Why I haven’t seen this video before, and why it has not gone viral, is beyond me. Listening to this speech, I feel as relieved as I did listening to Reagan in the late 1970s explaining calmly and clearly to the American people how we were being hoodwinked by Continue reading
Category Archives: Legislation
Former White House health policy advisor: Get the public on board
In case you missed it, this was Chris Dawe last year, shortly after he left the Obama administration, and before he joined Evolent Health — a consulting company founded by the Advisory Board and the Univ. of Pittsburgh Health Plan “to help health systems move towards providing value-based care.” (Advisory Board, which consults for C-TAC, was founded by David Bradley, now Chairman of Atlantic Media.)
Here Dawe is addressing the Campaign to End Unwanted Medical Treatment (which is in fact a campaign to gin up the public to demand less life-saving treatment. Talk about perverse.) Continue reading
Compassion & Choices is funding the American Society on Aging blog
Just a quick nota bene that the current edition of Generations — the journal for the American Society on Aging (ASA) — is posted on ASA’s blog courtesy of funding from Compassion & Choices (the present incarnation of the old Hemlock Society) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
One of the articles is by AARP veteran and Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) co-founder Bill Novelli (“Advanced Illness Care: We Can Do Better“). Continue reading
Scripting “The Conversation”
They’re at it again. NPR hosted another sham debate. On the left we have Ira Byock, hospice and palliative care advocate; and on the far left we have Compassion & Choices, the radical pro-assisted suicide/euthanasia group.
They are debating a subject that no one would have noticed if it weren’t for well-coordinated media hype from MSNBC, People Magazine and the like.
This is a staged “dialogue” on assisted suicide. Compassion & Choices presents the thesis (assisted suicide should be legal), then Ira Byock comes in with a straw man antithesis (traditional medicine will let you suffer) and then the synthesis: palliative care.
Here’s the dirty little secret: Ira Byock is, himself, a euthanasia advocate. Continue reading
Behind-the-scenes audio from the Patient Quality of Life Coalition training session
Last month I wrote about the Lobby Day hosted by the Patient Quality of Life Coalition (PQLC) and American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network (ACS-CAN). 
The Coalition invited representatives of a variety of non-profits and professional organizations to Capitol Hill to lobby for two pieces of legislation:
- HR 1339 / S. 641 an education bill known as PCHETA; and
- HR 1666, the so-called “Patient-Centered Quality Care for Life Act.“
The legislation would focus federal money on marketing palliative care to the public, educating teams of professionals in Continue reading