Transparency?

Speaker Pelosi infamously said on March 9, 2010:

“we have to pass the [Senate Health Care] bill so that you can find out what is in it . . . “

http://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/pressreleases?id=1576
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aefEk5LVirs

What then could possibly be in the 2,500 some pages of legalese that constitutes the Senate Health Care Bill which Pelosi is determined to pass in the House of Representatives? One would think that “the People’s representatives” would want to know before they vote on it. Yet it is doubtful that any of the prostituted supporters of Obamacare have any realistic idea.

Who is writing this fascist legislation? Is it Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago hoodlum who bullies reluctant Democrat Congressmen (e.g., New York Rep. Eric Massa) and who infamously said: "Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123310466514522309.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjMTNPXYu-Y&NR=1

Things such as a national socialist health care bill designed to control all American citizens and destroy our liberty and independence, purchased with “sweetheart deals” financed by unspent “stimulus” money allocated to non-existent districts. The bribery uses taxpayer funds, i.e., money stolen from citizens who overwhelmingly oppose the bill.

Perhaps we can get an idea of the contents from Obama’s top advisors and from Obama, himself. Shorn of its benign mask of compassion, what does Obamacare really look like?

(a) Obama ‘’medical’’ adviser “Dr.” Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist, would replace individual patient concerns with “communitarian” concerns such as rationing. To Emanuel savings in cost, requires changing how doctors think about their patients.

“Dr.” Emanuel criticizes the professional mentality which regards “the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition to `use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.”

(Emanuel and Fuchs, The Perfect Storm of Overutilization, Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008, p. 2790.).

http://www.ipalc.org/Healthcare_Policy/The%20Perfect%20Storm%20of%20Overutilization%20(JAMA%202008).pdf

(see generally Betsy McCaughey, “Deadly Doctors,” New York Post, July 24, 2009, http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/item_PU6S0iok2FbS368B7d7mAM;jsessionid=AE73A8E022C61B73A5D0F1D06C970C35; see also McCaughey, “Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama's Rationing Czar, Says We Have Too Much Health Care,” http://www.lifenews.com/bio2941.html )

In a 1996 article purporting to define “a just allocation of health care resources,” “Dr.” Emanuel pronounced as follows:

“Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.”

(Examples of those to be denied care include “patients with dementia” and “children with learning disabilities.”)

See Emanuel, Hastings Center Report, 1996, "Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet", The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 26, No. 6, (Nov. - Dec., 1996), pp. 13-14

http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Where_Civic_Republicanism_and_Deliberative_Democracy_Meet.pdf

“Emanuel's view of seniors is one of blatant disdain. He openly condemns what he considers antiquated notions of age discrimination. If Emanuel has his way, age discrimination will become standard practice. As he wrote in Lancet, a prominent medical journal:

“`Unlike allocation [of healthcare] 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 [iii]’.”

John Griffing, Cannibalizing America, American Thinker, December 4, 2009.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/cannibalizing_america.html, quoting “Dr.” Emanuel, and citing at fn. [iii] Govind Persad, Alan Wertheimer, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel, "Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions," (The Lancet, vol. 373, issue 9661, p. 429).
http://econopundit.com/ezekiel_emmauel.pdf

Thus, it is government which determines the value of the individual (as a mere asset of the state) – i.e., the standpoint of the all-powerful State, and the unelected bureaucracy.

(b) Another Obama advisor, Dr. David Blumenthal emphasizes cutting costs, even at the expense of medical innovation.

"Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they're `associated with longer waits' and `reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices' (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001). But he calls it `debatable' whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you'll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)"

Betsy McCaughey, “Deadly Doctors,” New York Post, July 24, 2009, http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/item_PU6S0iok2FbS368B7d7mAM;jsessionid=AE73A8E022C61B73A5D0F1D06C970C35 , quoting Blumenthal, David, “Controlling Health Care Expenditures”, New England Journal of Medicine, 344(10), March 8, 2001, 495-498, 766-69.)

(c) In a rare moment of authoritarian candor in 2007, now Obama adviser Robert Reich said:

“[P]articularly to you young, healthy people…you’re going to have to pay more. And by the way, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life…It’s too expensive… so we’re going to let you die.”

(How unusual, a forthright Obamacrat!)

Reich continued: “Also, I’m going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government… to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents.”

(Robert Reich speaking at UC Berkeley on Sept. 26, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7Y0TOBuG4.)

How about merely “as long as” your parents – or grandparents?

(d) The statements of “Dr.” Emanuel and Robert Reich reflect the attitude of Obama himself.

June 24th, 2009, ABC National Town Hall on Health Care: WSJ:
At one point in the town hall, broadcast from the East Room by ABC news, a woman named Jane Sturm told the story of her 105-year-old mother, who, at 100, was told by an arrhythmia specialist that she was too old for a pacemaker. She ended up getting a second option, and the operation, for which Ms. Sturm credits her survival.

OBAMA: I don't think that we can make judgments based on people's spirit. Uh, that would be, uh, a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that, uh, say that we are gonna provide good quality care for all people. . . . End-of-life care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we're going to have to make. . . . At least we can let doctors know -- and your mom know -- that you know what? Maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off, uh, not having the surgery but taking, uhhh, the painkiller .

(http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/remarks-by-the-president-in-abc-prescription-for-america-town-hall-on-health-care-6-24-09/.)

(d) Obama’s heartless pronouncement came almost a year after the July, 2008 case in Oregon in which (despite her protest that she was “not ready to die” and asserted desire to live) Oregon’s state “health” care bureaucrats callously denied Barbara Wagner her anti-cancer medication.

( http://www.kval.com/news/26140519.html ).