Sequester Cuts Kill: No Chemo for Cancer Patients

Keep in mind that these are the cuts that congressional repugs did not lift a finger to stop, the cuts that congressional repugs ensured were included in the budget for the remaining six months of the fiscal year, the cuts that congressional repugs have every intention of making permanent. 

Juanita Jean:

Okay, this is a serious walleyed snot nosed hissy fit.

Take a gander at this load of crap.

Because of the sequester, thousands of cancer patients on Medicare are being denied chemotherapy.  You wanna know why?  Because the for-profit health care providers will lose money.

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.

Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.

Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.

“If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. “The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”

There is something so base and evil about making money off suffering that it boggles my mind that we let the marketplace determine who lives and dies.  We have to put our lives in the hands of someone who looks at us by the profit we generate for them.

And then you have people like the owner of Cancer Centers of America who gave $12 million to the rightwing organization Freedom Works.   Well, apparently freedom doesn’t work for medicare patients with cancer.

Remember when the Republicans were all up in arms over “death panels.”   What the hell do they think this is?

Republicans are terrified of Rush Limbaugh and the NRA, but grandma doesn’t scare them in the least.   There is a special place in hell for those people. I just know there is.

They can kiss my big blue butt.

 There is no debt problem. There is no deficit problem. There is no too-much-spending problem. There is a repugs-are-giving-all-our-money-to-rich-people problem.