Thread: Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama's health care advisor, advocates deny care to elderly, Dis

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama's top health care advisor, advocates denying care to elderly and disabled

Denise Hunnell
DC Catholic Living Examiner
August 12, 2009

Allocating medical care based on the subjective judgment of the value of a patient's life is contrary to Catholic teaching. The value of treatment to any given patient can be ethically evaluated, but every patient's life is of inestimable worth.

See this article for a more detailed discussion of the moral principles applied to health care rationing.

Those advocating for President Obama's health care reform label concerns about rationing of care and denial of care to the elderly and disabled as irrational and the product of fear mongering. However, if you read the work of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is the health-policy advisor at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research (FCCCER) and also the brother of the President's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, these concerns seem very reasonable indeed.

The current legislation does not specify medical treatments to be covered. Rather, it delegates these decisions to a Health Benefits Advisory Council. This panel is advised by the FCCCER. That is why the ideology of Dr. Emanuel is very relevant to concerns about rationing of health care.

In January, 2009, Dr. Emanuel published a paper in the Lancet [Persad, Govind, Alan Wertheimer, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel. "Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions." The Lancet 373 (Jan 31,2009): 423-31].

In it he argues for the use of a "Complete Lives Systems" method of allocating care. From the abstract:

We recommend an alternative system--the complete lives system--which prioritises younger people who have not yet live a complete life and also incorporates prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value principles.

In defending this approach against charges of ageism, Dr. Emanuel claims that because everyone was young once, prioritizing the young over the old is not discrimination:

Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different states 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.

This system also treats human beings as commodities, evaluating their lives as "investments":

Consideration of the importance of complete lives also supports modifying the youngest-first principle by prioritising adolescents and young adults over infants. Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants by contrast, have not yet received these investments. Similarly, adolescence brings with it a developed personality capable of forming and valuing long-term plans whose fulfillment requires a complete life.

Lifesite News reports that in a Hastings Center Report, 1996, Emanuel also spoke of denying care to the disabled:

In a separate 1996 article for the Hastings Center Report, Emanuel spoke about rationing care away from those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens" to the non-disabled, adding "An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."

This is the ideology that will be guiding the Health Benefits Advisory Council in the current health care reform legislation.

For more info:
Full text of Dr. Emanuel's Lancet article

Health Care Rationing is contrary to Catholic moral principles


http://www.examiner.com/article/dr-e...y-and-disabled

Now they are trotting him out for a "media blitz". BEWARE
From 2008
The Unethical Ethics of Ezekiel Emanuel


Nobody’s Opinion:

The first time I saw Rahm Emanuel was on the Charlie Rose show long before Obama became President. He was there with his other two brothers, Ezekiel and Ari. It was obvious that these men had known Charlie Rose most of their lives. (Charlie Rose was just at the Bilderberg meeting in Switzerland. ) They were presented as the three geniuses who were going to save the world, and Charlie was proud to have watched their careers. The whole scene was full of jovial fun, as if they all knew what was coming and the part they were going to get to play.
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Their father was a pediatrician in Chicago, and so Ezekiel went into the footsteps of his dad and became a doctor. Ezekiel graduated from Amherst College. He received his Masters from Oxford University, and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Sounds great, until you realized that he goes beyond the doctor part, he is now called a Bioethics man. He holds a PhD. in political philosophy from Harvard University . In addition, he once was a fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Profession at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
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Harvard: Where our future leaders are trained to control the world, and bioethics gives you a license to play god. Lucky guy. He’s also…gay.

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All three boys were dragged to one protest after another by their mother, the nurse. You could say, they were trained in the same stomping grounds as Obama. The plan is to introduce socialism first, which has been done already. Read any communist book, and it will tell you, that you have to take capitalism through socialism before you can go the final place to..communism.
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Oh, but it’s all ethically done.
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So, think about that. What are the odds that TWO brothers work with one President so closely? I would go farther and say that Obama could not have even done any of his damage without them. I’m sure Ari helped out too. Many say, that it is Ezekiel Emanuel that designed our Obamacare, especially the part where it is rationed. He has written extensively on the “end of life.”
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If you look at it from their point of view, they see a mess, and they…feel superior. In their minds they are benevolent and omniscient gods. They have decided companies need to get out of the health care business and it should be managed by the state.
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Here’s what they see: 70 million baby boomers coming at them full speed ahead, and there is no money to treat them. The country is broke. The waste and fraud of our politicians have taken money out paycheck after paycheck and spend it elsewhere. TRILLIONS have been lost, or wasted, on foreign wars, social programs, or just plain forgotten. Donald Rumsfeld once admitted that 2.5 trillion Pentagon dollars disappeared. Nobody knows where it went. And that’s just one example. There are literally billions upon billions going to nobody knows where, and nobody is ever brought to light for stealing it. And we are all used to it. Our bookkeepers are right out of the Sopranos.
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Think, if that money had been put to pay for future Medicare costs, they wouldn’t have to ration “care.”
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If I say that Ezekiel is the next doctor of death, don’t take my word for it: Here are three comments I found on the internet:
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American should read what this man has written about health care since he is the mastermind behind the government takeover of healthcare. He believes that the elderly should be denied healthcare because the money can be spent elsewhere. He believes that doctors should not follow the Hippocratic oath but should determine the worth of a person and evaluate whether or not they should get treatment. He also believes people with dementia or Alzheimer’s should not be given medical care. These are not his direct quotes but paraphrases of what he has published. You had better read his writings now before the Obama administration hides all the evidence as is their standard practice. This man’s beliefs are dangerous. WAKE UP AMERICA!

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Folks better WAKE UP to THE COLD HARD FACT that Dr. Zeke (Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel) HAS NOT REFUTED BEING QUOTED his effectively stating that in his role as what will be effectively be ‘one of making the decisions’ (the “DECIDER”) when it comes to cutting costs (aka “RATIONING CARE”), that we … should consider withholding medicines that no longer prolong life to seniors unable to make a contribution to society’… (aka “EXTERMINATE THOSE UNABLE TO GENERATE TAXATION REVENUE FOR THE POLITBURO STATIST MACHINE”).
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So, Zeke, what you’re recommending is that we “exterminate” seniors in their last year or so of life, simply because they don’t provide a taxable revenue base for you and your comrades-in-hammer-and-swastika to usurp from their bank accounts through the new legislative bill’s provisions for having electronic access to every American citizens bank account (pg. 59 of House Bill #3200). This is kind of like Obama himself saying we should “…think about just giving ‘em a pain pill…”, huh?
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See, these people get it. You could argue that taxpayers should pay for Universal Health Care, as they pay for the military, but when you have a panel of people deciding who gets to live, and who gets to die, based on what is “cost effective” to the state, and the state is broke, and doctors have no freedom to practice what they were trained to do, but are told what to do…
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You don’t have universal care, you have…legalized genocide.
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There is nothing ethical about that, Mr. Ethical Emanuel—. It’s called..murder.
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Tomorrow: What many doctors are going to do, and why.
http://nobodysopinion.org/2011/06/13...ekiel-emanuel/