Barack Obama Appoints Doctor Death As Health Care Czar
July 26, 2009 · carl · Print This Article
My health took a turn for the worst when I learned that Obama has appointed Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to a top-level position as one of his top-level advisors on health care reform.
Yes, he is the brother of White House Chief-Of-Staff Rahm Emanuel.
What’s that you say?
Neopotism?
How dare you!
Obama promised us the “most ethical administration in history.”
Regardless, Dr. Emanuel seems to be a graduate of the Jack Kevorkian Medical School.
You may remember Kervorkian as the doctor who gained notoriety for assisting terminally ill individuals commit suicide, as well as being an advocate for legalizing euthanasia.
And Dr. Emanuel would make Dr. Kervorkian proud.
He has made the claim that “Medical care should not be 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.”
So if you have an elderly family member suffering from Alzheimer’s or a child diagnosed with Downs Syndrome, the hell with both of you according to Dr. Emanuel’s position.
By all appearances, as far as he is concerned you can push them off into a corner of the room, because the government won’t be wasting any resources on them.
He also discriminates against older patients.
He believes that “Unlike (health care) allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not discrimination.”
So if you are young and healthy, under Obamacare you’re in good shape.
However, if you are a bit older and require a bit more care, well, it sucks to be you.
“Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously as an imperative to do everyting for the patient regardless of the cost or the effects on others.”
This may become a commonly heard doctor-patient conversation:
“Sorry Mrs. Smith, we probably could have gotten your husband back on his feet and he could have lived another dozen happy and productive years, but you folks have reached the limit on your Obamacare debit card.
And after all, let’s face it, he was what, sixty?
And now I will have to ask you to excuse me, I have a 25 year old waiting to be treated for a sunburn.”
Something in the back of my mind was nagging at me that somewhere I had read of another so-called “medical man” like Emanuel and Kervorkian who thought that the critically ill and the mentally disabled were beneath contempt.
Then I recalled the name of a “doctor” who “practiced” at a place called Auschwitz.
His name was Josef Mengele.
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What makes one a participating citizen? Is the dementia patient trying to hang on to the last shred of their identity, who’s family cares for them, any less of a participating citizen than a 25 year old on welfare who sits around, gets fat and doesn’t work. Hasn’t the welfare state prevented them from participating? The elderly, even the ones with dementia, even the blind and infirmed have lessons to teach.
That’s the difference between us and them, Conservatives value all human life, from conception to death.
I agree with Emanuel. There comes a time when a person is no longer of any use to the state and must therefore be terminated. It’s just the progressive thing to do.
Emanuel (oh, the wicked irony of that name):
Boy, is THAT one slippery “definition”. First, medical advances occur all the time – perhaps in a few years a cure for dementia will be found. And, what about those patients who are in the early, and mild, stages of dementia? If some doctors believe dementia is “irreversible” (and irreversibly progressive), then many otherwise fairly “normal” individuals would be or could be denied ALL medical care (or just medical care for their dementia).
Plus, perhaps geneticists will eventually claim to have found a “Republican” or even a “birther” gene. Now THAT sure would be handy, wouldn’t it? Obama and his elitist minions could then theoretically deny medical care to anyone they deemed sufficiently “extremist”. (I know this last scenario is far-fetched; but similar things have happened before in totalitarian countries.)
@The Other Lou:
Sure sounds like what Mengele had in mind doesn’t it?
@Karl
Who gets to define when a person is no longer useful?
@Douglas
As I responded to Karl, who gets to make these decisions?
I don’t want to see that sort of power in ANYONE’S hands, no matter what their political persuasion might be.
Absolute power does corrupt absolutely.
P.S.
It’s great to see you here but where is your buddy Twitchy?
Carl,
I agree. I just used Republicans and “birthers” as an illustration given Obama’s extreme leftism. More likely it would end up being fundamentalist/Evangelical Christians, primarily.
P.S.: Has it been determined yet that Twitchy is a male? I’ll withhold judgment until I see a valid birth certificate.
But I don’t know where he/she is – probably ready to pounce any second now.
Here I am!
OTOH, there is a limited amount of ‘care’ available. Insurance companies make those decisions now, based on profit more than anything else.
Is it better to have some bureaucrat tell you you’re going to die, or some overpaid insurance drone? You’re going to die either way.
Twitchy,
I’d rather neither. How about instead of conceding the idea that there is a limited amount of care, let make it possible to have more care. If would remove the obstacles from doctors path, than we would have more doctors practicing. I am certain that if a doctor didn’t lose the first $100,000 they make to malpractice insurance, and the second $100,000 to taxes than they’d be more willing to pursue philanthropic medicine. It’s hard to find time to help the poor when you’ve lost two thirds of your income right off the top. Not to mention student loans. If there were more money in it there would be more doctors.
What if instead adding a new bureaucracy, we trade philanthropic care for tax relief, and find a better way to handle malpractice insurance than we have now. I bet a doctor would be more than willing to put in 8 hours a week of free time, in exchange for a 50% reduction in their tax bill. Especially if it we could insure that their insurance liability was reduced.
My wife is a teacher. One of the books she used to teach, until she was restrict by the bureaucracy for teach reading, is Lois Lowery’s “The Giver.” It’s a book about the down sides of Utopia. In the book, when a member of their society reaches a certain age they are “released.” Basically, they are killed, but no one knows this, except the highest level bureaucrats. I see shadows of this in Obamacare. Is this the path we want to tread. I think in the times we are living in we could all stand to read about “Utopia”.
I’ll admit than when I was young and naive I thought the idea a Utopian society was great. Than I grew up, and realized that to have Utopia, everyone had to give up their freedom. Liberty and the Utopia are incompatible.
Now I firmly believe Benjamen Franklin is right, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Zeke Emmanuel directed my sister’s treatment when she was suffering from cancer.
You have engaged, here, in a despicable, lying smear against a dedicated and highly talented doctor who earned his way to a postition at the top of his profession, before being asked to serve in the Obama administration.
Does your lack of decency know no bounds? You should be ashamed of yourselves for publishing this kind of nauseating lie.
Green Eagle
Try reading this again:
“Medical care should not be 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.”
We should be ashamed that we pointed out that Obama has appointed a man who feels it is his right to decide who receives medical care and who doesn’t?
Try again.
Carl,
I like arguing from public facts that can be checked, but I am going to break my rule this time, and speak from personal experience.
My mother, who is one of the oldest living woman lawyers in the country, is nearly 95, and suffering from a significant degree of dementia. Luckily, she has the money for whatever care she needs, so government restrictions are not involved in this case. Recently, relatives and I had meetings with medical people about the future of her care. Unfortunately, a significant degree of dementia severely reduces the patient’s ability to respond appropriately to treatment or participate in rehabilitation, and consequently massively increases the probability of a very bad outcome to even such a seemingly benign thing as CPR. My wife’s 96 year old aunt went through a similar situation a couple of years ago, before dying. This is simply the reality of that stage of life, sad to say, and relatives have to deal with that reality when they make treatment decisions, regardless of who is doing the paying.
As I say, there is a whole unpleasant reality involved in this sort of thing, which I certainly never understood before having to deal with it personally. I hope you have a long time before you have to deal with it, but let me assure you, this is what is being referred to above
Green Eagle,
“As I say, there is a whole unpleasant reality involved in this sort of thing, which I certainly never understood before having to deal with it personally. I hope you have a long time before you have to deal with it, but let me assure you, this is what is being referred to above.”
So are you suggesting that those in the later stages of dementia shouldn’t be given medical treatment? And, as for me, I HAVE had to deal with the issue you raise, albeit from a secondary vantage point. My mother’s mother, my grandmother, developed Alzheimer’s late in life (in her late 70s, I believe), and my mother took her into her home to care for her for awhile (and I was in the midst of helping take care of my mother in many ways [yardwork, house upkeep, and such]). So I was able to witness the effects of the disease, and the strain it puts upon a caregiver.
