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Time Magazine's Disgusting Michael Scherer Whitewash of Ezekiel
Emanuel

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 08:35 PM PDT

No one can at this point claim to be surprised to
see the media routinely lie or distort the truth, smear Obama's political
opponents and generally function as the propaganda organ for the White
House. It was inevitable then that the media would try to whitewash Dr.
Ezekiel Emanuel, whose high profile status as the brother of the White
House Chief of Staff, has made his ugly views into an extremely high
profile matter.

Michael Scherer's Time
Magazine hatchet job is nothing groundbreaking. It is unfortunately
exactly the sort of thing Americans have come to expect from the media,
and particularly from Time Magazine. It has the same blend of oozing
sympathy for anyone associated with Obama and contemptuous disdain for
anyone who disagrees with Obama. It is heavy on first person journalism,
and spends more time discussing Ezekiel Emanuel's reaction to hearing that
there are allegations against him, than actually stating the allegations.
And of course it lies blatantly in defense of Ezekiel Emanuel, but that's
a given these days, isn't it?

We get the tragically beleaguered Dr.
Emanuel's reaction to the allegations;

Time: "You have the quality of your work and
the integrity with which you do it," he said by phone from the Italian
Alps. "If it requires canceling a week's long vacation, what's the big
deal?"

Naturally most Americans will sympathize with Ezekiel
Emanuel's great sacrifice in selflessly giving up his taxpayer funded
vacation in the Italian Alps because he got caught with his eugenics down.
At least most Americans who are highly paid writers for Time
Magazine.

Time: Within days, the Post article, with
selective and misleading quotes from Emanuel's 200 or so published
academic papers, went viral.

There are the article's repeated statements that Ezekiel
Emanuel's quotes are somehow distorted or taken out of context. Yet oddly
enough Michael Scherer's article does not find time in between discussing
such vital facts as Ezekiel Emanuel's favorite vacation spots, his
feelings on the internet or putting scare quotes around any statement
critical of Emanuel... to actually cite one of those Emanuel quotes
verbatim. Which if those statements are as innocent as Scherer and Ezekiel
claim they are, is a no brainer.

Michael Scherer does not bother
interviewing a single critic of Ezekiel for balance. Instead he puts scare
quotes while citing a few dramatic adjectives. He describes Mike Sola, the
father of a son with cerebral palsy, who stood up at a Town Hall meeting
as the product of hysteria.

Time: By Aug. 10, hysteria had begun to take over
in places. Mike Sola, whose son has cerebral palsy, turned up at a
Michigan town-hall meeting to shout out concerns about what he regarded
as Obama and Emanuel's plans to deny treatment to their family. Later,
in an interview on Fox News, Sola held up the Post article.
"Every American needs to read this," he declared.

Scherer is cynically careful enough to avoid literally
calling Sola hysterical, instead he formulates the phrasing in a way that
gives that exact impression instead, piling cowardice on the already ugly
act of smearing the parent of a disabled child whose one crime was to
voice opposition to Obama's health care plan.

Then completely
devoid of irony, Michael Scherer flashes back 8 years, completely ignoring
everything Time Magazine had been writing during the Bush Administration
to claim that;

Time: The attacks on Emanuel are a reminder that
there is a narrow slice of Americans who not only don't trust
government, but also have come to regard it as a dark conspirator in
their lives.

Naturally Scherer is not referring to Code Pink or the ACLU
or Paul Krugman, or the legion of liberal columnists and pundits who
distrusted the Bush Administration and regarded it as a "dark
conspirator".

For example there's the following bit of "paranoia"
by a narrow slice of one American who viewed government as a
dark conspirator.

The Next Worst Thing

Is the federal government's
expansion of biodefense research paving the way for the bioweapons of
the future?

The paranoid fellow who wrote that was Michael Scherer, of
course that was back during the Bush Administration, when making up
conspiracy theories about secret government conspiracies was cool. Now of
course that the Dems are in power it means you're a dangerous
extremist.

But maybe Michael Scherer could use the reminder that
his "narrow slice" is not so narrow as he would like to pretend. It's
something his former colleagues at Mother Jones magazine could tell him
something about.

Finally though near the bottom of the article,
Scherer gets around to addressing any of the specifics of the allegations
against Ezekiel Emanuel.

Time: In her Post article, McCaughey paints the
worst possible image of Emanuel, quoting him, for instance, endorsing
age discrimination for health-care distribution, without mentioning that
he was only addressing extreme cases like organ donation, where there is
an absolute scarcity of resources.

Emanuel does use organ donation and flu pandemics as
examples, but he is not speaking only of extreme cases. He also lists beds
in intensive care units in his article
introduction as an example. He is speaking of how to address medical
resource shortages, which would be a reality under a national health care
plan.

