Health Care Ethics: No Health Services for People with Dementia, So Sorry

I've decided that the best way to read the gov't health care takeover bills and the writings of Obama's health care advisors is the same way that Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer wrote: stiff drink at hand.

It's about deadening the emotional pain.

Too bad I'm not much of a drinker.

And I'd prefer not to drive followers of this blog to drink either, so today I will offer you just one brief excerpt from a paper by Ezekiel J. Emanuel. He is the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and yet another reason that, I believe, Harvard degrees are rapidly losing their luster.

In his search for "the goods and goals of medicine," Dr. Emanuel concludes:

[S]ervices 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.

This is what passes for the highest order of medical ethics in U.S. medical debate, at the National Institute of Health, and, particularly, in the Obama administration, where Dr. Emanuel is "on extended detail as a special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget."

It's not hard to deduce where this man will be cutting costs in America's health care budget.

However, if you get should happen to read Ezekiel Emanuel's papers and, in consequence, stand up and shout at a town hall meeting, you will be called a nazi, a disrupter, and un-American by this country's Democrat lawmakers, and you will be told to shut up and "get out of the way" by this country's highest officer, no less than the Democrat President of the United States.

Oh yes, and you will be told matter-of-factly that ObamaCare will be passed by your Democrat representatives (so-called) in Congress no matter what you think, say, or write; no matter how many Americans agree with you; no matter how you vote; and no matter what the Constitution of the United States has to say about it. And that once this bill is passed into law, it will be impossible to revoke it.

Never mind that someone you dearly love suffers from (or will eventually suffer from) dementia or any other malady that might prevent them from being, henceforward, "a participating citizen."

I shudder to think what the term "participating citizen" might mean to some future set of power-hungry socialist politicians and bureaucrats.

Emanuel's paper is innocently titled, "Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet" (click on the link then scroll down to find the text). It is only about two pages in length, but it's not so short that it won't cost you sleep. It was originally published in the Hastings Center Report, November-December 1996.
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Ichthyological quote of the day:

"Once, when a pollster made him angry, [Rahm] Emanuel sent him a dead fish."

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