It wasn’t that long until my grandmother’s condition became so severe that she had to be placed in a nursing home. But my mother visited her about every day, and would feed her, and would talk to her. My grandmother eventually passed away, but there was never any question about providing her with medical care and making her as comfortable as possible.
And just last year my mother passed away from cancer. There was a point where she was hospitalized for internal bleeding (due to the cancer), and the doctor had the family gather together with her to discuss the option of performing surgery to correct the bleeding, or to allow the bleeding to continue, likely resulting in her bleeding to death. He said the surgery option might not be successful, and would only very temporarily postpone her death by cancer, likely from septicemia (spelling)? or something similar (internal infection). We all (including my mother) agreed, with sorrow but without question, that her bleeding to death would be quicker and less painful, and so there was no surgery done, But her bleeding stopped (and she eventually died of septicemia [?]).
However, we had a CHOICE, and we were not coerced or pressured or even “hinted” towards any particular direction. It seems that Ezekiel Emmanuel’s approach would entail a large degree of all or at least some of the above. And that would be just plain wrong.
“However, we had a CHOICE, and we were not coerced or pressured or even “hinted” towards any particular direction.”
You know what these situations involve, and you know that nothing proposed by the Democrats amounts to pressure or coercion. Yet you still stoop to engaging in the most unforgivable scaremongering.
Sorry, this is not a serious effort to move this discussion forward, and it earns you no respect.
Green Eagle,
“You know what these situations involve, and you know that nothing proposed by the Democrats amounts to pressure or coercion. Yet you still stoop to engaging in the most unforgivable scaremongering.”
Why is it that liberals always know exactly what I am thinking, and exactly what I know?
Ezekiel Emanuel:
If that approach had been in place when my grandmother could no longer be cared for at home, then what? Just strap her into a bed and home, and let her die slowly of starvation because no one in the family could take care of her?
If the above quote from Emanuel isn’t scary to you, then we need to ramp up the “scaremongering”, because you are too calloused to respond to actually and really scary pronouncements. If Emanuel has his way, there eventually WOULDN’T be a choice for people like my grandmother, or for my mother.
The Other Lou,
Even if we could make more care available, the resource called ‘care’ is still finite. There can never be enough care to provide an unlimited amount to everybody. Just like there’s not enough money to provide an unlimited amount to everybody. Somebody has to decide where to allocate that limited resource. Currently that’s mostly done by insurance companies, who are profit-driven.
I do think that some kind of malpractice reform would be necessary for a UHC system to work. However, one result of a UHC system would be that malpractice rewards wouldn’t need to be so large, because most of any necessary medical care would be covered by the system.
We should also help doctors with the cost of their education, perhaps by, as you suggested, trading philanthropic care for student debt. However, I doubt that the cost of their education is the main sticking point in training more doctors. I think it more likely that a bigger problem is the length of time it takes to become a doctor, and I don’t see that we’re going to be able to do much about that.
Ezekiel Emanuel:
Does anyone have an actual source for this and the other quotes from Ezekiel Emanuel? I’d like to see them in context.
Doug Bender says:
“Why is it that liberals always know exactly what I am thinking, and exactly what I know?”
Doug, I know what you say. I assume that’s what you believe. That’s all. Maybe that’s foolish of me.
I gave you credit for not having had any experience with these end of life issues, and consequently not knowing about the difficulty of treating people with end stage diseases. I was wrong about that. Apparently, you do know the facts. You just ignore them because they stand in the way of your disingenuous claims about Obama.
Now, as to all liberals knowing exactly what you are thinking, I would like to refer you to some seminal research done several years ago by some MIT students, who discovered that they can actually read your mind better when you have the tinfoil on your head. Who knew?
