On Obamacare's rationing :: Political News and commentaries

« Moonbats going nuts over Obama the Socialist Joker | Main | (Video) DNC Releases "Mob" Ad Attacking American Taxpayers Who Oppose Record Spending & Debt (Updated) »

August 5, 2009

On Obamacare's rationing

Topics: Political News and commentaries

From a reader (links and edits mine):

Read "Principles of allocation of scarce medical interventions"(pdf.) in The Lancet, Jan. 31, 2009 to see how they will ration treatment and with hold life sustaining drugs. Authored by Dr. Death himself Dr. Ezekial Emanual proponent of passive Euthanasia to the elderly, sick children, and those he finds less desirable in society. He is on the comparative effectiveness council and the office of management and budget (see NY Post: DEADLY DOCTORS - O ADVISERS WANT TO RATION CARE). He will be the one killing your parents and grandparents.

From the same NY Post article at the above link we learn that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and has indeed already been appointed to two key positions in the Obama administration: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. Then the Post provides a few very frightening details:

[...] Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. "Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change," he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).

Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years"

As if Emanuel isn't bad enough, there's yet another "Deadly Doctor": Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser:

[...] He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.

Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they're "associated with longer waits" and "reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices" (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001). But he calls it "debatable" whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you'll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)

Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically deivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.

In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist "embedded clinical decision support" -- a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.

As the article points out, Americans need to know what the president and his health advisers have in mind for them. And if rationing (and even euthanasia) isn't on Obama's agenda for our lives, he would not have placed "Death Doctors" in the key positions of "health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research" (scary stuff - see Nationalizing Life and Death) and "National coordinator of health-information technology."

Posted by Richard at August 5, 2009 6:56 AM

Articles Related to Political News and commentaries: