A provision for an end-of-life “death panel” in Barack Obama’s health care reform plan, brought to light by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, already exists in legislation passed earlier this year under the Stimulus Bill.
H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or the Stimulus Bill) contains US $1.1 billion in funding for the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is the brain child of Tom Daschle, who lost the nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary due to an unpaid tax scandal. Daschle is also co-author of the book Critical: What we can do about the Health Care Crisis, in which he not only outlines the details of the Council but advocates for the rationing of medical care based on age and other qualifiers. He also argues that Americans ought to be more like Europeans who passively accept “hopeless diagnoses.”
Daschle’s stated purpose (and therefore President Obama’s purpose) for creating the Council is to empower an unelected bureaucracy to make the hard decisions about health care rationing that elected politicians are politically unable to make. The end result is to slow costly medical advancement and consumption.
“Daschle says health-care reform ‘will not be pain free,’ writes former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey. “Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.”
One prominent member on the Concil is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Dr. Emanuel has written the following bone-chilling statement on why health care should be rationed for the elderly:
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.
As American Thinker writer Joseph Ashby properly concludes:
On average 25-year-olds require very few medical services. If they are to get the lion’s share of the treatment, then those 65 and over can expect very little care. Dr. Emanuel’s views on saving money on medical care are simple: don’t provide any medical care. The loosely worded provisions in H.R 1 give him and his Council increasing power to push such recommendations.
The impending bureaucracy needed to regulate such loosely-defined legislation is mind-boggling to say the least. This will leave Obama’s Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, to play a major role in defining the government’s role in controlling medical care.
How does Sunstein approach end of life care? In 2003 he wrote a paper for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies arguing that human life varies in value. Specifically he champions statistical methods that give preference to what the government rates as “quality-adjusted life years.” Meaning, the government decides whether a person’s life is worth living. If the government decides the life is not worth living, it is the individual’s duty to die to free up welfare payments for the young and productive.
Sunstein is also romantically linked to Harvard professor Samantha Powers, who was forced to resign from the Obama campaign for calling then-rival Hillary Clinton a “monster” in The Scotsman newspaper. In addition to being 15 years younger than Sunstein, Powers is a vocal anti-Israeli activist who is reportedly an adviser to now US-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Middle East policy.
“They’re definitely an item. He was at her book party on Friday night and said as much during a speech he gave on her behalf,” wrote Above The Law in February 2008.
