from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 27 Jul 2009 07:21 PM PDT

The big lie of those advocating socialized
medicine in America is that government mandate can give everyone the
health care they need. The truth is that every system of medicine
shortchanges some to the benefit of others. The only difference lies in
how many options those who are shortchanged have to get access to health
care anyway.

The more a health care system is centralized, the less
options there are for those who are shortchanged by it. It is why
Americans who can't afford to pay for surgery can look to charities,
surgeons willing to do procedures pro-bono, and various fundraising
mechanisms. By contrast Canadians have to travel to the United States or
look into one of a number of illegal clinics. In a free market health care
system, the main barrier is financial, and that can be overcome far more
easily than in the socialized system where lack of resources and
centralized planning combines to close off all legal options.

That
is why ObamaCare would not serve to expand American's access to health
care, but rather close it down. The big lie of socialism is freedom from
scarcity, but there is no escape from resource shortages. Instead
socialism insures greater resource shortages than a free market economy,
because it is woefully inefficient, inflexible and unrewarding. And those
resource shortages are then passed on to the average citizen in ways far
more unjust and restrictive than in any free market system.

While
socialism insists on promising an infinite amount of pies in the sky, in
the real world there is still only one pie. Where the free market uses
trading strategies between consumers and businesses to maximize access to
the pie, socialism locks the pie up in Al Gore's strongbox and creates a
bureaucracy to parcel out access to it. By the time the pie has gone stale
and everyone has figured out there's no more pie left, the system either
breaks down or becomes nakedly totalitarian.

The question therefore
is who will lose out under socialized medicine. Since socialized medicine
is premised not on profitability, resource shortages become a much more
pressing problem. That means that a socialized system must either limit
access to everyone, or selectively limit access to certain groups of
people. Or both.

The downside of limiting access to everyone across
the board is that it insures that everyone will be unhappy. And it also
cheats out government bureaucrats of the one thing they love most, playing
god, and deciding who lives and who dies. Unlike private health care
systems, socialized medicine exists for the society as a whole. As a
socialized tool, it is subject to the mandate of social improvement. This
opens the door to letting ethicists, read eugenicists, recommend how to
best utilize existing health care resources. Which is a fancy way of
saying, deciding who lives and who dies.

The elderly and the
disabled who benefit most from a private health care system because it
allows them to use their resources to obtain medical care, are the first
on the butcher's block under socialized medicine. So are children with
Down's Syndrome whose parents in a free market system can obtain health
care for them, and all the other sort of people who don't pass muster as
having a bright future of productive citizenship ahead of them. Or in the
Third Reich's distinctive phrasing, "Life Unworthy of Life."

And that is at the heart of the difference between
socialized medicine and free market health care. In the free market no one
gets to class an entire category of people as "Life Unworthy of Life".
Under socialized medicine, the actual classifications may be disguised in
more politically correct labels and categories, such as Quality of Life,
but they all mean the same thing in the end. Some people must die, so that
others may live.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Rahm Emanuel
and Health Policy Adviser at the Office of Management, provides
a preview of how such a system will get started...

Such an approach accepts a two-tiered health system-some
citizens will receive only basic services while others will receive both
basic and some discretionary health services... Substantively, it
suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity-those that
ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical
reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens
in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic.
Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly
prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic
and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing
health services to patients with dementia.

Obviously.
How could anyone disagree with rationing health care by allocating it
based on creating people with reasoning skills who can fully and actively
participate in the future of the Reich? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel probably
didn't even have to work too hard to translate his reasoning from the
original German.

Or as Dr. Hermann Pfannmüller, who would later
stand trial at Nuremberg for his Starvation Hospitals for those he deemed
unfit, put it,

"The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of
our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feebleminded and
irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the
asylum."

The idea is essentially the same. Why should
the weak, the sick and the degenerates receive treatment at the expense of
the healthy?

Here's a quick pop quiz. See if you can guess whether
the next paragraph comes from Dr. Pfannmüller or Dr. Rahm?

The complete lives system also considers prognosis,
since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor
prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a
complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that
disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young
people with poor prognoses.

