She Who Must Be Obeyed

She Who Must Be Obeyed
Ken Blackwell
Thursday, December 03, 2009

I like the catalogs that fill our mailboxes at this time of year. They’re fun to page through on long flights, or even in the barber’s chair, even if I don’t intend to buy anything. “Signals” markets all the great stuff that viewers of PBS would like. In past years there have been “Ho Ho Ho” nightshirts, as well as “Bah Humbug” sweaters (it is PBS, after all.) But the perennial favorite is the sweatshirt being marketed this year to those smart ladies in sensible shoe that bears the motto: She Who Must be Obeyed.

Well, this Yuletide, there’s a new She Who Must be Obeyed. It’s our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. Secretary Sebelius is the star of “Harry Reid’s Polar Express.” The new health care bill Harry Reid just dumped off his sleigh weighs in at 19.8 pounds. It’s 2,079 pages of “shalls” and “musts” and “directs” Sen. Reid wants to have it all wrapped up and signed by Christmas.

Secretary Sebelius gets all a bureaucrat could want under her tree in this bill. There are 1,697 grants of discretionary authority in Reid’s monster.

She Who Must be Obeyed gets to decide what health care is going to cost for every enrollee in America. And she gets to decide what qualifies as health care and what does not. If we’re going to give her all this power, if she’s going to be the one who must be obeyed, shouldn’t we know whether she’s been naughty or nice? Let’s consider the record.

Kathleen Sebelius was elected Governor of Kansas with the enthusiastic backing of ProKanDo—the political action committee set up by the late, late-term abortionist, George Tiller. Tiller’s Wichita abortion center did some 60,000 late-term abortions.

He raised large sums to help elect Sebelius and her cohorts in the state legislature.

In turn, Sebelius vetoed bills that might have put a crimp in Tiller’s sales. While we denounce Tiller’s murder and his murderer, it’s interesting that liberals have not really been able to make Tiller a martyr. He didn’t donate those abortions.

On April 26, 2008, Sebelius invited George Tiller, LeRoy Carhart and their staffs to dinner at Cedar Crest, the Kansas Governor’s Mansion. LeRoy Carhart has been to the U.S. Supreme Court not once, but twice, defending his practice of partial-birth abortions.

That’s the “procedure” in which Carhart seizes the unborn child while still in her mother’s womb and pulls her writhing body into the birth canal, all but her head. Then, Carhart stabs her in the back of the skull with scissors, thrusts in a catheter, and sucks out her brains. He finally pulls the unborn child’s lifeless completely body out of the birth canal and dispatches her, probably to an onsite crematorium.

Tiller was once described by an ex-bookkeeper as he came down the stairs of his abortion center. He carried a large cardboard box. Coming to a locked door across the hall from the bookkeeper, he balanced the box on one knee while he fished in his pocket for his keys. As the door creaked open, the bookkeeper said she could see the oven door of his crematorium before he quickly closed and locked the door to this particular chamber of horrors.

Warren Hern was not at that Cedar Crest dinner. But he’s another late-term abortionist. Here’s how he describes what he does: “The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current.” Hern told the New York Times he was working late one day in his facility. He called a friend, a fellow abortionist, to ask a question. Where are you, the friend asked? In my office, Hern replied. “Still killing babies this late on a New Year’s Eve,” the friend inquired. Hern complained that “there is a horror at what I do,” even among fellow abortionists. And he added that his friend’s question “went through me like a knife.”

Well, that pain was not quite as sharp as Warren Hern’s own knife. Or LeRoy Carhart’s. Or the knives and forks at Governor Sebelius’ cannibal picnic at Cedar Crest.

Think of Secretary Sebelius’ dinner partners when you think how much power Harry Reid’s bill will give her. These are the people who put She Who Must be Obeyed in power. These are the kind of people with whom she dined and felt no horror.

We must defeat Harry Reid’s bill.
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and in a related commentary...

The Real Death Panels
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, December 02, 2009

My aunt was 42 when she died. She was a vivacious spirit, a brilliant scholar and a mother of five. She also never had a mammogram. She was diagnosed with cancer at age 41, on March 10, 1995. A little over a year later, she was gone.

The accepted standard for mammograms was, until recently, that women should start receiving them every year beginning at age 40. If my aunt had followed that standard, she might still be alive. My father -- her brother -- has recurring nightmares in which he is urging my aunt to get a mammogram.

Now, however, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is suggesting that mammograms be routinely given beginning at age 50, only once every two years. The Task Force is a government agency. And according to the Task Force's website, its job is to conduct "rigorous, impartial assessments of the scientific evidence for the effectiveness of a broad range of clinical preventive services, including screening, counseling and preventive medications. Its recommendations are considered the 'gold standard' for clinical preventive services."

Mammograms between age 40 and 49 prevent one death in about 1,900 screenings. And there are 20 million women in this country between the ages of 40 and 49. The human cost of such a change in the mammogram standards? Several thousand women.

The Task Force's assessment was obviously based on a cost-benefit analysis. As Dr. Robert D. Truog, a supporter of the new guidelines, put it in the New England Journal of Medicine, "Clearly, screening mammography does offer an identifiable survival benefit to women in this age group … The problem is that the benefit is tiny and expensive."

But for the individual women, of course, the benefit is as large as it can be, and expense is no object. This is why a private health care system is necessary. My aunt should have gotten a mammogram; she didn't, and she died because of it. But if the government had been given control of the health care system, she wouldn't have had the choice in the first place: She would have been denied a mammogram based on her age. As Truog acknowledges, "the new recommendation is a concrete example of a proposal that could, if it became policy, lead to the deaths of some women who would otherwise have survived." In other words, rationing of screening leads to more deaths.

The Task Force's new mammogram standards were an attempt to circumvent that obvious problem by pretending that women under age 50 don't need mammograms in the first place. That obviation strategy was also attempted by another ally of the Obama administration, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which recently recommended that screening for cervical cancer begin at age 21 rather than within three years of first sexual intercourse. This despite the fact that cervical cancer comes from human papillomavirus (HPV), which is extraordinarily common among teenagers.

ACOG lists as its first legislative priority the "goal of achieving universal coverage to comprehensive, high-quality care for everyone in the United States." The problem is that, as ACOG's cervical cancer screening standards show, universal health care and quality comprehensive coverage cannot coexist.

President Obama has said repeatedly that the nationalization of health care will not compromise quality because drawbacks in treatment will be offset by increases in preventive care. In fact, in his pitch to the joint session of Congress back in September, Obama stated that "there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse. That makes sense, it saves money, and it saves lives." The economic claim was a dubious one -- the Congressional Budget Office explained that increases in preventive care actually increased costs over time.

But Obama was right about one thing: screening does save lives. Unfortunately, his government plan will compromise screening just as readily as it would treatment. And his allies inside and outside government are already softening the ground for the assault on preventive medicine.

When my aunt died, her youngest child, Anna, was 3 years old. Anna grew up without her mother. How many other children will grow up without their mothers because the government refuses the care that my aunt went without?