By Seth Richardson
In 1984, Democrat Governor Dick Lamm made his Orwellian “we have a duty to die” comment. His actual statement was “We’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.”
Lamm’s philosophy has been resurrected today in the Obamacare debate. There is substantial truth in the claim that Obamacare will at the very least create de facto, if not de jure “death panels.” This is because any socialized medical care system must perforce ration medical care, because with government-controlled and funded medical care there is simply never enough to go around at any sort of reasonable cost to the economy.
The calculus of who lives and who dies is a cruel one, because the non-productive always, inevitably, lose out. Under Obamacare this will occur through expedients of government-run medical panels recommending things like “women under 40 don’t need mammograms” and other policy-enabling medical decisions by Progressive lap-dog government experts about what comprises “reasonable and necessary” medical care. These decisions will, and indeed are right now being made by Progressive government lackeys in the Obama administration.
If some government-run medical panel says that regular colonoscopies for men aren’t “medically necessary” until men reach age 65, rather than the current recommendation that men over 50 get them, this medical recommendation will become public policy for government-run health care, including Medicare and Medicaid…and Obamacare. And since the ultimate goal of Obamacare, as stated by Obama himself before the election, is transition to a single-payer, government-run, mandatory, socialized universal health care that, like Canada’s did, prohibits private practitioners from providing out-of-network care to those who can afford it, public policy will dictate who gets and does not get “medically necessary” health care.
And what happens if you delay such medical screening for another 15 years? More men will die of colon cancer that was not detected early enough, which, like the recent guidance on mammograms, is the actual cost-cutting goal. This is what makes government-run medical recommendation panels into Obama Death Panels. They don’t decide on a case-by-case basis. Grandma will not have to stand before them and plead for her life. Instead, as faceless, inaccessible government bureaucrats, they will set broad government policy about the provision of medical services that are deemed to be “medically necessary” and they will allow people to die wholesale because diagnosis and treatment are delayed beyond the point of no return. And as faceless Progressive bureaucrats looking at balance sheets, they will never have to see the effects of their handiwork.
In Socialism, like Progressivism, because the individual and his rights are devalued and the system places greater value on the collective will and good, each person is necessarily forced into involuntary servitude to the State and is compelled to produce according to his ability. This system prohibits suicide because the individual is but a tool of the collective, and the tool must not be allowed to dull its own edge or impair its own usefulness to the needs of the collective. On the other hand, Socialism has no problem with destroying damaged tools once they have outlived their usefulness. This is why all socialized health care systems in existence ration medical care to the elderly, either overtly or covertly.
Socialists and Progressives use a cruel calculation of one’s economic value to the collective, based in how much work can be extracted. When the costs of supporting the worker unit exceed the costs of keeping it alive, they cuts their losses and find a way to dispose of the useless trash. How quickly or brutally slowly this happens depends on how close to full State Socialism the particular culture is. Under Stalinism, where data was kept on individual worker production, and when an individual worker’s productivity fell beneath an established standard, no mercy was shown and they were shipped off to the Gulags of Siberia to work on projects like the Road of Bones until they died, whereupon their corpses were buried where they fell.
Under Democratic Socialism such as the UK, France, or Canada, it’s more subtle, and the State allows the person to die slowly, and sometimes painfully, by reluctantly denying life-saving medical treatments on the excuse that it’s too expensive for society to provide, while simultaneously denying the sick the right to pay for their own medical care because that would be unfair to the other slaves. Government then laments their loss and exhorts the rest of its slaves to work harder, so that even more of the gross national product of the nation can be sucked down the socialized medicine toilet that still lines them up to wait for days, weeks or years for the inadequate treatment they might or might not receive.
That is precisely where we are headed under Progressivism and Obamacare.
No person should ever surrender themselves to involuntary servitude, and while death is the ultimate expression of liberty, as Patrick Henry said, it’s not for the government to decide when one must die. Nor should anyone submit to government murder through bureaucratic regulation or an infringement of the individual right to obtain the very best health care one can afford merely because the government deems your ability to obtain it to be unfair to others.
Don’t think for a moment that Barak Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and their minions are not making these calculations right now, however abstractly or covertly, because they are, and if they succeed, you too will one day exceed the cost/benefit calculus, and the bell will toll for you, whether you’re ready or not.
© 2010 Altnews
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[...]Governor Gloom, the duty to die, and Obamacare – The Broadside : Colorado Springs Gazette, CO[...]…
What you left out is the fact that young productive citizens without health insurance are not receiving the screening exams that will detect cancer in it’s early stages. Your focus is misplaced on the elderly who are more likely to vote in a national election. The young families are already strapped with high deductibles and escalating premiums yet no one is speaking out on their behalf. perhaps they are just too busy working and raising their family to worry about whether grandma should have a kidney transplant at 88.
