The proof will come when a bill introduced by Republicans called PATIENTS gets shot down in committee or is allowed to die there. PATIENTS makes it illegal for the government to ration any health care or deny any service, procedure or medicine.

(You’ve got to hand it to these overpaid Congressional staffers who have nothing better to do than come up with names for legislation that equate to real words or at least form nice-sounding acronyms. PATIENTS stands for Preserving Access to Targeted, Individualized, and Effective New Treatments and Services–whew, a mouthful!)

“We feel it is necessary to introduce this bill to make it crystal clear that the government should not be funding research which is then going to be used in one way or another to ration health care for Americans, to decide what diagnostics or treatments or prescriptions or care can be allowed under any kind of federal program,” Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said at a briefing with reporters Monday.

Now, will the mainstream media report a word of this when PATIENTS is rationed off into the sunset by the Democrats?

Of course not. Rationing is here to stay. I’m sure those overpaid staffers will come up with some gentle-sounding euphemisms for the “R” word (in Britain, it’s NICE–National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness, aka “the rationing institute”).

NICE stands for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, Britain’s model for what Obama and crew want to accomplish here in nationalizing and then rationalizing (and rationing) health care–true cost effectiveness.

As British oncologist Karol Sikora points out, however, NICE manages cost effectiveness by keeping the nation in the medicinal dark ages. “If it costs too much, it can’t be any good” seems to be NICE’s motto when it comes to drugs.

Writing in the Manchester Union-Leader, Dr. Sikora notes that Obama wants a similar mechanism for holding down costs and warns that it will cost thousands of Americans their lives in premature deaths and suffering:

As a practicing oncologist, I am forced to give patients older, cheaper medicines. The real cost of this penny-pinching is premature death for thousands of patients — and higher overall health costs than if they had been treated properly: Sick people are expensive.

Sadly, the model upon which Obama is building is based on Tom Daschle’s book, which praises NICE and slams old people for hanging on to their lives too long and costing taxpayers too much money (which presumably could be spent elsewhere in buying votes).

The thing about bleeding-heart liberals (see Obama, Barack, Kennedy, Ted, and Baucus, Max, et al.) is that they only bleed for taxpayer dollars and for systems they can run–not for real people in suffering.

“Build them a system, and they will be happy–and we can take credit for it forever.” Or at least until the “happy” citizens die at 67 instead of 81.

AHRQ is in the news since it just got a whole new set of fangs in the Obama stimulus plan (aka the Tom Daschle stealth strategy for health care reform). Rush Limbaugh and the Washington Times have equated the new powers of AHRQ to Hitler’s program of euthansia for the old, infirm and disabled of any age. These people are not productive, so why treat them and waste resources? Get rid of ‘em.

Daschle, of course, is not prescribing euthansia per se, but he wants a federal agency (which is now the AHRQ, ironically started under Dubya in 2004) to determine, among other things, when someone in the last stages of life should be denied services and asked to give up the ghost. Daschle says that seniors should gladly accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” except when it comes to pols like himself who will get the gold standard of cradle-to-grave health care. (Can you imagine Ted Kennedy’s being denied brain-tumor surgery last year even when a majority of doctors proclaimed it a waste of time and money, which they actually did?)

I keep bringing up Daschle’s name because it was his prescriptions for a federal agency to determine most cost-effective treatments and to track everyone’s health care through electronic records that was slipped into the stimulus bill under the innocuous-sounding name of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act–and then rushed into law before anyone had a chance to thoroughly read it.

Except Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York who’s been tracking health care matters, when she did read it and warned that you can “Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan,” especially if you’re a senior citizen.

Is the AHRQ really that scary and powerful? Not yet. I read through some of its Web site pages and found nothing revolutionary. In fact, it looks to be an impossible task for any person or agency to make valid health care cost-containing assessments. The best AHRQ could do was to compare findings of 61 studies on treating hypertension and to conclude that both angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs) and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) are equally effective, though the former have generic brands available while the latter don’t, yet.

Which means that the best anyone is going to do in measuring effectiveness in health care is to rule out quackery–and then just to rule out high-cost medicine, with a few rare exceptions (Daschle and company). Which is where it all really gets scary–down the line in the future when Obama and others call it a “health care crisis” and “we have to act now.” Wham, bam, no more angioplasties (fill in the blank) after age 62 (fill in the blank) and so on.

What really got me scared came when MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who’s never gotten any fact or issue correct in his life (except baseball arcana), felt compelled to devote a whole show to “debunking” the charges by Limbaugh and McCaughey.

McCaughey’s response? “Let’s hold a debate.”

Problem is, people like Olbermann don’t won’t a debate–they want a crisis, real or imagined.