Twitchy
“We should also help doctors with the cost of their education, perhaps by, as you suggested, trading philanthropic care for student debt. However, I doubt that the cost of their education is the main sticking point in training more doctors. I think it more likely that a bigger problem is the length of time it takes to become a doctor, and I don’t see that we’re going to be able to do much about that.”
I have three issues and one idea from this statement.
The idea, one issue that we do have that limits the amount of doctors in this country is qualified well trained doctors who want to legally immigrate from other countries are forced to go back to medical school and repeat their residency to practice medicine in the U.S. I could see repeating their residency to get on the same page as U.S. doctors, but repeat medical school? Isn’t human anatomy, the same everywhere?
Issue 1, Doctors do have a limited amount of student debt, some of the best have none or little.
Issue 2, Your are showing your liberal biased by not wanting to leave the idea of tax credits on the table.
Issue 3, I don’t think the amount of time is so much the sticking point as the cost to profit ratio. A person with an MBA could easily make more than even the best doctor. Although this is only one example, one of my friends is a doctor and has an MBA. Before she started her residency, she was offered a job by a drug manufacturer, who recruited her, making more than if she were to complete here residency and become a doctor. That example aside I do know other people who have their MBA who make more than doctors.
The more doctors can take home, the more doctors we will have.
Simple supply and demand, capitalism will lead us to better, more accessible health care not socialism.
Green Eye,
No, what’s foolish of you is extrapolating wildly beyond what I actually said. It’s also foolish of you to pretend that nothing that Ezekiel Emanuel said could be construed as implying future pressure or coercion OR “hinting” towards the elderly who are ill and the young who are permanently disabled or diseased ending their lives early. Both carl and I have helpfully quoted for you the relevant quote from Ezekiel Emanuel, yet you have so far studiously ignored it. It’s almost as though you can’t hear what E.E. said.
So far, you’re hitless.
I do.
There you go off the deep end again. You psychic liberals are borderline dangerous in your oracular pronouncements. And what exactly have I “ignored”? Nothing that I can see. On the other hand, YOU have not yet addressed AT ALL Ezekiel Emanuel’s quote which carl and I have both presented to you. Has it ever occurred to you that my concern in this regard MIGHT have something to do with other aged relatives that I have, and a concern that Ezekiel Emanuel’s statement, and apparent views, would have potentially or even likely negative consequences for those relatives (let alone myself should I ever actually age)?
Obviously, all liberals, because they are psychic. Thus, we conservatives are at a disadvantage, which explains our need to stick to the facts and to use sound logic. It doesn’t help that liberals have a monopoly on tinfoil.
Now, instead of trying to divert the issue, why not actually ADDRESS Ezekiel Emanuel’s quote which carl and I both have brought to your attention? Try applying your amazing psychic powers to HIS mind regarding what he said, and explain it in a way that we conservatives, handicapped by a reliance on facts and logic, can understand.
(By the way, I prefer going by “Douglas”. Thanks.)
The Other Lou,
As I understand it, they only need to repeat medical school if they don’t speak fluent English. There are some other restrictions that could be loosened a bit. For example, it seems that even if they qualify for a state medical license, they may still have to pass a federal exam, simply because many states accept a Canadian exam that the feds don’t.
Why is it that anyone, who considers themselves a conservative, whether accurately or not, thinks that anyone who disagrees with them has to be a liberal? And isn’t tax credits actually making the government pay for medical care? Isn’t that socialized medicine?
Do you really want to be treated by a doctor whose primary motivation is profit?
Dear Karl, It’s great that you agree with Emanuel because, we have just been appointed by Emanuel to decide about you and we have decided we should not waste any more resources on you.
I hope you understand that, as you indicated, “there comes a time when a person is no longer of any use to the state and must therefore be terminated.” Sorry, Karl, “it’s just the progressive thing to do.”
[...] article I did a while back, Barack Obama Appoints Doctor Death As Health Care Czar, has generated some interesting comments, but one it received on Friday tops them [...]