Out on the campaign trail, where the Prophet Obama is thumping for health care reform, he should be very much at ease. Campaigning is the one aspect of politics he does well. But here, too, we see desperation. The other day, he accused his critics of engaging in "scare tactics." He objects to their claim that the bill is exorbitant, though that claim is reinforced by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which puts the price tag at more than $1 trillion. He says he will shave off $500 billion from that sum by cutting waste, fraud and abuse, though the CBO estimates the savings at only 1 percent of the trillion-dollar cost increase. He says his reforms will not fall heavily on the elderly or the disabled, though his own health care advisers have written that reforms (SET ITAL) should (END ITAL) fall heavily on these groups. We can quote them. Call it scare tactics if you will.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel -- who is the health-policy adviser at the White House Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, as well as White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's brother -- propounds discrimination against the elderly and other less-than-robust patients. In the medical journal The Lancet, he wrote in January: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious (an irrelevancy) 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 for the less-than-robust, in The Hastings Center Report, he has written that medical care should be withheld from those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. ... An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia." Thus, the state should decide when and whether you get treatment. Does that not have a grisly ring to it?
Dr. Emanuel veers from the grisly to the delightfully frivolous in his pontifications on cost cuts. Savor this one, from the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 2007: "Too much money spent on health care reduced the ability to obtain other essentials of human life as well as some goods and services not essential to life but still of great value, such as education, vacations, and the arts." Yes, he said "vacations and the arts." So once we have Obamacare and you are sitting around waiting for a hip replacement or a CT scan, remember that tax revenues are being better spent on vacations or perhaps the performance art of that lady who smothers chocolate on her naked body. On second thought, she may be sitting nearby also awaiting a hip replacement. Remember, chocolate stains.