The content of THIS VIDEO , and the activities and words of those who are behind the Obama faction's attempt to take over health care in this country, need to be looked into.
Warning: While I have no doubt that the Obama program will heavily support and promote the culture of death, you should be warned that the gentleman making the comments in the recording, historian Anton Chaitkin, is part of the socialist Lyndon LaRouche organization.
Ezekiel Emmanuel MD, Rahm Emmanuel’s brother, who is Barack Obama’s “Special Advisor for Health Policy”, is described by the [1] Huffington Post article as engaged in a very important mission: redesigning the US health care system.
Emanuel and the White House are attempting to reorganize the delivery and reimbursement systems of health care, changing what the types of procedures doctors rely on, making people more aware of disease prevention, encouraging insurance companies to expand coverage, and so on. It is a process rife with sensitivities, trickeries and, of course, the potential for failure. It is not, he insists, impossible.
“It is a complicated process and we have to try and make the choices clear and give people good reasons for making them,” Emanuel explains. “I don’t think that’s an impossible task and thankfully we have one of the great communicators, Barack Obama, at the helm of this ship of state.”
Emmanuel recently authored an article in the Lancet describing the various models of non-market health care rationing. Titled [2] “Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions”, its is co-authored with Govind Persad and Alan Wertheimer. In it the authors simply review the pros and cons of the various ways of deciding who gets treated and who doesn’t. The allocation mechanisms they discuss are divided into strategies and substrategies. The pros and cons of each are laid out.
Treating People Equally
Lottery
First-come, first served
Prioritarianism
Sickest first
Youngest first
Utilitarianism
Saving the most lives
Saving the most life-years
Saving the most socially useful
Reciprocity (paying back people who have ‘contributed’, such as organ donors)
The authors are not very satisfied with the current metrics used for making medical decisions based on saving the most life-years. Both the “Quality-adjusted life-years” model and the “Disability-adjusted life-years” have shortcomings which they believe can be addressed by another model of their own: “The complete lives system”, which takes all the factors into account. They write:
Because none of the currently used systems satisfy all ethical requirements for just allocation, we propose an alternative: the complete lives system. This system incorporates five principles: youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value. … 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 is least vulnerable to corruption. Age can be established quickly and accurately from identity documents. Prognosis allocation encourages physicians to improve patients’ health, unlike the perverse incentives to sicken patients or misrepresent health that the sickest-first allocation creates.
Under this system, patients would receive scarce care according to the graph shown below.
The paper concludes: “the complete lives system combines four morally relevant principles: youngest-first, prognosis, lottery, and saving the most lives. In pandemic situations, it also allocates scarce interventions to people instrumental in realising these four principles. Importantly, it is not an algorithm, but a framework that expresses widely affirmed values: priority to the worst-off, maximising benefits, and treating people equally. To achieve a just allocation of scarce medical interventions, society must embrace the challenge of implementing a coherent multiprinciple framework rather than relying on simple principles or retreating to the status quo.”
What’s not mentioned anywhere in the discussion, except by implication is the identity of the narrator. Who is the “we” in “Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions” that decides who gets scarce medical care? The answer is tangentially provided in the paper itself, which writes that “the complete lives system is least vulnerable to corruption”.The “we” is a system; a system that can possibly be corrupted; hence Dr. Emmanuel’s efforts to design one in which such distortions will be held to a minimum.
Ultimately health care reform is as much about politics as it is about medicine. The discussion in Dr. Emmanuel’s paper is incomplete if limited to pure public health considerations. Politics is central to the whole issue. Whatever “guidelines” are chosen, however rational, however humane, can never implement themselves. Human beings in positions of power are required to do that. And while it is important to note that even under the current system these decisions are being made by someone or by some consensus, it is also vital to realize that in any “health care reform” effort, one of the principal outcomes is to shift the power to make those decisions to someone else. That may not be a fit subject for the Lancet, but it is the elephant in the operating room in the national health care debate.
Posted 2009-07-07 8:11 AM (#17783 - in reply to #17780) By: Editor
With its self-imposed deadline for health care reform only four weeks away, major health care overhaul proposals in both chambers of Congress leave key details up to unelected Obama administration officials, giving the administration the power to ultimately define what health care reform will look like.
In fact, bills working their way through both chambers give the administration broad powers over a key "reform" component -- health insurance “exchanges,” a new national purchasing pool from which individuals and businesses could choose health insurance from a range of options, including private plans and a government alternative.
