By Peter J. Smith
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Germany's experience with National Socialism is one of the darker moments of human history. FOX News host Glenn Beck has taken on the challenge of applying the lessons of Nazi Germany (government-controlled health care, combined with the principle of valuing human beings based on “quality of life” and a severe economic crisis) to “question with boldness” the direction American health-care is heading under President Barack Obama and his policy advisors.
Beck hosts a radio program and a 5 P.M. television program on the FOX News Channel five days a week. But the anchorman's passion is for taking an honest and fearless look at Obama's advisors who have taken positions so radical out in the open that exposing them seems like melodramatic fiction.
In his health-care reform special, Beck looks at three critical advisors or “Czars” in President Obama's Administration. These policy advisors manage new offices and exercise power within the Executive Branch, but are unaccountable to Congress in the way that cabinet appointees confirmed by the full Senate are.
In the first part Beck focused on Nazi Germany, because a system that valued the worth of human beings based on “quality of life” led inevitably to Hitler's “final solution.” However it began when Germans became used to the idea that human life ultimately had a value related to qualities valued by the state as a collective whole. That thinking led to the acceptance of “Lebensunwertes Leben” or “life unworthy of life,” and crimes against humanity most Germans, other than the National Socialist elite, did not foresee as a consequence.
“Well-intentioned people can produce systems that raise serious questions,” admonished Beck, asking his viewers to take a hard look at several advisors in Obama's inner-circle whose intentions are undermined by very serious flaws when it comes to judging which human lives have dignity – or even qualify for life at all. These advisors or “czars” are designing America's new government-controlled health-care system. Beck names them as Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, Health Reform Policy Advisor, John Holdren, Science Czar, and Cass Sunstein, the Regulatory Czar, and reminds his audience to take up President Obama's advice: to know his policies and who influences his thinking, look at his advisors.
Dr. “Zeke” Emmanuel and the Complete Lives System
Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel works in the White House Office of Management and Budget as a health-policy advisor and he is a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. Dr. Emmanuel is one of the pillars of Obama's reform. However Dr. Emmanuel has stated repeatedly in public forums such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that doctors were driving up health-care costs because they value the Hippocratic Oath as “an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.”
Instead, Dr. Emmanuel raises the possibility of a new ethical system, the “Complete Lives System” that would ration care away from the elderly, away from infants, and away from human beings judged unable to rationally participate in society (such as those with dementia), in favor of those aged 15-44, who have the best chance “to live a complete life.”
Dr. Emmanuel's theory of rationing, however, could end up being applied in a severe national economic crisis, far worse than the current recession, and not unlike the Great Depression that crippled Germany. Germany had made the mistake of trying to dig itself out of its staggering national debt by heavily inflating the money supply in order to save its economy. Beck makes the point that this is not too dissimilar to the United States' attempt to stimulate its economy, which unable to borrow more money from creditor-nations like China, has instead borrowed cash from the printing presses of the Federal Reserve.
Such a system could be implemented and recommended to the government insurance programs or private companies participating in the Health Insurance Exchange by means of a Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research and its advisory panels as proposed in HR 3200“America's Affordable Health Choices Act,” which soon enough may be named for the departed Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin brought attention to this fact in a Facebook statement that charged Obama and Dr. Emmanuel would turn the health-care system into a “death panel.” (see coverage here and here)
But as Beck points out, Dr. Emmanuel may not believe that people who can't become developed citizens are not “basic” and “should not be guaranteed,” but he is not alone in his thinking. Obama's “Science Czar” John Holdren does him one better: some people are not yet human.
John Holdren: Not Even Born Babies are Human … Yet
John Holdren is President Obama's Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Beck says he is another key player in Obama's health-care reform. But Holdren has a life-long obsession with population control and has written two books outlining a host of options to deal with what he sees as a global crisis of “human overpopulation.”
Beck points out that Holdren has this to say about who is human and who is not, and babies do not qualify as human beings: “The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experience and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being.”
Holdren co-authored a college textbook called “Ecoscience” in which he advanced the idea that forced abortion and sterilization of women is justifiable under the US Constitution, and that sterilizing agents could be added to the drinking water in order to curb the growth of human populations.
That background does not sit well with Americans trying to judge for themselves whether to trust the safety and effects of the hastily approved H1N1 “swine flu” vaccine. Holdren has urged Americans to take the vaccine warning that up to 90,000 Americans could die from the virus this season – although to date less only 500 Americans have died of the virus. Many are wary of taking the fast-tracked vaccine citing the 1976 swine flu scare in which the vaccine killed more people than the disease and left many more with a nerve disease called Guillian Barre syndrome.
Cass Sunstein and Rationing by QALY
Cass Sunstein, Obama's appointed advisor to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, shares opinions in common with Dr. Emmanuel and John Holdren when it comes to health-care rationing and the dignity of the human person. If Sunstein's appointment is not rejected by the Senate, then Sunstein will oversee the OIRA, which creates government regulations for federal laws.
Sunstein advocates rationing based on “quality-adjusted life years” (QALY), meaning that the government would evaluate statistically whether a person's life is worth the cost of living.
Sunstein is a radical animal rights thinker, who believes that animals such as dolphins and whales should have legal representation. Sunstein counts Princeton philosopher Peter Singer among his closest friends. Singer believes that children under the age of seven do not have sufficient rationality to count as human beings, and for that reason parents could commit infanticide.
Sunstein has also stated a desire to regulate the internet in order to fight what he calls a “system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.”