According to the Wall Street Journal Article, Obama’s Health Rationer-in-Chief, Dr. Emanuel has some pretty sick ideas. He apparently has written extensively on who should get health care and who should not get health care. As in the case of all socialized programs, other people’s money eventually runs out, and they have to start rationing health care. So I suppose that the good Doctor is the perfect person to have the job of Health Care Advisor, since he will be an expert on who health care should be focused on, and who should be denied health care for the “Good of the People.” It is quite scary stuff, and it not much different then Hitler’s Eugenics program, where he decided who get’s to reproduce. In fact, in the end that will eventually be the result of any policies Emanuel gets his hands on.
Let’s just look at a few of his policies. I don’t think I really have to say much about them. Dr. Emanual, the brother of Obama’s Chief of Staff, and my former Congressman Rahm Emanuel, has said some pretty disturbing things to say.x
First in a June 2008 issue of JAMA, he blames the Hipocratic Oath for the “overuse” of medical care.
“Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness,” he writes. “This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition to ‘use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.”
He says that there will be hard choices to make.
“In the next decade every country will face very hard choices about how to allocate scarce medical resources. There is no consensus about what substantive principles should be used to establish priorities for allocations,” he wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, Sept. 19, 2002. Yet Dr. Emanuel writes at length about who should set the rules, who should get care, and who should be at the back of the line.
He suggests that when making these decisions, the focus must be on who will be best for the “good of the people.” Of course, what is best for the “good of the people,” will be determined by the government, specifically him.
“Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity—those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations—are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Covering services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic, and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” (Hastings Center Report, November-December, 1996)
I wouldn’t be surprised to see similar writings as the above in a Nazi Eugenics Manuel.
And of course, age should also be taken into account.
“However, other things are rarely equal—whether to save one 20-year-old, who might live another 60 years, if saved, or three 70-year-olds, who could only live for another 10 years each—is unclear.” In fact, Dr. Emanuel makes a clear choice: “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get changes that are attenuated.
He even illustrated his point using the following Reaper Curve in a Lancet article.
All in all, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is a sick sick person and Obama is sick person for relying on his advice.
