I love my Mama. I can’t stand my Mama’s politics.
My mother is a gregarious, welcoming woman who always had a few more potatoes and a little more meat to throw into the pot if unplanned guests were to do her the honor of dropping by. There are few people whose life she hasn’t touched for the better.
But, love her as I do, she is still a wrong-wing, fundamentalist, born-again, arch-conservative, RayGun-loving, Republican. She is convinced that Barack Obama is evil and is part of a conspiracy to take the United States straight to Hell. And, she lives, eats, and breathes anything her hero, Bill O’Reilly, has to say.
Her latest rant to her card-carrying, bleeding-heart, liberal Democratic son involved the secret regulations Obama "buried deep in his healthcare plan that forbid the government to pay for some special pills that will cure macular generation unless the patient goes completely blind in one eye!"
There is no use arguing with Mama and no deluge of facts will wash away her made-up mind. But, I decided to do some research to find the kernel of truth upon which a rumor often rests.
In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye.
I can’t find the original source for this phrase. I suspect some wise Kosack will enlighten me before long. But, I came across it early in the research project. A Google-search of the phrase gave me 2120 hits but not the energy to find the earliest.
Without knowing if he was first, it is clear that David Gratzer of City-Journal.org. would be within shouting distance of the epicenter. In a November 2008 article, he wrote, a Mr. Andrew Dillon of the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, did in fact decree that approving Lucentis didn't make "economic sense." Government reviewers set stringent guidelines: for example, patients had to be unable to see at all in one eye before they could be eligible for the drug.
There is your kernel: in England, some macular degeneration patients were denied a very expensive drug unless they were completely blind in one eye. It seems the public uproar in the UK caused Mr. Dillon rescind his order two years later, but that isn’t enough to stop the rumor.
There was still one small detail of my Mama’s story that needed another kernel. She said Obama had this evil plan to make her blind "buried deep in his healthcare plan". So, what could the O’Reilly’s of the world be spewing that would cause my mother this unnecessary angst? On page bazillion or so of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, there is the continued funding of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) with these ominous duties:
That these operating plans shall describe how expenditures are aligned with the specific objectives, milestones, and metrics of the Federal Health Information Technology Strategic Plan, including any subsequent updates to the Plan; the allocation of resources within the Department of Health and Human Services and other Federal agencies.
The conservative meme holds for my mother because, after all, if those socialists have objectives to allocate resources, the medicine that will help an old woman would be the first to cut. She can’t remember where she heard it but she is sure it’s reliable. It could have been O’Reilly or Hannity, or maybe an email from my Republican Aunt in Alabama. Either way, it is her truth.
My dear mother is petrified because she is being told this evil, socialist Obama is hell-bent on foisting socialized medicine onto an unsuspecting American populace that will, among other atrocities, make her go blind in one eye before she can get the right medicine. Plenty of other Wrong Wing lemmings are throwing this story on the wall to see if it sticks. It stuck on Mom’s wall and no amount of KILZ will get the stain out.
Hopefully, someone else will be able to catch it before it hits someone else’s wall.