What Does Ezekiel Emanuel Really Believe About Rationing? Age, Maybe. Quality of Life, Yes

First Things/Secondhand Smoke ^ | 7/30/09 | Wesley J. Smith

[wagglebee]

I have been doing a little reading about Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the head bioethicist at the NIH and brother of the president’s chief of staff.  He is a supporter of health care rationing, which is relevant to the current health care debate.  In a Lancet article earlier this year, he suggested that age be a proper method of allocating scarce resources, and indeed, stated that age based allocation is not invidious discrimination.  From his piece:

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. 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.

He seems to be saying, be ageist, just call it something different.

Still, as I read the article closely, it was not about health care rationing in the general sense, but rather, concerned situations of extreme resource scarcity. Thus, while I think it is fair to say that Emmanuel is clearly laying the intellectual groundwork for an age-based rationing regimen, he doesn’t take the final step, writing:

Accepting the complete lives system for health care as a whole would be premature. We must first reduce waste and increase spending.

Some might say that is just a hedge to avoid the heat.  And indeed, bioethicists often promote radical ideas they advocate generally by using extreme situation hypotheticals to make their intellectual points, thereby allowing them a path of retreat if the blowback becomes withering.  Still, unlike some others who have commented about this piece in the current health care reform debate, I don’t think he explicitly advocated a system of health care rationing now based on age, at least not in this particular article.

The same can’t be said of an article he wrote in the Hastings Center Report, in which he explicitly advocates rationing based on what appears to be a quality of life measurement.  From the piece:

This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity-those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

A lot of people are frightened that someone who thinks like Emanuel is at the center of an administration seeking to remake the entire health care system.  Having read these two articles, I think there is very real cause for concern.

[wagglebee]

A lot of people are frightened that someone who thinks like Emanuel is at the center of an administration seeking to remake the entire health care system. Having read these two articles, I think there is very real cause for concern.

When you look at how much the left has actually admitted it becomes terrifying to contemplate what they are hiding.

[wagglebee]

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[wagglebee]

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[444Flyer]

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[Seruzawa]

Notice that the standard is written fuzzily so that old people who are still “valuable” will still get health care. I assume this means govt officials and tenured professors and the like.

[Frantzie]

He sounds like Doctor Josef Mengle. You know certain elderly groups will get exemptions - i.e. my guess is elderly whites health care will be the first to get cut off.

The seniors who voted for Obama are fools. The Emanuel family is evil.

[Boardwalk]

Nifty solution to the social security issue. Now the government can keep that money instead of having to pay it out to seniors who reach retirement age since everyone will be killed off at the cutoff.

[Frantzie]

Certain groups - they will have access to voting records and believe me there will be racial profiling too.

[cranked]

Here we go again....”Lancet article.”

Lancet = fail, on varying methodology and political bias levels.

[Frantzie]

Well American seniors are selfish and illegal aliens and recent third world immigrants need that social security, medicare and the seniors life savings.

Don’t think for a minute that Obama will not go after seniors life savings. Expect a doubling of the estate tax.

Baby boomers and seniors can forget about a comfortable retirement. Under the new Animal Farm we will work 50 years, have everything we own taken away and will be told it is time to die. The elites will party while we toil.

[davisfh]

Should Dr. Emanuel ever desire euthanasia, I will be glad to assist him.

[Uri’el-2012]

A lot of people are frightened that someone who thinks like Emanuel is at the center of an administration seeking to remake the entire health care system. Having read these two articles, I think there is very real cause for concern.

Adolf Hitler wrote all of his plans
in Mein Kampf in 1925.

He came to power in 1933.

Most people did not understand until 1936
that he really meant what he wrote.

We are being warned about BHO's associates.

It may take three years for all to understand
what is planned for the weak, the old and the infirmed.

shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach

[gusopol3]

I guess we've become so inured to obvious conflicts of interest that this doesn't stick out like the sore thumb it is. The head ethicist at NIH is the brother of the President's chief of staff? Oh the head ethicist doesn't have to be ethical himself.

[PGalt]

“When you look at how much the left has actually admitted it becomes terrifying to contemplate what they are hiding.” - wagglebee

“Everything about socialism is sham and affectation” - Frederic Bastiat, “Economic Harmonies” 23.11 Evil

Thanks to all posters.

[whitedog57]

I hate everything the Social Utopians stand for.

I think that the code is that one receives healthcare IF and ONLY IF they don’t retire.

So, if any of you want healthcare past 65, you had better forget your retirement plans.

Watch out! Since you don’t retire, the government will eventually transfer your 401Ks and related plans to government health care plans.

All so illegal immigrants and union workers get healthcare.

Hey union members. Figured out yet that you can never retire? As if you haven’t already retired already.

[wagglebee]

Wesley Smith was QUOTING, Emanuel’s article in “Lancet”.

[GiovannaNicoletta]

bookmark

[wagglebee]

“This person suffering from hereditary defects

costs the people 60,000 Reichmarks during his lifetime.

People, that is your money. Read ‘New People’.”

[Uri’el-2012]

Yes, that is exactly what I see coming.

These people are empty vessels for the Evil One.

Acorn will become the new "Brown Shirts"

Then they will come for those who believe in the Jewish Messiah.

shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach

[wagglebee]

I fear you are correct. We are about to see Nazism all over again and this time there will not be a superpower willing to step in the way America and England did seven decades ago.