There's a lot of BS flying around out there. The President and his congressional confreres are slinging it like crazy. Worse, some conservative critics are circulating bogus talking points and many more are sucking them up and regurgitating them without thinking.
I heard a snippet of a woman caller to a radio talk show claiming page 55 of the health care bill contained a provision for free health care for ACORN, or some such nonsense. Where's this woman's BS filter at? Yes, Congress lavishes money on their favored groups, but never so blatantly. I don't know what she was reading from, but I bet it has a fw: fw: fw: fw: towards the top and includes a lot of exclamation points.
This clueless woman just provided the angry, smirking left another opportunity to paint us all as Rushbots, insurance company shills or simply stupid right wing kooks. Please verify what you read and hear before propagating it and stay away from the kooks.
However, It's Not All BS...
So, where do the euthanasia and care rationing charges come from? They're not explicitly in the bill, but Betsy McCaughey in the NY Post demonstrates why these are valid issues:
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.Communitarianism is a philosophy that believes right and wrong should be decided by what's best for the community, or society as a whole. Sounds good, but who decides? And how do you decide what constitutes a "participating citizen."
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).
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).
Paging Dr. Mengele!
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).President Obama has appointed this man to head up his health care effort. What conclusion are rational people to draw from this, other than the president agrees with this man's philosophy? And they have the temerity to call us Nazis?
