Politician health care

Jeffrey Lord:

POLITICS rarely gets more per sonal than this.

On Sunday, furious Phila delphians shouted down Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius at a health-care town-hall meeting.

The anger wasn't simply over the threat of ObamaCare. Both Specter and his colleague, Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr., have had to struggle with well-publicized health-care issues -- crises resolved by lifesaving treatments that simply wouldn't be available to average Americans under an Obama "public option."

In 1993, Specter, 63, was hurriedly operated on to remove a 2-inch growth, a benign meningioma (a slow-growing brain tumor) from inside his skull.

In 2005, he was diagnosed with an advanced Hodgkin's lymphoma. He lost his hair thanks to chemotherapy, then appeared to recover -- only to have the Hodgkin's reappear in 2008, albeit in a less advanced form. He underwent another round of chemo and is today running for re-election. (Though the anger over ObamaCare only makes his prospects more dicey.)

At the same time Specter's brain-tumor battle was announced in 1993, then-Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey, the father of today's senator, underwent surgery for Appalachian familiar amyloidosis, described as a genetic condition resulting in the destruction of bodily organs by proteins.

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The controversial core of ObamaCare is a so-called "public option" that critics insist would eventually wipe out the ability of average Americans to get the kind of care Specter and the senior Casey received. This already is being set up, with the establishment in the Obama stimulus bill (passed with votes from both Sens. Casey and Specter) of the ominous-sounding "Federal Coordinating Council for Effectiveness Research."

Modeled after European equivalents such as the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the council is supposed to assign a monetary value to your life. This is done through a "QALY" -- a "Quality-Adjusted Life-Year." In Britain, The Wall Street Journal reports, NICE refuses to pay more than $22,000 "to extend a life by six months."

In other words, had Obama's plan been in effect in 1993, given the QALY of the 63-year-old Arlen Specter and the 61-year-old Bob Casey Sr., and had they been private citizens on the Obama public-insurance plan, both might, literally, have been allowed to die.

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This program was already a tough sale, before revelations like this. I don't know what Specter's answer is. He and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius had a hard time speaking over the angry reception they got. It sort of overrode their presumption of love for rationed health care.