Will Dr. Death be in charge of Health Care?

As we all know health care has been the topic of the day for some time now. The outrageuos cost of treatment & the soaring costs of coverage are without a doubt in need of a fix. The administration has almost called our health care situation a crisis. And as Obama's Chief of Staff, Rammin' Rahm Emanuel, has stated a good crisis should never be wasted as it allows things to be done that normally wouldn't be. This means more czars and more rights-stripping, Hugo Chavez like rules deemed "for the best interest of our country."

With the health care proposals being discussed, people laugh and think it is funny when I have called it Death Care. Taking into consideration Obama appointed a Science Czar that advocates population control and that the proposals in congress will put our care & lives in the hands of political appointees who believe in rationing health care -- we should be, not concerned, but very, very scared -- as it will be Death Care.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (aka Dr. Death), the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is Obama's health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research offers his views on what they consider good health care...

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).

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).

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" (Lancet, Jan. 31).

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