Dr. Rahm writing in the
Lancet this time. It could just as easily have been Dr. Pfannmüller of
the Starvation Hospitals who put it much more colorfully;

These creatures (the children) naturally represent for me as
a National Socialist only a burden for the healthy body of our Volk. We
do not kill with poison, injections, etc.; then the foreign press and
certain gentlemen in Switzerland would only have new inflammatory
material.. No, our method is much simpler and more natural, as you see.
With these words, he pulled, with the help of a … nurse, a child from
its little bed. While he then exhibited the child like a dead rabbit, he
asserted with a knowing expression and a cynical grin: For this one it
will take two to three more days. The picture of this fat, grinning man,
in his fleshy hand the whimpering skeleton, surrounded by other starving
children, is still vivid in my mind.

But here's
another resource allocation quote to try your wits on. Is it Dr. Rahm or
Dr. Pfannmüller?

social value allocation prioritises specific individuals to
enable them to promote other important values, or rewards them for
having promoted these values. In view of the multiplicity of reasonable
values in society and in view of what is at stake, social value
allocation must not legislate socially conventional, mainstream
values.

Dr. Rahm naturally. The tipoff is his concern
that a system of socialized health care eugenics not unduly favor people
who represent mainstream values. Else where will the Obamas of tomorrow
come from?

But here's another little preview of the moral calculus
behind ObamaCare

Allocators must also avoid directing interventions
earmarked for health needs to those not relevant to the health problem
at hand, which covertly exacerbates
scarcity. 8,49 For instance,
funeral directors might be essential to preserving health in an
influenza pandemic, but not during a shortage of intensive-care
beds.

For instance, former organ donors seem to deserve
reciprocity since they make a
serious sacrifice and since there is no
surplus of organ donors. By contrast, laboratory staff who serve as
vaccine production workers do not incur serious risk
nor are they
irreplaceable, so reciprocity seems less appropriate for
them.

Ah, but somehow I suspect funeral directors will
actually be quite vital under ObamaCare. Or perhaps they'll simply
dispense with the carbon footprint of energy inefficient funerals and just
shove them into the ovens. If they can find any ovens that are "green"
enough.

It is of course safe to say that Dr. Ezekiel Rahm will be
considered most "essential" to preserving health under this
system.

But here's another quote for the pop quiz.

Making a well-off person slightly better off rather than
slightly improving a worse-off person’s life would be unjust; likewise,
why give an extra year to a person who has lived for many when it could
be given to someone who would otherwise die having had
few?

Another deep thought from Dr. Rahm at the Lancet
on who should live and who should die. The Lancet you will remember served
as a source for the vastly inflated Iraq civilian deaths that proved to be
blatantly false. But that was okay since the Lancet only lied because they
cared so much about human life. It is really wonderful how much liberals
care about human life. And about apportioning that life to those humans
they feel are worthy of life.

But here's one last quote
challenge;

The complete lives system assumes that, although life-years
are equally valuable to all, justice requires the fair distribution of
them... Finally, the complete lives system is least vulnerable to
corruption. Age can be established quickly and accurately from identity
documents. Prognosis allocation encourages physicians to improve
patients’ health, unlike the perverse incentives to sicken patients or
misrepresent health that the sickest-first allocation
creates.

And if the doctors can't... well it's no great loss
anyway. And the good people like Dr. Rahm who will be pulling down six
figure salaries to provide "ethical guidance" will be doing gangbusters
business ethically guiding the new ObamaCare Eugenics (TM).

As Rahm's own article admits, socialized
medicine will not usher in health care for everyone. It will simply
centralize resource allocation in the hands of people like Dr. Rahm who
will decide who gets or doesn't get treatment from a shrinking pool of
available health care coverage... based on their own social values.

The premise that health care should be doled out to those capable
of developing reasoning skills and active participation in the political
system, can be easily used to allocate medical treatment based on
progressive political views... which in the liberal lexicon is identical
with "reasoning skills" and "active political participation".

Furthermore if health care is allocated based on the overall
social goal of political participation by the next generation, affirmative
action and diversity will inevitably factor into the decision. By linking
civic participation with health care allocation, Dr. Rahm has made an
argument for rationing health care in order to promote progressive
politics and racial diversity. This of course would bring ObamaCare full
circle to merge with Nazi eugenics in a horrid prescription of death.