Posted on 06/13/2012 9:13:03 PM PDT by JohnKinAK
What should be done with elderly Americans when they become very seriously ill? Should we try to save their lives or should we just let them die? Unfortunately, there is a growing consensus among the "intellectual elite" that most elderly people are not going to have a high enough "quality of life" to justify the expense of costly life saving procedures. This philosophy is now being promoted very heavily through mainstream news outlets, in our television shows and in big Hollywood movies. The elite are attempting to convince us that killing off our sick grandparents is cool and trendy. We are being told that "pulling the plug" on grandma and grandpa is compassionate (because it will end their suffering), that it is good for the environment and that it is even good for the economy. We are being told that denying life saving treatments to old people will dramatically reduce health care costs and make the system better for all of us. We are being told that it is not "efficient" for health insurance companies to shell out $100,000 for an operation that may extend the life of an elderly person by 6 months. But the truth is that all of this is part of a larger agenda that the elite are attempting to advance. As I have written about previously, the elite love death, and they truly believe that reducing the population is good for society and good for the planet. Sadly, population control propaganda has reached a fever pitch in recent months.
Time Magazine has just come out with a very shocking cover story entitled "How To Die". The article goes on and on about how wonderful and compassionate it is to remove life saving treatment from sick relatives.
A recent article by Mike Adams summarized the message of this disgusting article....
Inside, the magazine promotes a cost-saving death agenda that encourages readers to literally “pull the feeding tubes” from their dying elderly parents, causing them to dehydrate and die. This is explained as a new cost-saving measure that drastically reduces return hospital visits by the elderly… yeah, because dead people don’t return to the hospital, of course.
Many of you also probably remember the Newsweek cover story from a couple years ago that was entitled "The Case for Killing Granny".
Underneath that shocking title was the following phrase: “Curbing excessive end-of-life care is good for America.”
According to the author of that article, spending less money on the elderly is the key to successful health care reform....
The idea that we might ration health care to seniors (or anyone else) is political anathema. Politicians do not dare breathe the R word, lest they be accused—however wrongly—of trying to pull the plug on Grandma. But the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate. Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it. At a more basic level, Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable.
Sadly, articles like that one are becoming quite frequent in mainstream media sources.
Just a few days ago, a Bloomberg article entitled "How 'Death Panels' Can Prolong Life" declared that we must "deny treatment to people who want it" in order to hold down costs....
In short, all the Republican talk during the health-care- reform debate about “death panels” was melodramatic and unfair, but not ridiculous. One way or another, holding down health-care costs will require policies that deny treatment to people who want it. And want it because it will extend their lives.
This goes on already, all the time. Health insurance companies have been known to deny payment for treatments deemed unnecessary. Age limits for organ transplants are another example. All policies that involve denying care because of “quality of life” considerations are, in effect, “death panels.” But no society can afford to give every citizen every possible therapy. Medicare is going broke trying.
So who are we supposed to deny treatment to?
The elderly of course.
According to that Bloomberg article, we are supposed to kill off our sick grandparents because the "quality of life" they would be expected to have if they recover would not be enough to warrant spending so much to save them....
A $200,000 operation can add a year or two to the life of an octogenarian, or it can save decades of life for younger people. In a country like the U.S., with an average life expectancy of 78.5, it takes 10 septuagenarians who get an extra five years from the health-care system to balance a single 30- year-old who gets 50 extra years. Or save the life of a newborn, who then enjoys a normal life span and dies at 78.5, and you have the same impact on national life expectancy as 16 operations on septuagenarians. The average national life expectancy can increase even as the cost goes down.
This is the kind of thinking that starts happening in a society that dramatically devalues life.
If human life has little value, then it is easy to start justifying things that would have once been unthinkable.
For example, one surgeon is now suggesting that we should start harvesting organs from patients before they die....
Dr. Paul Morrissey, an associate professor of surgery at Brown University's Alpert Medical School, wrote in The American Journal of Bioethics that the protocol known as donation after cardiac death -- meaning death as a result of irreversible damage to the cardiovascular system -- has increased the number of organs available for transplant, but has a number of limitations, including the need to wait until the heart stops.
