People are being told that the crowds of people who are going to town halls to angrily protest the Democrat health care plan are “un-American” as well as being swastika-carrying fascists. It is terribly malicious and hateful demagoguery. It is amazing that Democrats demonize tactics that they themselves are pursuing and have been pursuing for YEARS. And then we come to learn that not only are Democrats organizing, but they are in fact literally PAYING people to show up and fight for the Democrat health care plan. Talk about “manufactured outrage“!!!
The Speaker of the House decided to make this a debate about who is more Nazi. I welcome that argument. Just look at the Democrats’ own tactics!
But there is a far deeper issue at stake when we talk about “Nazism” than mere political rhetoric. There is a very real issue of life and death at stake.
Mike Sola angrily confronted his Congressman over his fear that the Democrat system would not cover his son, who is in a wheelchair suffering from cerebral palsy. He has since received death threats and vandalism at his home from Democrat supporters.
Should people fear for their lives under ObamaCare? Should people like Mike Sola fear for their loved ones’ lives?
Let’s get away from the rhetoric, and reflect on the words of key Obama health care architects.
Consider a New York Post article:
Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.
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).
Yes, that’s what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.
Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.
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).
Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.
So, yeah. Mike Sola has every right to be fearful of what will happen to his son. Just as I have every reason to be afraid of what will happen to my parents.
When Dr. Emanuel says “communitarianism,” it is impossible for me – given the man’s writings – not to think “communist” plus “totalitarianism.”
And Obama appointed this man. How can he distance himself from a guy who he himself appointed? As Glenn Beck put it, “I wouldn’t let these people bring me a can of Coke, much less allow them to write a national health care plan.”
In January of THIS YEAR, Dr. Emanuel – who is a principal architect of the Democrat’s health care plan – wrote:
“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… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”
“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.” Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care. Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel included a chart with his work (available here), which shows how he wants to allocate medical resources under a government plan:
When you’re very young, or when you start reaching your 50s and 60s, you start receiving less and less priority.
Take Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Regulatory Czar, who wrote in the Columbia Law Review in January 2004:
“I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”
Barack Obama’s Regulatory Czar explains:
“If a program would prevent fifty deaths of people who are twenty, should it be treated the same way as a program that would prevent fifty deaths of people who are seventy? Other things being equal, a program that protects young people seems far better than one that protects old people, because it delivers greater benefits.”
Which very much jives with what Obama told a woman concerning her mother:
“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”
As I wrote in my last article, “Don’t let the coffin lid hit your face on the way out, Grandma and Grandpa.”
Incredibly, that’s not all. There are other writings that President Obama’s appointed architect Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel have said. I thank Jeff Head for bringing his own blog citing other statements by Emanuel to my attention:
Is the “Final Solution” wording that was added to this revamped Obama Health Care graphic warranted? Some might see it as a simple play on words.
But before you decide how to consider that wording, please read the following shocking quotes from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the chief health-care policy adviser to President Barack Hussein Obama, and (not coincidentally) the brother of Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
From: Principles of allocation of scarce medical interventions, January 31, 2009
Also see: Deadly Doctors, New York Post, June 24, 2009“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.”
“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. Treating 65-year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”
“Ultimately, the complete lives system does not create ‘classes of Untermenschen whose lives and well being are deemed not worth spending money on,’ but rather empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible.”
“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”
“Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”
From: Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008
“Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others”
From: Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008
“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,”
(These quotes add new context to the “End-of-Life” Counseling sessions required every 5 years for all seniors over 65 in Obama Care.)
“There is a widespread perception that the United States spends an excessive amount on high-technology health care for dying patients. Many commentators note that 27 to 30 percent of the Medicare budget is spent on the 5 percent of Medicare patients who die each year. They also note that the expenditures increase exponentially as death approaches, so that the last month of life accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the medical care expenditures in the last year of life. To many, savings from reduced use of expensive technological interventions at the end of life are both necessary and desirable.”
“Many have linked the effort to reduce the high cost of death with the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. One commentator observed: “Managed care and managed death [through physician-assisted suicide] are less expensive than fee-for-service care and extended survival. Less expensive is better.” Some of the amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Supreme Court expressed the same logic: “Decreasing availability and increasing expense in health care and the uncertain impact of managed care may intensify pressure to choose physician-assisted suicide” and “the cost effectiveness of hastened death is as undeniable as gravity. The earlier a patient dies, the less costly is his or her care.”
