Health Care "Reform" in the Hands of "Deadly Doctors"?

This blog mentioned Section 141 of H.R. 3200, a.k.a. heath care reform bill, which will set up a Presidential appointee as Health Choice Commissioner with vast authority without accountability. And here are two candidates who should never be considered for the position (and for that reason I have a sinking feeling that it will happen), according to New York Post.

DEADLY DOCTORS - ADVISERS WANT TO RATION CARE
(Betsy McCaughey, 7/24/09 New York Post)

"THE health bills coming out of Congress would put the de cisions 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."

Who are they?

One of them is the brother of Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

Dr. Emanuel is already working closely with the White House Budget Director on health care reform. (He also happens to be a proponent of VAT, Value-Added-Tax.) What irks New York Post?

"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)."

So, Dr. Emanuel wants medical doctors to administer social justice by withholding medical care from the disabled, the non-productive and the old. I think I've seen something similar before. It was called eugenics and it was practiced in the U.S. in early 20th century and in Nazi Germany, among other places.

And who is the other one that New York Post hates to have as the Presidential health care Commissioner?

He is Dr. David Blumenthal.

"He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending." And that view is shared by Dr. Emanuel, who criticizes "Americans for being too "enamored with technology" and is determined to reduce access to it", according to the article.

"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 deivered 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."

So this good doctor wants to withhold new health care technology from patients and he is in charge of nationally coordinating the health-information technology?

I wonder if he ever heard of Moore's Law.

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