Obamacare’s death panels

Last Wednesday, Mark Levin, on his radio show, took a call from a physician named Chris from Milwaukee. Chris reported on a seminar he had attended in Rhode Island where Ezekiel (“Zeke”) Emanuel was speaking on Obamacare. He was explaining that in Obamacare, health care would be rationed to prevent the sickest and most elderly from consuming too many resources. Here is the audio clip.

Ezekiel Emanuel on the rationing of health care in Obamacare

I have a couple of observations about Chris from Milwaukee. While I appreciated his information and his willingness to stand up and be counted, there were a couple of things I would have liked to see.

First, I prefer plain speaking to euphemisms about health care rationing. Zeke Emanuel was talking about just letting the sickest people die. I’m big on clarity and unambiguous language. This is why I like Sarah Palin so much. She just came out and said it: there are death panels with Obamacare. There clearly have to be. There is no such thing as universal health care anywhere in the world, anywhere in history. No system gives any kind of treatment to whoever asks for it. There always has to be some kind of mechanism for approving who gets care and for what. They have that in Great Britain, in Canada, and anywhere else that the government pays for health care. Medicare and Medicaid have much higher rates of claim denials than private insurance ever had. There is always a limited supply of money, and so health care has to be dispensed with some type of rationing.

The second thing is that he talks about this seminar as if it were just exposing Zeke Emanuel and his thinking. But as he quotes Zeke, Zeke was speaking in the first person plural, not singular. “We didn’t address tort reform.” “We’re going to ration health care.” It was “we,” not “I.” That’s the thinking behind Obamacare and behind every utopian health care system – it’s not just Zeke. When they’re honest they will tell you this – when people reach a certain age or have certain debilitating illnesses, they no longer contribute enough to society and there’s no point spending public resources on them. Obama said that when he was on one of his sales tours promoting Obamacare. A woman asked about her mother who at 100 years old needed a pacemaker, and he said that maybe it wasn’t worth giving her the surgery. Maybe she should just be given a pain pill.

Yes, death panels. Part and parcel of any government-funded health plan.


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About mesasmiles

By Dr. David Hall. Dr. Hall runs The Website Factory, a digital marketing agency. He has had a long-standing interest in politics. As a college student he was Utah State Chairman for both Young Americans for Freedom and Youth for Nixon, and toyed with the idea of a political career.
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