How would a monster put this?
Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel’s brother and one of Obama’s health-care advisors, wrote in a January 2009 white paper that health care should be rationed in a way that “promot[es] and reward[s] social usefulness.” He said age could play a factor in determining who can and cannot access health-care resources.
What’s more:
Emanuel also wrote, “[S]ervices provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens [in the body politic] are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”
And the maximum leader?
Obama addressed this too, saying, “Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. … And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.”
Did someone say “death panel”?
It’s a brave, brave, brave new world we are looking at.
In Salon, Camille Paglia makes much the same point, praising Sarah Palin for her “shrewdly timed metaphor,” which “spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral.”
As for sharp views of both Salon —
“a pretentious word for a beer and wine guzzle and gum flap”
— and Paglia —
“openly gay yet not given to strident agenda netting . . . a former Catholic who respects the beauty, mystery and majesty of the Faith . . . a feminist who never allows simple-minded association to grab for the broad brush and repaint the house”
— see the well-stocked mind and intellectual pointillism of Pat Hickey, who supplies a dated but fetching image for the former:
Sen. Rockefeller puts it clearly enough:
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., said in March that as part of responsible healthcare reform people must recognize they would not be able to get every treatment they wanted. The government would use a cost-benefit analysis to determine treatment options.
The government, yes.
Erick Erickson sums it up:
It is an inevitable fact of life that the more the government outlays to keep you alive, the more your life becomes subject to a cost/benefit analysis.
That would be Holy Mother.
Blithe Spirit 
I don’t know that Zeke Emanuel is a monster, when you hear him talk he isn’t some Hitlerian type — he probably thinks that he is taking the long view of how to continue to provide health care to our nation and keep costs under control.
That said, what becomes monstrous is creating a dollar-sucking bureaucracy that will contribute to the shortage of funds for health care itself. Further monster creation occurs when unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats determine one-size-fits-all care criteria from which there is no appeal, once the public option and the regulations strangle private insurance.
According to what I’ve read, the stimulus bill is where the “death panel” was buried. Doctors who violate its protocols, suggesting forbidden treatment, will be fined. What are the chances that anyone’s doctor will risk that for a patient?
We are being corraled by a series of laws that legislators didn’t read, but which have devastating real-world consequences for the rest of us. While we react to HR 3200, multiple laws similar to it are being hatched. Who is watching for those?
Obama really doesn’t care about the details. He wants a broad, vague law that gives the administration power over health care. The details will follow from his Health Care Commission (Emanuel is on it), which HR 3200 clearly states.
God help us.
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Meanwhile, nothing about tort reform (trial lawyers are protected) or allowing ins. companies to cross state lines, as car insurers do (See Charles Lipson in yesterday’s Trib, “Let insurance companies compete”). You’re right, Margaret, it’s control he wants.
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