from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Socialized Medicine's Logic of Killing the Elderly

Posted: 11 Aug 2009 07:45 PM PDT

It's hard not to notice that many of the most vocal ObamaCare
protesters are senior citizens. And senior citizens remain the largest
challenge for ObamaCare. Not in political terms, but in terms of resource
management. Senior citizens are likelier to require medical care than
younger workers, and contribute little or nothing to the system. From the
perspective of socialized medicine it becomes all too easy to contemplate
"cutting the waste" by reducing the care given to senior citizens, the
disabled, infants with birth defects, the mentally retarded and anyone
else who fails the system's "Productivity in Practice or Potential"
test.

Most people have not considered the fundamental
change that comes in the transition to socialized medicine. But it is part
of a larger social transition, one that moves the cost and decision making
process from families and religious organizations, into the bowels of a
"big picture" government planning system.

Let's stop for a moment
to ask why we don't simply euthanize the elderly or anyone who in the
words of White House Health Care advisor Ezekiel Emanuel is
"irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating
citizens". The answer would seem obvious to most of us, but the
question is a vitally important one.

The key phrase here is
"Citizens". Since the state is doing the planning and deciding who gets
medical care and who doesn't, it is the state's perspectives that defines
socialized medicine. Once health care is shoved into one giant system
chock full of resource shortages that can't be met, the resources will
have to be allocated one way or another. From the state's perspective, it
makes a certain utilitarian sense to give life to productive citizens,
while denying it to non-productive citizens.

The reason we don't do
things like this is that for us morality is individual, not collective. We
don't think in terms of a system, we think in terms of individual people.
And from a utilitarian standpoint, we exist on a familial level. The care
we give to our children, is a return on the care that we ourselves were
given by parents. And the care we give to our elderly parents is meant to
be returned by our children. If we were to begin sticking the elderly on
ice floes, we know in the back of our minds that our children are likely
to do the same to us. Or as one bumper sticker witticism goes, "Be nice
to your children, they'll choose your nursing home."

The
family as the basis of society however has crumbled in favor of the state.
As people increasingly turn over the care of their children and their
parents to the state, the social investment becomes not in the family, but
in the state. As the moral power of the family is transferred to the
social service bureaucracies of the state, the investment that people have
in their children and their elders diminishes, their investment in the
social services bureaucracy grows. Birth rates drop, inheritance levels
drop and the elderly begin dropping too as each generation tries to game
the system in order to maximize the resources available to it at a given
time.

Euthanasia of the elderly, the disabled and infants is
morally wrong on an individual level, but when one begins playing with
hundreds of millions of lives, morality quickly becomes hazy. That is the
danger of playing god, when you sit on a high enough throne looking down
at all the ant people with their ant problems, individuals cease to
matter, only the welfare of the system does. That is why large centralized
systems quickly become oppressive, because they become detached from the
wishes and wills of individuals. At the system level, only the system
itself matters.

When individuals gain the power of live and death
over hundreds of millions, individual welfare gives way to the welfare of
the state. Once the state has been defined as the sole source of life for
everyone living under it, the state then gains the right to sacrifice the
lives of any number of individuals for its own self-preservation. With
ObamaCare, with socialized medicine, the state becomes the unquestioned
source of life for those living under it. The individual becomes nothing
more than a cog within a machine, a tiny spinning wheel marked "Citizen
5435534" whose destiny will be decided based on how well he functions
within the system.

That leaves out anyone whose life does not contribute to the
system, or as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel put it, "who are irreversibly prevented
from being or becoming participating citizens" thereby failing the
Productivity in Practice or Potential test. Such people draw more from the
system while giving back very little. The Nazis considered them to be
"Life Unworthy of Life". The modern formulation designates them as
suffering a "Poor Quality of Life", which is a fancy way of saying that
people like Dr. Zeke have decided that their lives aren't worth living. A
problem that can be decided in an oven or a needle, or if those aren't
painful enough, by starving them to death on public view.

This is
not a theoretical discussion. Hospital staff already quietly kills
patients they decide are just taking up space. I know an elderly woman who
spent the better part of several months staying in her husband's room
because the hospital staff kept "accidentally" unplugging him. Eventually
they got their way. But while such tactics have to be covert at the
present, a "Gentleman's Agreement" cloaked in the sanctity of the white
robe and the moist needle, under socialized medicine they will begin
coming out of the closet more and more, as medical resource shortages turn
what was once a crime into government policy.

Imagine that instead
of ObamaCare, we were discussing ObamaFood, as the government decided that
it would end hunger in America permanently by confiscating everyone's food
and placing it in a big pile and then giving everyone an equal amount of
food. The plan seems noble enough, but when all the food is gathered
together, it turns out there isn't enough for everyone. The government
will have to ration the food. Some must get less. And some perhaps nothing
at all.