“Although the cost savings to the United States and most managed-care plans are likely to be small, it is important to recognize that the savings to specific terminally ill patients and their families could be substantial. For many patients and their families, especially but not exclusively those without health insurance, the costs of terminal care may result in large out-of-pocket expenses. Nevertheless, as compared with the average American, the terminally ill are less likely to be uninsured, since more than two thirds of decedents are Medicare beneficiaries over 65 years of age. The poorest dying patients are likely to be Medicaid beneficiaries. Extrapolating from the Medicare data, one can calculate that a typical uninsured patient, by dying one month earlier by means of physician-assisted suicide, might save his or her family $10,000 in health care costs, having already spent as much as $20,000 in that year.”
“Drawing on data from the Netherlands on the use of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide and on available U.S. data on costs at the end of life, this analysis explores the degree to which the legalization of physician-assisted suicide might reduce health care costs. The most reasonable estimate is a savings of $627 million, less than 0.07 percent of total health care expenditures.”
From: Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet, Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec.1996
“This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation 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 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.”
[….]
Do not fall for the platitudes and the revisionism or assurances of the people pushing this plan. It is a radical plan and it will lead to single payer, complete governmental control of health care. A command economy of health care much more akin to what someone like Karl Marx would implement to go hand and hand with his political philosophies.
The president, in a less-guarded moment before running for the Presidency outlined his true goals with respect to Health Care, and now he has the congress and the advisers he thinks will lead him there.
“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.”
When you see “angry mobs” of Democrat health care plan opponents, realize that they aren’t angry because of “disinformation” or “fishy” emails; they are angry because of what they KNOW. They are angry because of what Obama’s own architects have STATED.
Some of what we have seen here has far more in common with Dr. Mengele than with medicine.
The Nazis had a term, Lebensunwertes Leben, that meant “a life unworthy to be lived.” The Nazi agenda was not about goose-stepping soldiers; it was about a complex of ideas that de-valued individual human life and exalted the power of the state to control the lives of the people. And those who were deemed unable to produce sufficient societal benefit were deemed unworthy of life. And the men who created this system did not regard themselves as evil men; they regarded themselves as doing what was necessary to implement their vision for their country.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel would never agree that he is a Nazi. He would point out that he is Jewish; how on earth could he be a Nazi? But his plan comes right out of the heart of Nazi ideology; it is Lebensunwertes Leben rearing its ugly head all over again. Does he want 6 million Jews to die? Of course he doesn’t. But my question is, “Does he not want 60 million senior citizens to die?” And the only difference is that he would prefer to kill them by neglect due to rationed medical care, or due to a more humane but every bit as evil death by suicide.
The Nazis’ “final solution” was to eliminate an alleged crisis by eliminating the Jews; Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s “final solution” is to eliminate an alleged crisis by eliminating unhealthy children and senior citizens.
And, again, if Barack Obama doesn’t want this vision himself, then why on earth did he appoint Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel – who has been arguing for this “Complete Lives program” for YEARS, and who has an article urging for it as late as January of THIS YEAR – to write large swaths of the health care bill? And any of Obama’s protestations to the contrary only fly in the face of what he himself has said and what he himself has done. Don’t trust him.
A video montage explains precisely how the Democrats have organized behind the scenes to use the currently-proposed plan to necessarily lead into the kind of system that will produce the kind of “care” outlined by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel above.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and Cass Sunstein tell us what government health care will ultimately look like; and the video explains in Democrat health care strategists’ own words how they propose to get us to that point.
Watch it – and then join the fight against this monstrosity.
Tags: 'lipstick' cost control, architects, attenuated, Cass Sunstein, cerebral palsy, communitarianism, Complete Lives, death threats, dementia, euthanaisia, Ezekiel Emanuel, fascists, Final Solution, health care plan, Hippocratic Oath, Lebensunwertes Leben, Medicare, Mike Sola, Nancy Pelosi, Nazism, physician-assisted suicide, preferences to younger people, proponent of a single payer universal health care program, social justice, swastika, taking the painkiller, un-American
Start Thinking Right 
August 10, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Michael, you have done a fantastic job here.
The first time I heard the word “communitarianism” was when Hillary Clinton said it. Check it out here: http://hillaryclinton.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/hillarys-disrespect-of-mississippi-might-bite-her/
I thought it sounded very fishy when I first heard it – a fancy, elitist word for “communism,” and now I’m convinced.
