Sunday, October 2, 2011

Walker Proposes Stage Two Of His Death Panel

Scott Walker, realizing his days as governor are numbered, is going to try to get through as many of his corporate master's wishes as soon as possible.  This includes the installation of a death panel, in which Walker is the sole panelist, and wants to play God, deciding who gets to live and who gets to die.  All of his decisions, like any major insurance company, will be based not on the person, not on their illness, but on the bottom line.

The first stage was enacted on July 1, 2011 when he put a cold stop from counties handling the logistics s of their own medical transports in an efficient manner.  Instead, he contracted with some private out-of-state agency to do all the scheduling state wide.  As one could have predicted, they are under-performing to the detriment of the health of our most vulnerable citizens.

Now, Walker is ready to roll out the next step, and the real reason he brought in someone like Dennis Smith to head up the chop job Walker and company wanted to do to Medicaid.  To the tune of more than $550 million.

And if you look at the break down, it's not just the poor that Walker wants to throw under the stretch limo. He is also going after the disabled, the frail and elderly, and children, whether they are healthy or disabled.

Strangely, the conservatives who have been squawking about death panels under President Obama's health care reform proposal have been oddly silent about Walker's death panel.  Same for those that made, and continue to bring up, the handful of protesters who held a silent protest during Walker's photo op with Special Olympians.  (That was the same day that he announced he was freezing Family Care, denying many of those same Olympians the services they need for independence.)

So, when he says that he is going to focus on jobs, his real plan is to cut tens of thousands of people off from health care, all in order to pay for the big tax breaks and sweetheart contracts that he is giving to his campaign donors.  And this at a time when one in five Wisconsinites are dependent on government subsidized health care.  Ironically, this will also end up cost tax payers a lot more in the long run.

As Steven Walters pointed out months ago, this is going to prove to be wildly unpopular, even more than his attack on the working men and women of this state.  The elderly and their advocates aren't going to lay down and take this any more than the unions are.  And as Walters put it in his article:
One other reason Walker's call to put new limits on Medicaid's explosive growth is that 42% of all Medicaid recipients are children.

Think of it this way: Would you want to be the legislator blamed for ending Wisconsin's record of providing health care for 100% of all low-income children?
Is it any wonder that Walker has spend the last several months traveling the country to raise big money and has sent his chief of staff back to his campaign to prepare for the recall? His unnecessary maliciousness is going to make him even more unpopular than he is now. And more and more people are beginning to realize that things won't get better, the jobs won't come back and people won't be able to regains some sort of normalcy until Walker and his ilk are gone.

2 comments:

  1. To be fair, Jim Doyle brought in Logisticare to privatize medical transportation. It only became effective under Walker.

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  2. True. But two wrongs don't make it right.

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