They could go get the screening any time they like. They would just have to save up and pay for it in cash. This shouldn’t be difficult because they will be paying for it ALREADY, in the form of premiums paid for medical care they DO NOT take advantage of.
I wish the new Republican House leadership would worry about fixing those parts of the Health Insurance law that can be fixed while the Senate remains in Democratic hands. Is pragmatism dead over ideological warfare? Part of the revenue enhancement of that law requires companies to file forms 1099s to all of their vendors (to help eliminate forms of tax evasion). This will impose far heavier burdens on small businesses more quickly than any other part of the law. I would imagine that bi-partison support would be easier to find than support for complete repeal.
Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the provision you speak of is idiotic, and I believe there is substantial bi-partisan support to change that, and that it will happen very quickly.
In the interim, I recommend civil disobedience. If NOBODY files these forms, what’s the IRS going to do about it? They don’t have the manpower to enforce it.
The IRS will make a big show of publicly making a dramatic statement in prosecuting civil disobedience. The media blitz will focus on those businesses and call them un-American and the businesses will close.
That will scare the rest of the businesses into compliance or closure and there will be fewer jobs. The media will again blame business and we will become even more the slaves of the government.
The time for civility is over.
It is time to take the offensive and revoke our support of the tyrants by force of arms.
Sic semper tyrannis!
Um, not until he refuses to vacate the White House when his term is up. Nothing he’s done cannot be undone by a subsequent Congress. We, the People just have to suck it up and elect better representatives to Congress. On the day that this is no longer true, I’ll agree with you, but not until then.
Instead, those who have money should live long comfortable lives and the poor should be miserable and die young. If freedom is allowing the poor to die because they can’t afford the care required to keep them alive, bring on the Socialism.
We have rationing today. It is based on economics and profit. At least with a government run health care system there in equality in treatment.
Something often left out of the discussion is the abilty to purchase private coverage in countries with nationalized health care. In England, if you want to be pampered by your doctor and hospital you can buy suplemental insurance to pay for private care.
You’ve just explained the entire point of Obamacare with the sentence, “At least with a government run health care system there in equality in treatment.”
You are quite correct, that IS the point of government-run health care… to give everyone equally crappy service based on the false premise that doing so is “fair” to everyone.
What you fail to realize is that the finest medical care on earth exists in the US today not because of socialism, but because of capitalism and free markets, driven by the demand for excellence in medical technology by those who can afford to pay for it.
This sounds unfair to the indigent and poor, but only if you fail to look at the bigger picture.
As medical research is driven to new heights by the demands of free market competition, the price of anything short of the bleeding edge of technology comes down, just as it does with computer technology.
The advances in microprocessors and computing power that are driven by the needs of industry for better and faster computers results in “fallout” that benefits everyone. The computer you used to type your message is orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones that the government created, using the best available technology of the time, to send man to the moon. Your CELL PHONE has more computing power in fact.
Every time the industry makes a leap in processing or storage technology to meet the demand of high-end users, the next level down becomes cheaper and more affordable for the common man.
The same process applies to medicine. The ONLY reason that you can go to a mall and get a full-body CT or MRI scan for a reasonably small amount of money is because “the rich” funded the development of MRI and CT technology for you.
The reason you can go to the mall and have your vision corrected by LASIK surgery is because the wealthy paid for the development of cutting-edge technology, and continue to do so.
As a direct result of that “unfairness” in the ability to obtain cutting-edge medical care, the cost of LASIK treatment is now within reach of the common man. More importantly, as a result of the decline in the cost of LASIK machines, charitable organizations are now able to install them in trailers and take them overseas and offer life-changing vision correction to thousands and thousands of third-world poor people who could never afford even the cut-rate procedures available in shopping malls here in the US.
The same pattern of development of advanced technology paid for by those who have money to burn on the very best, which then soon becomes available more cheaply for everyone else occurs everywhere the market is allowed to operate freely.
What one gets with socialized medicine is a dependence upon free-market technologies created by US medicine, but with little advancement in technology under socialized medicine itself.
The UK, and Canada, and every other system of socialized medicine on the planet DEPEND UPON the cutting edge technology created here in the US for advancement of medical science. They create little or nothing themselves because all the money that might go towards research instead goes towards providing equality of treatment. But the treatment everyone gets is certainly not the best it can be, and is rationed because fundamental economics force it to be.
So, calling for socialized medicine in the US is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and will result in inferior health care for all, and it will result in a massive slowdown in the advancement of medical technology and knowledge as the funding for advancing such things dries up, since there is no demand for it.
Be careful what you wish for. If you really think that socialized medicine is a good thing, I suggest you go to a country where they have it now.
Your mind sure does run wild, doesn’t it? You worry too much.
It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Better than not worrying enough. Blithe proletarian acceptance is what got us here.