- The huge public outcry against Health Care reform has
the Democratic Left running scared. What began as a populist movement promising
everyone cheaper universal access to health care has now begun to engender
legitimate public fears about excess control, loss of privacy, rationing
and even bureaucratic determinations about who deserves to live or die.
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- Even the notoriously Leftist AARP organization has stirred
up a hornet's nest of angry members who finally realize the extreme partisan
nature of this huge and well funded lobby for retirees. The YouTube video
of AARP staffers pushing ObamaCare at a member meeting and encountering
a wall of opposition went viral-precisely because it showed staffers telling
the audience in the beginning they were there to "listen to member's
concerns" and then abruptly shutting down the meeting, insulting the
audience, and walking out when the discussion didn't go their way! AARP
true colors were showing for all the world to see.
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- The Democrats are now scrambling to create all kinds
of legislative ploys to make it appear as if the bad parts of Obama's Health
Reform package are being taken out, but still allowing sufficient remnants
of regulation to keep their foot in the door. Some Democrats are talking
about splitting the bill into two parts, separating out the regulation
of private insurers from the public insurance option. But they can get
to total government control over health care through the regulatory option
even if they appear to abandon the public option temporarily.
-
- Nat Henhoff, a Leftist journalist typifies the growing
dissatisfaction and concern among even hard-core liberals about the direction
Obama is taking the nation: "I was not intimidated during J. Edgar
Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me [on the Left] who criticized him.
I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking.
But now I am finally scared of a White House administration.
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- "President Obama's desired health care reform intends
that a federal board (similar to the British model) - as in the Center
for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill
- decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party,
merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for thatlife-decider
in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law.
-
- "The members of that ultimate federal board will
themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question. For another
example of the growing, tumultuous resistance to 'Dr. Obama,' particularly
among seniors, there is a July 29 Washington Times editorial citing a line
from a report written by a key adviser to Obama on cost-efficient health
care, prominent bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House
chief of staff Rahm Emanuel).
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- "Emanuel writes about rationing health care for
older Americans that 'allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious
discrimination' (The Lancet, January 2009). He calls this form of rationing
- which is fundamental to Obamacare goals - 'the complete lives system.'
You see, at 65 or older, you've had more life years than a 25-year-old.
As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care
than older folks.
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- "No matter what Congress does when it returns from
its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama's eventual master health
care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview
(quoted in a Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a
government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a
certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake,
he says, a 'very difficult democratic conversation' about how 'the chronically
ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially
80 percent of the total health care' costs.
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- "This end-of-life consultation has been stripped
from the Senate Finance Committee bill because of democracy-in-action town-hall
outcries but remains in three House bills." This presents the Democrats
another strategy: The gutting of the Senate version sets up a conflict
between what the House and Senate have passed, which must be resolved by
a "conference committee," --chosen manipulators who will determine
the final outcome in secret sessions. I suspect that they intend some version
of the bad provisions to remain in the compromise bill, undoing the milder
Senate version, which Obama will sign.
-
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- (End Excerpt)
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- World Affairs Brief - Commentary and
Insights on a Troubled World.
-
- Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution
permitted.
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- Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com
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- World Affairs Brief, 290 West 580 South, Orem, Ut 84058,
USA
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