When I lay this case out before you I want you to keep in mind the Terry Schiavo controversy. You remember her, the woman who was in a vegetative state when her then soon-to-be ex (who was already living with another woman) wanted her feeding tubes removed and sought legal means to do so against her parent’s wishes.
The reason why I want you to remember this case is because it directly applies to the “Universal Health Care Plan” that Obama and the Democrats are trying to rush into existence on two fronts.
First was the legal and political tug-of-war that ensued between the Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats had their slimy paws on the cords of life and wished to pull it out of the socket so she would die and the Republicans were attempting to do everything in their power to keep that plug in the socket. You remember who won and who lost her life and who lost their daughter.
Second is the argument of quality of life and who makes that decision. Those very same doctors, lawyers, politicians and advocates that had their slimy paws on the plug of life are the same players pushing this change of Health Care upon us.
That said – there is no disputing what side of the fence the Conservatives and Socialists were on.This brings me back to the NY Times interview.
Here are some excerpts that Obama commented on regarding health care and end-of-life issues:
“I have always said, though, that we should not overstate the degree to which consumers rather than doctors are going to be driving treatment, because . . . when it comes to medical care; I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he's the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, you know what, you've got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don't go around arguing with him or go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.”
Here Obama is advocating that when your doctor (in his health care plan) tells you that you have an ailment, you should take this as gospel without question and NOT seek a second medical opinion (costs) and raises the specter of power the doctors will have over life and death issues.
Or a darker analogy would have your doctor tell you that you are dying, that your quality of life will be minimal and steer you to assisted suicide as a more human (and cheap) way to handle your personal situation remember the Schiavo arguments about pulling the plug because of her “quality of life” in the vegetative state was nil?
Obama’s next statement lends credibility to these concerns:
“And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options. And certainly that's true when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid, where the taxpayers are footing the bill and we have an obligation to get those costs under control. And right now we're footing the bill for a lot of things that don't make people healthier.”
The gist of this comment hinges on “footing the bill for a lot of things that don’t make people healthier”. If your doctors tells you that you have a terminal illness or a debilitating disease (such as a severe spinal cord injury that renders you a paraplegic) then you will most certainly NOT get healthier. So the litmus test on his health care plan is to reign in costs – translated, if you are not going to get better/healthier then you need to be cut from the program.
Nowhere in Obama’s utterance were the words care to alleviate symptoms or comfort care, just plain and simple “healthier” which brings me back to my first comment on the power that Obama wants to bestow upon your doctor without qualification (doctors word is final and absolute).
When I mentioned the assisted suicide as the cheaper alternative you may have thought I was offering the extreme as the only option, but read Obama’s next statement:
“So when . . . I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies as a way of reining in costs [which] . . . is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we've looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.”
First let me be the first to point out the hypocrisy here. In the early comment Obama made about your doctor being the ultimate word in your diagnosis and treatment, he shifts to questioning the doctors logic about price of pills (once against as a matter to cost). But this is not the gist of this statement and point I want to make. Your health and the care you need will be reduced to a “study” and how it relates to cost which translates into two categories.
First category – if you are healthy and low cost you get treatment and Second – if you are diagnosed with an illness that is expensive and long term you are deemed unworthy of care.
If you think this is extreme again, look at what happened in my State recently (Oregon):
In Oregon, as you know, assisted suicide is legal. Barbara Wagner (who had State Covered Health Insurance provided to her much like Massachusetts universal care) was diagnosed with lung cancer and was given a prescription for medication for the ailment. The insurer sent her a letter that denied the prescription because of cost but did offer her an alternative covered prescription to allow her to participate in the assisted suicide. In other words, as ABC news puts it – “drugs for death, but not for life”.
Do you think I am being paranoid and posing only the extremes now? Once again remember the democrats and activist judges pushing Terry Shiavo to her death due to “quality of life” and the expected cost to maintain hers. Shiavo ultimately was starved to death because her feeding tube was removed and it took a long time for her to die. Imagine how her parents felt, their hopelessness in witnessing this slow and methodical death sentence on their disabled daughter who had the means and the love to keep her alive.
The next statement by Obama again was contradictory when he used his dying grandmother as an example:
“My grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip . . . So now she's in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you've got about - maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that - you know, your heart can't take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you're just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible. And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just - you know, things fell apart .”
Obama seemed to be OK with allowing his family to choose an alternative source to alleviate “quality of life” issues in the face of a terminal disease, but where is the comparative studies that would have denied this surgery as too costly and would produce nothing but diminishing returns on the investment?
Alas, he expounds on the point:
“Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else's aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they're terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn't have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life - that would be pretty upsetting.”
Again, he expounds on the point (which is easy in his case because his grandma is already dead and he has no problem throwing a cadaver under the bus):
“Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.”
As “Concerned Women for America” puts it:
“Have "conversations" with the public under the guise of measured reasonable argument. Subtly (and not so subtly) use doctors, scientists and ethicists who are pro-death to lead the way. Shape public opinion to utilitarianism, futile care, people as pure economic entities, and then the resistance to assisted suicide, and, eventually, euthanasia, will crumble.”
So after this revealing interview on Obamacare the question posed is this – Are the Democrats and Obama the ones America want to “lead the way” on our health care options given their track record on the subject and the allies that they surround themselves with in the political arena?
The allies I speak of are “assisted suicide” lobby and “abortion advocates” like “Planned Parenthood” (whose founder Margaret Sanger was an advocate for Euthanasia/eugenics as well as the founder of the baby murder mill).
We all know the “pro-choice” stance that Obama has taken, it is well documented. It includes “partial birth abortion” that strips a live baby (accident) during the abortion procedure that draws breath to be killed (which in any state statute is murder because the child is born and therefore protected by law unless it is born during an abortion then it has no right to life).
We know that the democrats for all intents and purposes are pro-choice as a great deal of their lobby money and campaign contributions come from that sector. We know that the democrats wanted the plug pulled on Terri Shiavo.
We know that during the Scott Peterson trial one of these groups (NOW) objected to the double murder charge that include the death of Laci Petersons unborn child when they stated:
"If this is murder, well, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder," Morris County NOW President Mavra Stark told the Daily Record of Parsippany, N.J. "There's something about this that bothers me a little bit," Stark said. "Was it born, or was it unborn? If it was unborn, then I can't see charging [Peterson] with a double-murder." "[The boy] was wanted and expected," Stark added, "and [Laci] had a name for him, but if he wasn't born, he wasn't born. It sets a kind of precedent."
The double standard that the socialists use in crafting the debates on abortion (pro-choice) and assisted suicide always hinge on the voters have spoken and the law is clear ones. Three times the State of Oregon voters placed on the ballot and won the “assisted suicide” law on the books and each instance the Bush administration through the Justice department tried to squash it by threatening doctor’s licenses and arrest. The argument the left had against Bush and the Justice Department was “the voters have spoken”.
The same goes with the Abortion issue and the Supreme Court decision “Roe v. Wade” and the democrat’s insistence that once the Supreme Court ruled, then “Stare Decisis” applies (meaning it can never be brought forth again as it is the “settled law of the land”).
But, these same socialist lobby groups have fought to overturn the voters every single time California voters decided to change the state constitution in the realm of “traditional marriage”. In this instance, because it goes against the liberal mantra of “gay equality”, the voters do not matter.
Just as Obama sends through this health care legislation, there will be no “meaningful debate” that will do anything other than push this euthanasia mill down the voters and taxpayers throats
