I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law.Read the rest of it here. Looks like Sarah Palin's "death panel" comments continue to resonate.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
"I Am Finally Scared of a White House Administration"
So says Nate Hentoff, a left-leaning libertarian:
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There is certainly the architecture for "death panels" already written into some of the bills. Whether the panels go to the lengths that we fear -- in this legislation -- is unclear. But that they pave the way for "death panels" is clear. John Holdren's appointment as Director of Science and Technology ought to tell us as much. There's a philosophy behind all this stuff, and we see the same people who crafted these notions thirty years ago now being elevated to positions of power and influence.
It's like a highway. When the interstate highway system was built no one was anticipating smog clouds settling over cities, or regular morning and evening traffic jams, or 30,000 highway deaths every year.
It's not just the bill, it's the consequences of the bill that matter. It's not just the language of a specific bill, but the architecture of a system set into place that begins a transformation of American medicine. It's not just the members of Congress, the doofuses who will enact this stuff, but the Doctor Deaths who are modeling policy after doomsday scenerios.
The whole culture of medicine is what is being changed. It's radical and fundamental, and now is the best time to stop it before it has a chance to take hold.
It's rather like a disease, and as with disease an early intervention will make the difference between whether the patient lives or dies or suffers miserably -- only the patient in question is the United State of America.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And we're foolish if we don't eradicate this menace now while we can -- before it metastisizes.
Fear never fails. Americans, burdened with the worst and most exploitative health system of any advanced country, are now being expertly stampeded by the right's campaign that Obama's health plan means that state-licensed executioners will make the unilateral decision to give granny her final morphine shot whenever they think fit. The present system means that granny gets her final morphine shot once her money runs out.
The liberals are howling bout the unfairness of these attacks, led by Sarah Palin, revived by her “Death Panel” talk and equipped with a dexterous new speech writer who is even adding footnotes to her press releases.
But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize “imbeciles.” Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the scan.
In 1972, a year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion on demand nationwide, virtually all children with trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, were born. Less than a decade later, with the widespread availability of pre-natal genetic testing, as many as 90 percent of women whose babies were pre-natally diagnosed with the genetic condition chose to abort the child.
One survey of 499 primary care physicians treating women carrying these babies, however, indicated that only 4 percent actively encourage women to bring Down syndrome babies to term. A story on the CNS News Service last year quoted Dr. Will Johnston, president of Canadian Physicians for Life, reacted to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) pre-natal testing endorsement as another step toward eugenics.“The progress of eugenic abortion into the heart of our society is a classic example of “mission creep,’ ” Johnson said. “In the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would be a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ’70s abortion began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In the ’80s respected geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort Down’s babies than to raise them. By the ’90s that observation had been widely put into action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and abortion as our central tools.”
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