed legislation, expert panels signify a fundamental turning point in health care. Compassionate health care, the contribution of the Church to humanity, will be replaced with government control operating on a cost-cutting basis.
The proposed system is only good for the cryptocracy who will see a greater share of societal wealth go from health care to their pockets. Everyone else will suffer. Patients will be saddled with a blueprint plan for health recovery, and it will be extremely difficult to obtain alternate care. Doctors will be hamstrung by best practices which may or may not fit a particular problem. Doctors actually become like robots; all they have to do is identify a problem and the regulations take over. Any attempt to do something different would be punished. Society as a whole will find itself weighted down by yet another impersonal, inhuman massive bureaucracy attempting to control citizens' lives.
The change is not in the interest of anyone. Yet, there is no outcry against the expert-panel outrage. Every now and then someone will speak out, as in the Wall Street Journal today on the commentary page, "'Expert Panels' Won't Improve Health Care." But where are the associations and organizations that represent professionals and patients? Their presence is noticeable by their absence.
And most outrageous of all is the silence of the leaders of the Church and Catholic organizations. Nothing has crossed the desk here presenting Catholic commentary on expert panels. We now face the likely possibility that one of the great legacies of the Church is set to slip into oblivion because no leader saw fit to oppose it.
The Church leaders have the capability to stop the expert panels. The faithful are a large percentage of the public. If the faithful were motivated to take action against the expert panels, the cryptocracy and legislators would sit up and take notice. Even just a nation-wide campaign of prayer would shake the rafters.
Yet, the Church leaders don't even seem to recognize the problem. The change to expert panels is the central issue of the health care legislation. The Bishops, however, are concentrating on a number of other issues, all important. They seem to miss entirely that the compassionate care of the needy that Jesus' teaching brought about is under unprecedented challenge.
Moreover, the Bishops seem to be positioning themselves to approve the legislation if they receive a few crumbs from the legislators. If they do approve legislation that contains expert panels, it will be one of the greater disgraces in the history of the Church.
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