I don't like the use of emotive terms like 'death panel' and 'genocidal'. It reduces the power of the arguements.

I would be skeptical about any proposals by Gillard et al regarding 'health' based on their inability in the past to do anything of any good.

However, it is up to the CEC or anyone else to suggest an alternative method or means of distributing scarce resources and ensuring waste is not increased.

The 'unelectedness' of a committee is frankly neither here nor there when you consider the monumental cock-ups of elected bodies.

Perhaps, Bowspearer, you could give us your views as to the proposal's likey (as opposed to unlikely) effects on men's health.

Percy in a nutshell, it comes down to this. QALYs (a figure determined by multiplying long long a treatment will last for with the percentage of how close a person will get to perfect health by undergoing it), can be used as a way of assessing the effectiveness of treatments, and what other treatments might have to be used in conjunction with to create a more effective outcome. This is how they can be used when used by a medical practitioner

However this isn't how they're being used here. The way they're being used here is by bean counters- where a QALY has a dollar value attached to it, say $30,000 per QALY (which could be achieved by increasing someone's health for 5 years by 20% or for 10 years by 10%, etc).

Regardless of how effective the treatment might be, like with chemotherapy for example, or renal failure (some of the drugs involved in these and diseases like it can cost upwards of $500-$1000 a dose).

Say it would improve someone's health by 5% for 3 months (to take chemo for example, but was going to cost $1000 by the time you factored in the cost of drugs, machinery, practitioner labour, etc. You wind up with a treatment that has a QALY of 0.0125 (5% or 0.05 multiplied by the 3 months or 0.25 of a year) that costs $1000. The ratio of cost to QALY you get there is $80,000 per QALY.

As this by far exceeds the $30,000 per QALY benchmark set in terms of what is an economically viable medical treatment and what is not, the cancer sufferer in question would either wind up with substandard treatment, or if that was not possible, no treatment at all. In short this policy is nothing short of genocide (which applies to any group and can be a partial reduction as opposed to completely wiping them out).

Furthermore, it is incredibly convenient to consider this to be mere incompetence, but it runs much deeper than that, to the heart of the environmental movement and elitist and eugenic organisations which have infiltrated and thoroughly influenced both the left and right wing factions of Australian Politics, as well as political organisations in other countries.

The reality is that there is an agenda in play, lead by groups such as the World Wildlife Fund for Nature and the Fabian society, to reduce the world's population, down from 6.9 billion people to under 2 billion.

What you need to understand about the WWF is that it was founded by 3 individuals in 1961: Prince Bernhard, a former member of the SS who believed that the only problem with eugenics was that Hitler gave it a bad name, Julian Huxley who was then president of the British Eugenics Society and Prince Phillip who as made such misanthropic claims as that he would love to be reincarnated as a deadly virus. These are the same individuals who are currently using another organisation under their umbrella, The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, to try and destroy 60% of Australia's food production capabilities.

Amongst those in Australia actively contributing to it is Tim Flannery who originally called for reducing Australia's population to between 6-7 milion people, down from over 20 million, until he adjusted those figures to around 15 million after intense criticism for making that claim.

Understand that all this talk about "sustainability" and "overpopulation" is about nothing more to those running the show, than killing off the population to a point where it is small enough that the elites of this world can control it.

So the obvious question is, besides cultural influences, what would this have to do with this policy.

You will recall I briefly mentioned the Fabian Society before.

To gain an insight into their views, it is best to look at the words of one if its early and highly prominent members, HG Wells in his work, "Anticipations":

And for the rest--those swarms of black and brown and yellow
people who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?

Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I
take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the
world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to
develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great
world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear. (p.
274)

I could go quote hunting for what others who were prominent in the organisation have said, as well as for the quote where HG Wells called Jews "the termite in the woodwork of society", but I think people here get the picture of what the society is about. The Australian Fabian Society, though founded much late, has it's leanings in the exact same ideology. Furthermore it should be understood that several members of the Australian Labor Party, starting with former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and the current Prime Minister Julia Gillard, are members of this. Thus it is entirely within the realms of possibility for her to have consciously and deliberately included this genocidal aspect in the COAG health deal. For those Australians asking, yes there is a similar story with the Liberals and an group called the Mont Pelerin society, however that is a story for another time.

In short, it shouldn't be upto others to suggest better alternatives- but for options such as this to never be put on the table. The alternative would be to overturn the convictions at Neuremberg- after all, policies based in eugenics are either completely acceptable or completely unacceptable, without exception. To clarify, I am decidedly in the "unacceptable" camp.

However Percy, to address you point; the CEC actually does have some pretty profound solutions to the problems Australia faces economically and socially (such as fighting the war on drugs by actually taking such steps as mounting pressure on the Afghan govt to burn the opium fields there which are 70% of the world's Herion supply).

However it's not as simple as having the ideas. You have to get airplay for them to be heard and those who own the media are ultimately linked with those who own the Central Banks and if the CEC and other affiliates of the LaRouche movement actually got their message out there, they'd be finished as the current parasitic and self-destructive monetary system which they push for would be done away with.

What people have to understand is that this isn't so much about money as power. These people don't need money- in fact with their links with the privately owned central banks, they literally have a license to print money. They can never be broke because getting more money for them is as simple as printing more off. Money is irrelevant to them. This is about consolidating power to the same extent as they have consolidated their wealth.

Look at things like the Julian Assange case for example and what that's REALLY about.

However there is one solution to this- people unilaterally saying "enough".

Politicians only care about re-election, and so the only way this policy can be overturned, and others like them, is if as many people as possible are made aware of this and if a clear message is sent that those supporting it are finished if they don't quickly nip it in the bud.