Because of the waiting time, Morrissey said that about one-third of potential donors end up not being able to donate, and many organs turn out to not be viable as a result.
Instead, he argues in favor of procuring kidneys from patients with severe irreversible brain injury whose families consent to kidney removal before their cardiac and respiratory systems stop functioning.
Do you want your organs harvested before you are dead?
Sadly, those that often do need organ transplants the most these days are often denied for "quality of life" issues as well.
For example, at one U.S. hospital a 3-year-old girl named Amelia was denied a kidney transplant that she desperately needed simply because she is considered to be "mentally retarded".
These are the kinds of decisions that are being made by doctors and by health insurance companies all over America every day.
And did you know that life-ending drugs are going to be 100% free under Obamacare?
I did not know this until I read a Christian Post article the other day....
A Christian-based legal defense alliance is warning Americans who already believe that President Barack Obama's health care plan is a bad idea that the "ObamaCare mandate is worse than you think."
"Everyone likes a good surprise, but no one likes a bad surprise. So, you're really not going to like the surprises buried in the 2,700 pages of this document," says the narrator of a short video produced by the Alliance Defense Fund.
"Did you know that with ObamaCare you will have to pay for life-saving drugs, but life-ending drugs are free. One hundred percent free. If this plan were really about health care wouldn't it be the other way around?"
Apparently they want to make it as easy to off yourself and your relatives as possible.
So where is all of this headed?
Are we eventually going to become like the Netherlands?
In the Netherlands, mobile euthanasia teams are now going door to door to help elderly patients end their lives in the comfort of their own homes.
Is that what we want?
Do we want government agents going door to door to help people die?
As I have written about previously, the elite believe that the world is massively overpopulated and they believe that all of us are ruining their planet.
So they love euthanasia, abortion and pretty much anything else that will result in more people ending up dead.
Why take the risk, that those evil relatives will keep you alive just to drain their savings, go now while you have the means to determine your end.
The right to die with dignity cr@p passed in Oregon big time, amazingly only 35 people have requested the suicide kit, and not all of them have used it. Wonder why?
It was never about a right to die, it was always about a right for the state to kill you. Soon if you are on life support, it won't matter what your wishes are, is that really what the human race has come to?
I had three stents put in not long ago and was harassed big time by an old nurse to sign a DNR. Do you have an idea how stupid that would be?
That's true. People, even conservatives, apparently think the government should take care of the elderly, but the government doesn't have a bottomless pit of money. Neither do insurance companies. Death panels are the inevitable result of dependence on other people's money.
If someone has their hand out for other people's money, those other people are going to inevitably put the brakes on spending. They'll have to or it will bankrupt them. No one is saying a person can't spend as much as they want to extend their life as long as they can, so long as that money is their own.
If people don't like death panels, then stop asking the government to pay your bills. It's as simple as that.
Kellis91789: “The more relevant question of this article is whether anyone has the right to make virtual slaves of strangers to prolong their own life.”
I posted something similar before I read your post. You sum the situation up well. You want others to pay, don’t complain when they make the decisions, right?
I don't know, how about comparing that to the cost of a death row inmate that has been there through several appeals and quality healthcare even in one case that included a heart transplant.
If you love your parents and grand parents then take care of them yourself, then they won't be a burden to society, else quit complaining, and just off them yourself.
Beside that the comatose patient is still voting.
Add to that;
40 percent of the U.S. workforce to retire over the next five years.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2894020/posts
I mean, every Democrat from Nancy "Facelift" Pelosi to "Dingey" Harry Reed made fun of Sarah Palin for suggesting such patent nonsense... even Prezzadint Barrio Bummer chimed in on that one.
They wouldn't lie about that, would they?
You know, the govt. wanted this when FDR started giving away other people’s hard earned money. There were plenty of people opposed to him, but now they are more or less ignored, the same as we will be ignored 70 years from now when our kids and theirs are struggling with this mess.
Now the govt says just what those oppositionists said they would say: “We won’t take care of the elderly, it’s not possible”.
Really? Well, we would do so, but we’re not very well prepared to do so.
