Meet Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel: Deny Coverage to Elderly and Disabled for the Greater Good

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

Alice in Medical Care

Most political and media discussions of medical care have an air of unreality reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. There is an abundance of catch-phrases but remarkably few coherent arguments.

Let's start at square one. Why is there alarm about American medical care? The most usual reason given is because its cost is high and rising.

That is certainly true. We were not spending nearly as much on high-tech medical procedures in the past because there were not nearly as many of them, and we were not spending anything at all on some of the new pharmaceutical drugs because they didn't exist.

This general pattern is not peculiar to medical care. Cars didn't cost nearly as much in the past, when they didn't have air-conditioning, power steering and high-tech safety features. Homes were cheaper when they were smaller, had fewer bathrooms and lacked such conveniences as built-in microwave ovens.

We would like to have all these things without the rising costs that come with them. But only with medical care is such wishful thinking taken seriously, with government regarded as a sort of fairy godmother who will give us the benefits without the costs.

A cynic is said to be someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If so, then it is political cynicism to point to other countries that spend less on medical care, including some countries where there is "universal health care" provided "free" by their governments.

Just as medical care, houses and cars were all cheaper when they lacked things that they have today, so medical care in other countries is cheaper when they lack many things that are more readily available in the United States.

There are more than four times as many Magnetic Resonance Imaging units (MRIs) per capita in the United States as in Britain or Canada, where there are government-run medical systems. There are more than twice as many CT scanners per capita in the United States as in Canada and more than four times as many per capita as in Britain.

Is it surprising that such things cost money?

The cost of developing a new pharmaceutical drug is now about a billion dollars. Neither political rhetoric nor government bureaucracies will make those costs go away.

We can, of course, refuse to pay these and other medical costs, just as we can refuse to buy air-conditioned homes with built-in microwave ovens. But that just means we pay attention only to prices and not to the value of what we get for those prices.

We can even refuse to pay for so many doctors. But that just means that we will have to wait longer to see a doctor-- as people do in countries with government-run medical systems.

In Canada, 27 percent of the people who have surgery wait four months or more. In Britain, 38 percent wait that long. But only 5 percent of Americans wait that long for surgery.

Surgery may well cost less in countries with government-run medical systems-- if you count only the money cost, and not the time the patients have to endure the ailments that require surgery, or the fact that some conditions become worse, or even fatal, while waiting.

A recent report from the Fraser Institute in Canada shows that patients there wait an average of ten weeks to get an MRI, just to find out what is wrong with them. A lot of bad things can happen in 10 weeks, ranging from suffering to death.

Politicians may talk about "bringing down the cost of medical care," but they seldom even attempt to bring down the costs. What they bring down is the price-- which is to say, they refuse to pay the costs.

Anybody can refuse to pay any cost. But don't be surprised if you get less when you pay less. None of this is rocket science. But it does require us to stop and think before jumping on a bandwagon.

The great haste with which the latest government expansion into medical care is being rushed through Congress suggests that the politicians don't want us to stop and think. That makes sense, from their point of view, but not from ours.

By Thomas Sowell - Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Source: Real Clear Politics

Posted: Knowledge Creates Power

Related Resources:

• ObamaCare Isn’t Inevitable
• Canadian Healthcare Coming Soon to the USA
• Get Both Sides of the National Healthcare Story
• Here Comes Health Care Rationing
• Catastrophe or Catastrophe CD
• Glenn Beck's Common Sense