Betsy McCaughey brings to our attention the Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's views regarding universal health care. Dr. Emanuel is a health policy advisor to President Obama and brother of Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, so what he thinks may impact all of us. As Betsy points out, Dr. Emanuel has some very radical views regarding the rationing of health care. Take for example Emanuel's comments in a 2008 article in which he says cutting costs won't be easy:
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.
In other words, these procedural changes aren't really change at all. Instead, he thinks we need change in how we apply health care coverage. As Betsy notes, Dr. Emanuel believes doctors try too hard to apply the Hippocratic Oath to everyone as equally as possible, which is what drives up costs. Instead Emanuel thinks we need to ration basic, guaranteed care to only those who can fully participate in society. Betsy points out a 1996 Hastings Center article in which Emanuel wrote this:
This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just alloca- tion of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity-those that ensure healthy future genera- tions, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, 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. A less obvious example Is is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason.
So, according to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health care advisor to President Obama, the elderly with dementia and the young who have neurological disorders should be sacrificed for the common good. I can tell you that as a mom to a four year old girl with severe speech apraxia that prevents her from being able to speak intelligibly, this scares the living hell out of me. If you have a child with autism, cerebral palsy, Downs syndrome, or any other neurological disorder or chromosomal defect that prevents him or her from participating in society in the manner Dr. Emanuel or the government thinks they should, that neurological care would not be guaranteed as basic and would, therefore, not be covered in a government takeover of health care.
Making things even worse, private health care companies will be driven out of business, so that won't be an option for parents with disabled children, either, leaving them with no coverage whatsoever. This kind of policy would drive up the abortion rate, which Obama and other liberals want covered as a basic care, as doctors urge parents go out of their way to screen their unborn babies for any and all disorders and defects that would not be covered under basic care. If a child's disorder is undetected by prenatal testing, what happens when the disorder becomes obvious after birth? I shudder to think what the government would come up with then.
Emanuel's policies would lead to a further deterioration of our nation's culture as people begin to look at those with disabilities as objects that drive up collective health care costs instead of as individual human beings who have intrinsic value and rights endowed to them by God.
Posted by Kim Priestap – Wizbang – July 26, 2009
Review of Complete Lives System
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel and Obama’s Health Policy Adviser, announced a new “Complete Lives System” for selecting which sections of the population should be killed, in his article “Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.”. His writings were published Jan. 31, 2009 in the British medical journal Lancet…11 days after President Obama’s inauguration.
On March 19, Emanuel was appointed to the Federal Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research, to begin the design of a Federal system for withdrawing care from those chosen for death. Dr. Emanuel provides a preview of how such a system will get started…
“Such an approach accepts a two-tiered health system-some citizens will receive only basic services while others will receive both basic and some discretionary health services… 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. Conversely, 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.”
“When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.” This may be justified by public opinion, since “broad consensus favours adolescents over very young infants, and young adults over very elderly people.”
“Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects…. Adolescents have received substantial substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does.”
“The ‘complete lives’ system also considers prognosis, since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses.”
“Social Value Allocation” prioritizes specific individuals to enable them to promote other important values, or rewards them for having promoted these values. In view of the multiplicity of reasonable values in society and in view of what is at stake, social value allocation must not legislate socially conventional, mainstream values.”
“Allocators must also avoid directing interventions earmarked for health needs to those not relevant to the health problem at hand, which covertly exacerbates scarcity. For instance, funeral directors might be essential to preserving health in an influenza pandemic, but not during a shortage of intensive-care beds. For instance, former organ donors seem to deserve reciprocity since they make a serious sacrifice and since there is no surplus of organ donors. By contrast, laboratory staff who serve as vaccine production workers do not incur serious risk nor are they irreplaceable, so reciprocity seems less appropriate for them.”
Related Resources:
- Obama’s Rogues Gallery: Ezekial Emanuel – Goodnight Grandma
- Complete Lives System by Ezekial Emanuel
- Ezekiel Emanuel, architect of ObamaCare..please read
- Meet Your Science Czar
- ACORN CRACKED: Exposes ACORN"S Push for Socialized Medicine
- Kennedy: Let’s Ration Healthcare
- Ghoulish Science Plus Obamacare Equals Health Hazard
- Reparations By Way of Health Care Reform
- Obama in 2007 Said He Wanted to Eliminate Private Health Insurance
- ObamaCare For Seniors: Sorry, You’re Just Not Worth It
- *Letter to Your Congress Person on Health Care (Obamacare) HR3200
- *A Look at What is Really in the Health Care Bill (HR 3200): Chilling!
- Useless Eaters
- Absolutism Redux – Review of the Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever
- America Senses Something Isn't Right
- American Progressivism
- Liberal Fascism
- The Second Bill of Rights
No comments:
Post a Comment