Obama's Aide: If You Are Not Adolescent or Middle Age, Forget About Getting Medical Care.

As the Obama Administration works on details of the proposed health care overhaul, President Obama is getting advice from someone with some very unsettling views on who should be allowed to receive medical care.

After a nationwide search, Obama hired Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, as a special advisor to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget for health policy.

Writing in the Lancet journal (free subscription required for article), Emanuel and two colleagues examined various means for the "allocation of scarce medical interventions." A cynic might call this an article on how to best ration health care.

This article on how to best ration health care contains some chilling conclusions on the part of Obama's right-hand man on health care policy.

Emanuel favors what he calls the Complete Lives System, which give priority to "younger people who have not yet lived a complete life and will be unlikely to do so without aid." Meaning, that young people between ages 15 and 40 will become the most likely to receive these "scarce medical interventions." Leaving children and the elderly to take a back seat.

Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments.

The basic theory is, if a 25-year-old person and a 60-year-old person both require the same medical treatment at the same time, the 20 something will get the care long before his elder, simply because he -- in theory -- has longer to live.

...why give an extra year to a person who has lived for many when it could be given to someone who would otherwise die having had few?

As for giving the 25-year old preference over an infant, Emanuel speculates:

It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies and worse still when an adolescent does...

Excuse me? This is a shocking and clearly ignorant piece of filth, coming -- I am certain -- from someone who has not lost a child. This is a grotesque insult, bred from pure ignorance; and to base an entire health care philosophy on this bit of hate is contemptible at best. Sick and disturbed at worst.

However, if you are a sickly or disabled young person, you might be out of luck, too:

A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses. When the worst-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable.

Combine this notion with a finding in an Emanuel article from 10 years ago (PDF), and the future for the disabled seems even more in question:

(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.

If there is anyone out there with a disabled child, know that Obama's main man on health care does not want to give medical care to your child because he will never become a fully "participating citizen."

As for the elderly, it seems that they are no better off:

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance (at receiving medical treatment), whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated...

But, these are just a few thoughts from the man whom Barack Obama has entrusted with YOUR medical care -- assuming you are among the select people who will be allowed to receive it.

And to think, we were afraid that Obama would limit medical care access to the elderly, shuttling them off to hospices instead. It seems his top adviser also wants to allow infants in children to die, rather than give them life saving treatment, even if that life is necessarily short.

This is some of the most twisted thinking from so-called respected ethicist I have ever heard. This is the stuff of bad science fiction movies. And if we don't act, it may become part-and-parcel of YOUR health care.

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