August 10, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Also, thanks for giving the definition of ‘attenuated.’
Elites like to use big words to hide their real intent from common folks.
But … we have dictionaries!
August 11, 2009 at 8:36 am
I realized that most ordinary people wouldn’t understand what that word meant without resorting to a dictionary. I used a dictionary to define it so that no one could accuse me of “redefining” the word. Attenuated care for seniors means “RATIONED” care.
When you read a liberal academic’s writing, it is incomprehensible. The more gobbley-gook and amorphous abstract concepts, the better. The idea isn’t to express sound ideas, it is rather to conceal terrible ideas behind a maze of impenetrable abstractions.
In my own field of philosophy, there is no way one could ever get away with that. In my brothers’ field of physics, the same. While both fields use their own lingo and communicate in difficult ideas, their papers focus on clarity and precision. But in liberal-dominated fields (education, art, literature, sociology, anthropology, Marxist studies, Black studies, feminist studies, etc. etc. etc.), all you ever get is hiding behind words. At some point, sociologists finally abandoned the notion that their field actually dealt with objective content. And then they turned that realization into a weapon: since objectivity was a myth, the social sciences were no longer accountable to the logic of science and could, in effect, drop “science” from social science and incorporate ideological dispositions into the “social.” The belief that there could be no “value-free sociology became an excuse to infuse theoretical framework with pure political propaganda. And that view spread to the other liberal “arts” disciplines. Academics in these “fields of thought” use the power of lofty rhetoric to conceal the fact that their fields have become completely dominated by ideology.
You can probably tell that academic dishonesty and ideological game-playing irritates me to no end.
In the field of education, if parents could understand what educators are actually SAYING, they would pull their kids out of public schools so fast it would be unreal.
August 11, 2009 at 8:42 am
All these pseudo-intellectual types use language to convey a false impression and conceal what they genuinely believe.
A “communitarian” is a person who is a member of a communistic community. That’s what the word means. It’s a nice, fuzzy way of saying, “I am a communist” without all the attached unpleasant baggage of communism.
Thus it is incumbent upon us to make sure “communitarians” have carry all their luggage.
Hillary Clinton also proudly identified herself as a “progressive.” When you go back to the progressive movement when it was founded in the early 20th century and see the terrible things these people believed and did, you want to scream.
August 11, 2009 at 10:56 am
I allow you to read the article, I hope your article is useful for reading,keep posting,thanks.
August 15, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Dr. Zeke and Company!
(Below is a link for Dr. Emanuel talking about his “Religion” on JudaismToday. This not the Judaism that I know and respect, It is one of self-worship and not one of love of one’s fellow man and of God:)
http://bigthink.com/ezekielemanuel/judaism-today
If you voted Democrat, You voted for Green Eugenics! Now it seems in addition to Green Eugenics (Techno-Eco-Totalitarians or Communitarianism-Fascists), you voted for a Death Cult full of “First Class Psychopaths”. (These people think they are far smarter than you and I and will be making all the decisions for us now…) Continuing in the tragically ironic tradition of racist, eugenic proponent and Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger we have euthanasia being incorporated into the Totalitarian National Healthcare grab (her monstrous goal was to do away with black people…). In addition to killing the unborn we have the influence of such people of National Science Advisor Robert Holdren ensuring the pulling the plug and killing of the grandma, and other undesirables. Then we have the genteel Ezekiel Emanuel M.D. PhD. Dr. Emanuel is a noted Bioethicist and Oncologist. He is also a well known proponent of Euthanasia and Green Eugenics. Dr. Emanuel is head of President Obama’s National Heath Care Advisory Board. His brother, the Intrepid Rham Emanuel is President Obama’s Chief of Staff. His other brother Ari Emanuel is Michael “Sicko” Moore’s Hollywood Agent. President Obama’s friend and fellow Harvard/U. Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein is White House Director of Regulatory Affairs. He is also a Social Justice Medicine and Euthanasia/Eugenics Proponent. What is next?