Emanuel also mentions dialysis machines and penicillin as
other examples. He is clearly not discussing only organ donations or
absolute scarcities. In fact based on Emanuel's own introductory words, he
is saying that any number of medical resources may be considered scarce,
even if they are available, because their cost would be better utilized
somewhere else.

For some interventions, demand exceeds supply. For
others, an increased supply would necessitate redirection of important
resources, and allocation decisions would still be
necessary

So ironically it is Michael Scherer who deliberately
misrepresents Ezekiel Emanuel's views, in order to pretend that Emanuel is
speaking about organ donations and only the most extreme situations in
which there is no alternative but to ration. In fact Emanuel views even
some available treatments as not worthwhile if they do not meet his
criteria.

Time: She quotes him discussing the denial of
care for people with dementia without revealing that Emanuel only
mentioned dementia in a discussion of theoretical approaches, not an
endorsement of a particular policy.

In fact the denial of care for dementia is mentioned
in the conclusion of Ezekiel Emanuel's article. It is not treated as
hypothetical in the sense that Emanuel mentions it without recommending
it, instead he quite clearly treats it as one of those substantive
practices he treats as an obvious example of what we should be
doing.

"This civic republican or deliberative democratic
conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights
for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally,
it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health
services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed.
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."

Ezekiel Emanuel is clearly not citing this example as
something he disagrees with. It is in fact something he is recommending.
For Michael Scherer to claim otherwise is a blatant lie.

Time: She notes that he has criticized medical
culture for trying to do everything for a patient, "regardless of the
cost or effects on others," without making clear that he was not
speaking of lifesaving care but of treatments with little demonstrated
value.

In fact that is not clear at all. In
the JAMA article, "The Perfect Storm of Overutilization", Ezekiel
Emanuel cites a number of factors in the high cost of US medical care.
These include,

"the abundance of amenities. Hospital rooms in the
United States offer more privacy, comfort, and auxiliary services than
do hospital rooms in most other countries. US physicians' offices are
typically more conveniently located and have parking nearby and more
attractive waiting rooms."

... as well as overutilization itself. Ezekiel
Emanuel defines overutilization as;

higher volumes, such as more office visits,
hospitalizations, tests, procedures, and prescriptions than are
appropriate or more costly specialists, tests, procedures, and
prescriptions than are appropriate.

One of the causes he blames for this is physician
culture;

Medical school education and postgraduate training
emphasize thoroughness. When evaluating a patient, students, interns,
and residents are trained to identify and praised for and graded on
enumerating all possible diagnoses and tests that would confirm or
exclude them... This mentality carries over into practice. Peer
recognition goes to the most thorough and aggressive physicians. The
prudent physician is not deemed particularly competent, but rather
inadequate. This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding
of professional obligations, specifically, 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.

This paragraph above is the source of the quote. The
discussion is not about treatments of limited value as Michael Scherer
wrongly contends, but what Ezekiel Emanuel feels is doctors being too
thorough in excluding possible but less likely dangerous conditions,
rather than simply treating the patient in the most "prudent" and
efficient" way.

For example then a patient who comes to see a
doctor with blood in herurine, would be treated with antibiotics for an
infection, and given an ultrasound. Ezekiel Emanuel would consider this a
waste of medical resources from a too aggressive physician who is trying
to rule out more dangerous problems that the patient might have.

The Emanuel way would be cheaper, and it would result in more
undiagnosed medical problems, including cancers. It's the kind of thing
liberals rail against when HMO's do it. But when it comes to Ezekiel
Emanuel, Time Magazine and Michael Scherer work to cover it up, by
transposing Ezekiel's view from one paragraph in the article, to the next,
which discusses treatments of dubious value.

In thes sole paragraph
in Michael Scherer's article dedicated to actually listing specific
criticisms of Emanuel based loosely on his words, Scherer gets all 3
statements wrong. Which suggests that he either did not read Emanuel's
articles, did not understand them, or deliberately misrepresented them.
Either way it's a level of incompetence or deceit that a major publication
would not have tolerated once upon a time.

Scherer concludes by
giving us the heroic image of Ezekiel Emanuel passing up on a return trip
to the Italian Alps, surely an image right up there with a crowd of slaves
rising to proclaim, "I Am Spartacus".

Emanuel, for his part, plans to continue his work, which
is focused on finding the most equitable and ethical way for this reform
to be carried out, even if he has opted against returning from the
Italian Alps. "I am an Emanuel," he says. "We are pretty thick-skinned.
I am not going to change my colors. I am not going to crawl under a
rock."

Yes it's hard to crawl under a rock, when the rock has been
lifted up and you've been exposed to the light. It'll take a lot more than
articles like Scherer's to pull that rock back over him again.