The health insurance exchanges would be run by the administration, allowing Obama administration officials and the bureaucrats they employ to design and run a permanent government health care bureaucracy designed to act as part insurer, part enforcer for the new exchanges.
Congressional leaders are hoping to complete work on a bill before their summer break begins in August. They want to have the bill on Obama’s desk by October.
A plan authored by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) is currently under consideration in the Senate, with a second Senate proposal expected soon. Three separate House committees are currently debating identical proposals.
Under the Kennedy plan currently being debated in the Senate, the Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary is granted broad discretion in fleshing out the details of the health insurance exchanges – called “gateways” – including which insurance plans qualify, which state-developed gateways receive federal assistance, and what qualifies as “quality” health care.
Posted 2009-07-22 6:41 PM (#18738 - in reply to #18662) By: Philomena
A transcript of Chaitkin's statement to the CE Council (The Federal Coordinating Council Comparative Effectiveness Research) was posted at http://www.larouchepac.com/node/10599
I'm Anton Chaitkin. I'm a historian and the history editor for Executive Intelligence Review.
[Alleged] President Obama has put in place a reform apparatus reviving the euthanasia of Hitler Germany in 1939, that began the genocide there. The apparatus here, is to deny medical care to elderly, chronically-ill and poor people, and thus save, as the President said, 2-3 trillion dollars, by taking lives considered "not worthy to be lived," as the Nazi doctors said.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and other avowed cost-cutters on this panel also lead a propaganda movement for euthanasia headquartered at the Hastings Center, of which Dr. Emanuel is a Fellow. They shape public opinion and the medical profession to accept a death culture, such as the Washington State law passed in November to let physicians help kill patients whose medical care is now rapidly being withdrawn in the universal health-care disaster. Dr. Emanuel's movement for Bio-ethics and euthanasia, and this Council's purpose, directly continue the eugenics movement that organized Hitler's killing of patients, and then other costly and supposedly unworthy people.
Dr. Emanuel wrote last October 12 that a crisis, war, and financial collapse would get the frightened public to accept the program. Hitler told Dr. Brandt in 1935 that the euthanasia program would have to wait until the war began, to get the public to go along.
Dr. Emanuel wrote last year that the Hippocratic oath should be junked; doctors should no longer just serve the needs of the patient. Hoche and Bindlings — the German eugenicists — exactly said said the same thing, to start the killing.
You on the Council are drawing up the procedure list to be used to deny care, which will kill millions if it goes ahead in the present world crash. You think, perhaps, that the backing of powerful men — financiers — will shield you from accountability. But you are now in the spotlight. Disband this Council, and reverse the whole course of this Nazi revival — now.
Posted 2009-08-02 7:59 AM (#19546 - in reply to #18738) By: SteveSchulin
They’ve already made property rights into an object of government control. You may still “own” property, but at the behest of government as long as they permit you to own it. Thanks Kelo. (see Hitler’s view below*) This is just one more big slice of the pie government is cutting itself. You may live now, short of those circumstances that make you a strain, inconvenience, or too expensive for them to allow. (imagine what we can all do with those resources, by applying them elsewhere.) And they’ll ask: ‘what is wrong with that? Those are market principles we accept for other things.’
In both cases we're told to look at the bigger picture, what’s best for the village and “the greater good”. Let the health of the village determine your fate, too. In fact succumb to what is best for it. “It’s the noble way”. They’ll tell us this is the patriotic way; that is true patriotism.
**In the early 1920s, Hitler explained his view of private porperty to a journalist: "I want everyone to keep the property he has acquired for himself according to the principle: the common good takes precedence over self-interest. But the state must retain control and each property owner should consider himself an agent of the state. . . . The Third Reich will always retain the right to control the owners of property."
How much difference could their healthcare schemes be to that?
Posted 2009-08-02 12:57 PM (#19552 - in reply to #19546) By: FreeByrd
It's worse than we think. Read the book authored by Dr. Fredric Wertham, A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence. Wertham was a rather controversial individual. In his historical account of the Nazi and pre Nazi era he carefully and faithfully documented how the holocaust began in Germany first in the mental institutions and the hospitals before their final solution of exterminating the general population beginning with the disabled, infirmed, Jews, and whomever else they wanted extinguished. Very scary!!
Edited by catstack 2009-08-02 10:17 PM
Posted 2009-08-02 10:15 PM (#19559 - in reply to #19552) By: catstack