The first victims of the National Socialists of Germany were not Jews, Gypsies, etc. (or Romini as they prefer to be called) but handicapped, socially and mentally “unfit” beginning in 1936. The great C. Everet Koop wrote a book titled “What Ever Happened to the Human Race”. Indeed what ever happened to the Human Race? Other “Monsters in Human Form” include De Camp Professor of Bioethics, Peter Singer at Princeton University. He would allow and encourage Infacide, Parricide, and Suicide of the undesired people. Human Monster and Professor is the son of Jewish parents who escaped Austria in the late 1930’s when the NAZI’s took over. I am sure his parents are very proud of that their son turned out to be a Human Monster just like the Communists and NAZI’s. The banality of true evil rears it’s ugly head again. I recommend that everyone read Professor (and Rabbi) Richard Rubenstein’s 1983 sleeper classic, “The Age of Triage, Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World”. Since 1973 over 35 million babies have been aborted. Over 14 million of the babies aborted since 1973 have been black babies. Yet black or African American’s only comprised 13.4% or 40.9 million people. Planned Parenthood concentrates their clinics in Black and other minority communities. Under President Obama the disproportionate ratio black or African American abortions and other killings will most certainly increase. Perhaps our new president and his fellow Eugenics Proponents may yet be the greatest disciples of the Human Monster Margaret Sanger yet!
P.S. The followers of Socialism (including the National Socialist of Germany) killed over 100 million people in the last century. How many will they kill in this one? I feel the largest holocaust in human history has yet to be!
August 15, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Padraig’s Ghost,
Excellent comment.
I have wondered if Obama’s political “genius” is never underestimating the sheer stupidity of the American people. Even if they start getting it now, it was damn stupid of them not to understand all of this before.
I salute your understanding of history. The Nazis had an idea called “Lebensunwertes Leben” (A life unworthy to be lived” or “life unworthy of life”). Nazism didn’t just begin with goose stepping troops or even Adolf Hitler; it began as an idea, in the minds of German intellectuals. Well, ideas have consequences.
The consequences of Lebensunwertes Leben was “Mercy wagons” that brought retarded children, children with malformed limbs (even ears that stuck out!), handicapped people, old people with dementia, etc. etc. etc. to their deaths. Hitler’s “Final solution” was really nothing more than Adolf deciding to “expand the government program” to include a new class of undesirables.
Adolf Hitler had earlier contacted American eugenics authorities. As he began his campaign, one American eugenicist bitterly complained that “Hitler is beating us at our own game!”
Any form of government health care will necessarily lead to rationing. An article written by a health care expert blatantly reveals that. It turns out that the government only provides Medicare coverage with 93% of the total cost of treatment, meaning that hospitals lose an average of 7% every time they treat a Medicare patient. How does the hospital stay in business? They subsidize their loses with the PRIVATE INSURANCE that Obama demonizes. If more and more people are put into the government plan as a result of the Democrat’s health bill – which will necessarily happen by the very way the bill is structured – you will start seeing some serious “death panel” action. Particularly when this country goes into hard core crisis due to all the massive spending.
August 30, 2009 at 11:31 am
I have wondered if Obama’s political “genius” is never underestimating the sheer stupidity of the American people. Even if they start getting it now, it was damn stupid of them not to understand all of this before.
**** “Fortunately for rulers, people don’t think.”
– Adolph Hitler
August 30, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Nearly 60% of the people who voted for Obama were so ignorant that they didn’t even know that Democrats had actually been running Congress since 2006. They just believed what they were told to believe without question and without understanding.
I routinely run across people who say, “I was born a Democrat and I’ll die a Democrat,” or, “My late husband was a Democrat!” I’ve never heard a single Republican say either. It’s a different mindset. In a similar vein, when Regan died, you didn’t hear Republicans demanding we pass massive bills (to lower taxes or anything else) in his “honor.” But we’ve heard Democrats play that game for years: Ted Kennedy, Paul Wellstone, John F. Kennedy are just a few examples.
In my own extended family, I’ve got elderly uncles/aunts who are Democrats because they’re daddies were Democrats in the Great Depression. They are furious at the gay marriages (most live in Iowa, where judges just made gay marriage the law of the land by judicial activist fiat); they are furious that people who don’t speak English and who aren’t even citizens taking over their communities. And you can’t even begin to tell them that it is because of liberalism and the liberal policies of Democrats. They don’t have a clue what the party that they’ve voted for their entire lives is trying to do. They don’t have a clue what godless and immoral policies Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid – now joined by Barack Obama – are trying to impose on society. They don’t pay attention, they don’t understand, and they are sadly ignorant and supporting things that they would NEVER want.