No, it wasn
t his call, really. the medical system takes over. Even with a living will, they’lll ignore it. The medical system thrives on sick people and those in it, doctors, big pharm, take and take. But that $ will run out. It already did a long time ago.
the govt stepped in a long time ago with medicaid and medicare.
It is a fact that the system MDs etc, ripped off that funding to bankruptcy.
Folks are running up million dollar bills all over every day and there is no one paying all of that, no way.
People assume there will always be this kind of care, but it will stop one day soon.
and no one would be allowed to publish a story on the decrease in interest in entering the medical field.
Whoever thinks this is an attractive and thriving field is living in a rebbit hole.
The idea that we might ration health care to seniors (or anyone else) is political anathema. Politicians do not dare breathe the R word, lest they be accused—however wrongly—of trying to pull the plug on Grandma. But the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate. Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it. At a more basic level, Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable......need to be carefully indented using the <blockquote> tag (and then unblocked, of course, at the end), so that readers don't form the unfortunate, and wrong, impression that American Dream was actually advocating this stuff. The problem is that in the article above, the provenience of these sentences is completely unmarked. It needs to be marked, by offsetting and possibly setting a font, for correct comprehension.
All these articles are Doing is Describing Obamacare. When Obama states that his Health care law will lower Costs what do you think he is Talking about? He Stated it in public at the Town Hall during His Campaign to the Woman who asked about the pacemaker for her Mother and Obama told her that we could not afford to provide things like that to people at that age regardless of how active they were.
But if you would just Google Ezekiel Emmanuel and the “Complete Lives System”,you will see the Guy and His Plan who Obama gave a Billion dollars in the Stimulus Package to implement what all these articles Write about.
I cant believe the ignorance of the American People,I a Printer Repair Dope has Been posting this for years now,it is right in front of our faces it is in the Obamacare law,these articles are just Just trying to justify what is at Present THE LAW OF THE LAND! This is how Obamacare cuts cost. Look at Emmanuel the Guy who is writing the policy and is being paid with OUR TAX DOLLARS!Google “Comparative Effectiveness Research Panel”Its all right there folks
....after all, did not our FASCIST Dear Leader personally recruit and appoint a renowned Medical Expert (Dr. Ezekiel "Mengele" Emanuel) as his "Health Czar?
Dr. Emamuel wrote in the Feb. 27, 2008, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
"Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change."
"True reform, he argued, must include redefining doctors' ethical obligations.
In the June 18, 2008, issue of JAMA, Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the 'overuse' of medical care: 'Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness,' he writes:
"This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically the Hippocratic Oath's admonition to 'use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment' as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.'
In numerous writings, Dr. Emanuel chastises physicians for thinking only about their own patient's needs. ...
Dr. Emanuel believes "doctors should serve two masters, the patient and society, and that medical students should be trained 'to provide socially sustainable, cost-effective care.' One sign of progress he sees: 'the progression in end-of-life care mentality from 'do everything' to more palliative care shows that change in physician norms and practices is possible." In the Lancet, Jan. 31, 2009, Dr. Emanuel and co-authors presented a 'complete lives system' for the allocation of very scarce resources, such as kidneys, vaccines, dialysis machines, intensive care beds, and others.
Dr. Emanuel concedes that his plan appears to discriminate against older people, but he explains:
"Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination. ... Treating 65 year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not"
Sadly, this IS what the young want because they want their parent,s MONEY and don,t want to bother with taking care of them.
Once abortion broke that parent/child relationship, this is what you get.
GOD BLESS your FAMILY!!!
“If an individual pays their own health care, they have the right to make their own health care decisions”
Your autonomy is the biggest “problem” for these Communists in DC...because you’re autonomous....it makes them superfluous...something thei little egos can’t handle.
Unfortunately, such little egos have a history of great violence and destruction when made to face that fact. Such little egos were responsible for most of the 20th century carnage.
Do you have the Obama quote about not treating your 90 year old grandmother?
Amen, sister! Plus.....there’s the Eucharist.
;-))
Yes. I don’t take Communion because I’m “lapsed.” I hope I will some day when I can get my act together.
Cool and trendy? OK; I suggest we start with the parents of Time’s editorial staff and reporters who worked on this story. How “cool and trendy” will it be when it’s their loved ones who are being harvested and allowed to die?
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