Nat Hentoff is back on World Nut Daily catapulting the 'Obamacare' propaganda again

[Cirque du So-What]

Here's a snip:

To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.

Not only Medicare doctors will be monitored for their cost effectiveness. In the House bill, as Cato Institute's health care specialist Michael Tanner explains (New York Post, Nov. 8), "111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies -- all overseen by a new health-care czar," the commissioner of Health Care Choices, will keep watch on what the president has called excessive, wasteful health care expenditures.

Moreover, President Obama has made clear that eventually he desires a U.S. equivalent of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, a commission that decides which drugs and procedures for patients are within the national budget for health care. The current baseline expenditure for each Briton, according to Michael Tanner, is $44,305 per year.

In this country, bureaucrats keeping tabs on patients -- without actually seeing them and their condition -- will mean, as Tanner notes, that "every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: 'Does the government think I'm doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?"' (Disclosure: As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I have access to its continuing research.)

http://www.zanesvilletimesrecorder.com/article/20091203/OPINION02/912030312/1014/OPINION/Obamacare-endangers-Americans--lifespans

Link to the article as it appears in my local Gannett fishwrap, which is slightly better than providing a link to World Nut Daily.

Looks like Hentoff has given up all pretense of moderation after the Village Voice gave him his walking papers earlier this year. Anything you have in the way of debunking Hentoff's RW talking points would be appreciated.

[Blue_Tires]

1. hentoff gave up any pretense of moderation at least as far back

when i first read him in the late 90s...of course he went totally batshit after 9-11

[aldo]

2. Maybe we need to rethink everything since Obama has made the Dems another war party. Are we really

in opposition? The one thing sacrosanct in the allowable health care reforms has been insurance company profts. How can that be? So we're not the antiwar party, we're not the single payer healthcare party, we're not the expand medicare party, hardly even the public option party. So what are we?

Could Obamacare, which hardly reforms healthcare, actually be a stealth attack on Medicare and Medicaid? Could that be its prime mission? Are we being played here too?

I have my disagreements with Hentoff, but he is usually careful factually.