There will of course be lifestyle penalizations. ObamaCare
puts the government in a position of judging every single individual's
lifestyle and punishing "sin" by withdrawing medical resources. Do you
drink more than the prescribed limit? Do you smoke? Do you drive, a
notoriously accident prone activity, instead of taking public
transportation? Are you above the government's weight limit? ObamaCare
puts the government in the godlike position of judging everyone and
creating a health care "Water Empire" to discourage behaviors it
dislikes.

But such measures will be unpopular, and will make the
public more willing to shove those who consume "more than their fair
share" overboard.

Euthanizing the elderly will begin by defining
"End of Life" down, more and more. DNR's will move from voluntary to
mandatory. The quality of the care will drop. Wards will be grim and awful
places, poorly maintained by staff that sees the elderly as disposable.
Depression in the elderly will be enabled, instead of treated. Wanting to
die will be seen as a rational response, rather than a suicidal one.
Decreasing medical procedures will be available to the elderly, and will
instead be supplemented with empty group therapy sessions. Dying will be
treated as a public good, a final chance to give back to society by
ceasing to be a burden on it.

The treatment of the disabled will follow
suit. Comatose patients, the severely physically disabled and mentally
disabled will have their humanity degraded by being called, "Vegetables",
before being euthanized, a little preview of which we got in the Terri
Schiavo case. The media at the time deliberately ignored disabled
protesters, focusing instead on the antics of the religious protesters,
because it understood that the public would not be ready to accept the
real agenda behind the case.

Screenings will help insure that
defective children are never born. And if they are, hospitals will not
provide any care for them. Parents attempting to provide care, rather than
euthanasia, will paradoxically be charged with child abuse. Anyone who
thinks this kind of legal paradox is farfetched, should remember that we
currently live under the legal fiction that an unborn child can be
murdered by a third party and aborted as a constitutional right by the
mother. Of course the individual's sovereign right over her body will
itself become a legal fiction, when the supremacy of the state in medical
matters gives it superior rights to everyone's body.

Of course such
things will not happen overnight. Most systems don't turn monstrous over
the weekend. Even Nazi Germany took nearly a decade to follow through on
the logical conclusion of National Socialist philosophy regarding the
Jews, going from repression to expulsion to extermination. It took nearly
twice as long for the USSR to follow through on Marxism's view of the
Jews, but made up for it by skipping from repression to planned
extermination. The United States has strong and deep moral roots, despite
a vast amount of cultural degradation, a transition to euthanasia will not
happen overnight. But the logical conclusion of the system dictates it.
And those who run the system have already begun to treat it as a
given.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely by granting
godlike power, without godlike wisdom. And any horror quickly becomes
tenable in the name of the system, which itself becomes the god. For the
liberal theology of social justice, the great dream has been of Government
as God, to create a vast bureaucratic machine that will feed and clothe
the poor, provide mandated equality to all and create the utopian kingdom
of heaven on earth. And if Government is God-- then those who run
government become viceroys or avatars of the godhead of social justice. Or
messiahs.

Socialist tyrants from Lenin to Stalin, to Hitler and
Mussolini, and down to Castro and Saddam were praised for their supposed
ability to make the chaotic tide of human affairs work through central
planning. They made the trains run on time, provided health care,
education and a social safety net to all, eliminated crime and insured
public order. In short they created the perfect state machine, a utopian
system in which everything works controlled by one godlike figure at the
center of it all.

Americans were not immune from that same dream,
springing from mingled awe at the recent accomplishments of technology and
outrage over muckraker's revelations about the way the other half lived.
FDR was the embodiment of the great American socialist dream. It was a
dream that failed, over and over again. American government is not a
polished machine, it is a great creaky engine that leaks water and blows
steam everywhere. It is incredibly inefficient and rarely gets anything
done right. But despite everything liberals have not lost faith that the
right man can make it all work, destroy the reactionary forces of
capitalism and the family, to make way for Holy Liberal Empire in which no
one will ever be oppressed, except those who deserve to be.

When you pull back the curtain on a Utopian dreamland, the
horror behind it is a pure nightmare of death camps and firing squads,
misery, oppression and brutality. A million awful things that those at the
top did not care about, because all that mattered to them was the
beautiful system they were building. A system that would be perfect, once
all the imperfect people in its way were taken care of.

The
elderly, the disabled, children struggling for life, dying people fighting
to live-- are all in the way of socialized medicine, which must do
horrible things in the name of the larger dream of free medical care for
everyone. The problem of resource consumption makes it all too easy for
the dictators of health to look down from their ivory tower and decide
that these people are a drain on the system and that they must go.