To a small degree, Obamacare's ominous implications are starting to leak out. Here's how columnist Charlotte Allen explained it recently in the Los Angeles Times:
In looking for a way to fund healthcare, Obama has set his eye on the oldest and sickest. You see, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, about 30 percent of Medicare spending – nearly $100 billion annually – goes to care for patients during their last year of life. What if there were no 'last year of life,' the president seems to be asking. ... [W]hy not save billions of dollars by killing off our own unproductive oldsters and terminal patients, or – since we aren't likely to do that outright in this, the 21st century – why not simply ensure that they die faster by denying them costly medical care? The savings could then subsidize care for the younger and healthier.
And for those who have been paying close attention, Obama himself has ever-so-gently hinted at his true intentions. At a town hall event in June televised by ABC News, Obama cited the case of his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who died on the eve of his election, suggesting one way to cut medical costs would be to stop expensive procedures on people about to die.
Families, Obama said, need better information so they don't approve "additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care."
"Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller," the president offered.
Obama was slightly more explicit in a May 3 interview with the New York Times, when he said there ought to be a national "conversation" over whether "sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else's aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they're terminally ill is a sustainable model." Such decisions, added Obama, shouldn't be left to patients or their relatives, but to a "group" of "doctors, scientists, ethicists" who are not part of "normal political channels."
One such elite medical decision-maker would be Obama’s special adviser for health policy, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel. He's a longtime advocate of "age-weighted medical rationing" – meaning, the older you are, the less care you get, as in Britain. But what about the Hippocratic Oath, you might ask, the sacred vow doctors have always taken to do all they can to heal their patients? As Whistleblower documents, Emanuel advises doctors to stop taking that oath so literally, and instead to be "prudent" in assessing how much time, effort and money each patient is worth, for the greater good of society.