This NY Post health care op-ed includes some truly appalling commentary by Dr. Ezekiel (Rahm’s brother) Emanuel and Dr. David Blumenthal.
As I was reading the piece I had a wrenching, visceral reaction. Orwellian in nature.
These people actually believe they are adequately equipped to make not only “minor” but also life-and-death health care decisions for the elderly, the infirm, and the terminal. That they have the right to say when a person does, or does not, need or deserve health care – and to what degree. That they can and should decide which technologies are “appropriate” and which are too costly depending on the age and condition of the patient.
They knowingly and deliberately wish to suppress and subvert the will of family, and of the individual. And they do it in the name of money: cost savings, greater efficiencies.
It is horrifying. Because the only thing more agonizing and torturous than having to make a life-or-death and/or quality-of-life choice about the care of a loved one, or yourself, is to be taken out of the process and have some computer algorithm or committee make the decision for you.
If these monsters are allowed to proceed — what else do you call men so misguided and monomaniacal that they sit in their mahogany-trimmed offices and play at being gods with clear conscience? — we will find ourselves living that horrifying vision that was once but a fiction.
(As an aside, Orwell’s heirs should sue Emanuel, Blumenthal, President Obama, and two-thirds of Congress for copyright infringement over health care language.)
And we should all come out of our slumber before we find ourselves in a nightmare from which we cannot wake.
Update: Fred Thompson interviews the writer of the above-named NY Post piece, Betsy McCaughey (8 minutes).
She said that on page 425 of the House bill is language making it mandatory that every five years, people in Medicare will have a required counseling session that will educate them about how to end their life sooner (how to refuse nutrition and medication, and how to approach hospice care). And that some parts of the bill dictate that the elderly will be faced with denials of care based on their age. It’s called “comparative effectiveness.”
