Warning Dont Be Fooled, Death Panels Are REAL!!!!!!

My name is Linda Peeno, and although the witness list does not reflect this, I am a physician. I am a former medical director and medical reviewer. I did the job that was referred to repeatedly in the first panel as a physician manager for three health care organizations. I currently, though, primarily work in medical and health care ethics.
I am here primarily today to make a public confession. In the spring of 1987, as a physician, I denied a man a necessary operation that would have saved his life and thus caused his death.
No person and no group has held me accountable for this because, in fact, what I did was I saved the company a half a million dollars for this.
And furthermore, this particular act secured my reputation as a good medical director, and it ensured my advancement in the health care industry&emdash;in little more than a year, I went from making a few hundred dollars per week to an annual six-figure income.
In all my work, I had one primary duty and that was to use my medical expertise for the financial benefit of the organization for which I worked and according to the managed care industry... [In the managed care industry] it is not an ethical issue to sacrifice a human being for a savings, no matter how that savings occurs. And I was repeatedly told that I was not denying care. I was simply denying payment.
I am not an ethicist whose primary background has come from the books. For me, the ethical issues were born in the trenches and pit of the pain that I have come to realize that I cause. And if I am an expert here today, it is because I know how managed care maims and kills patients.
So I am here to tell you about the dirty work of managed care and this is the kind of straight talk that I wish Ms. Ignagni [President and CEO of the American Association of Health Plans] could hear now.
Now, let me explain to you the ways that I was a good medical director. I was regularly consulted by marketing on ways to change expensive benefits or change the language to give me loopholes to make denials when requests came.
For example in one plan, we were able to structure our investigational language exclusion so that I was often able to use it to deny almost anything that was expensive, and particularly out-of-network requests.
I turned preexisting exclusions into a game as I tried to connect almost any prior medical complaint or visit as a reason to deny payment.
There are many more thing that I could tell you about, but, ultimately I was only as good&emdash;and I put that in quotation marks&emdash;as the doctors in my network, for it was their numbers that I needed to prove that I was doing my job.
That meant that I did whatever it took to control them: intimidation, hassling, humiliation, I have done it all. I have used inadequate and inaccurate data to create reports to get doctors to make their numbers better, in other words, decrease their usage.
I have used "economic credentialling" to select the best inexpensive physicians and rarely correlated these with quality factors.

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• Warning Dont Be Fooled

[Strutingeagle]

Of course they don't use words like death panels in the bill. Fact is this is one big eugenics movement forced onto an unwilling population. Remember this when you vote.

[Smartassawhip]

More and More physicians are speaking out on behalf of health care reform.

We Need A Public Option Plan!

Anyone who is still having trouble understanding the current legislation may find the information on profile helpful. I have a link to the ez to read version of the bill sent out by congress and a whole lot more.