DEADLY DOCTORS ADVISERS WANT TO RATION CARE

By Betsy McCaughey, founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former New York lieutenant governor.

The health bills coming out of Congress would put the decisions about your
care in the hands of presidential appointees. They'd decide what plans
cover, how much leeway your doctor will have and what seniors get under
Medicare.

Yet at least two of President Obama's top health advisers should never be
trusted with that power.

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.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "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" (Lancet, Jan. 31).

The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500
billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts
will be, the president's budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this
week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new,
presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn't be accountable to the
public.

Since Medicare was founded in 1965, seniors' lives have been transformed by
new medical treatments such as angioplasty, bypass surgery and hip and knee
replacements. These innovations allow the elderly to lead active lives. But
Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too "enamored with technology" and is
determined to reduce access to it.

Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends
slowing medical innovation to control health spending.

Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he
concedes they're "associated with longer waits" and "reduced availability of
new and expensive treatments and devices" (New England Journal of Medicine,
March 8, 2001). But he calls it "debatable" whether the timely care
Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you'll get a
different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)

Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information
technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically
delivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and
cost effective.

In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that
many doctors would resist "embedded clinical decision support" -- a
euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.

Americans need to know what the president's health advisers have in mind for
them. Emanuel sees even basic amenities as luxuries and says Americans
expect too much: "Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy . .
. physicians' offices are typically more conveniently located and have
parking nearby and more attractive waiting rooms" (JAMA, June 18, 2008).

No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views. Nor have
most people heard about the arm-twisting, Chicago-style tactics being used
to force support. In a Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch column, Emanuel
explained how business should be done: "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."

Do we want a "reform" that empowers people like this to decide for us?

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Sweet Jesus, as my sainted Irish grandmother would say, if that doesn't
scare you bedazzled bro-zos and ho-zo, then the lobotomies have truly done
their work.

We have to stop B.O., The Lyin' Prick from destroying our republic.

"If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break
him." --Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.)

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage
where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens
may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of
human history, the stage of rule by brute force." --Ayn Rand

Where an excess of power prevails...No man is safe in his opinions, his
person, his faculties, or his possessions." --James Madison

I fight for my republic.

Dionysus
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