Portia has drawn my attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal by the splendid Betsy McCaughey. Unlike Henry Waxman, she's actually read the bill for Obamacare, and she's exposing its dirty little secrets. The secrets that the Legacy Media won't tell us about.

Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, has been appointed as health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. I've written on this man before, and his acknowledgement that promising to save by cutting waste is merely lipstick, and the real savings will be rationing.

Emanuel doesn't think much of doctors' adherence to the Hippocratic Oath because it, in his opinion, makes doctors think too much of their patients' welfare to the exclusion of society as a whole--a communitarian prospective. He can in this way allocate, i.e., ration, resources in a way which best keep society going, and guess who defines the way it should go? From the Hastings Center Report, November-December, 1996:

Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity--those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations--are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Covering services 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.

So, if you have a Down's baby, that kid's out of luck. Cerebral palsy? Costs too much. That aged parent? Kiss Grandma good bye. What if you come down with ALS? What if you are, quelle horreur, gay? Well, I suppose the lesbians might get a pass as long as they agree to be good brood mares.

If you're not a healthy breeder, then you're out of luck. It follows that if you're past being useful to your progeny, you're out of luck and if your progeny aren't breeding, you're out of luck too. The Eskimos would abandon old people on the ice once their teeth, used for chewing leather, were gone. Dr. Emanuel seems to be set to do the 21st-century same thing.

To scare people he gives us:

The United States is No. 1 in only one sense: the amount we shell out for health care. We have the most expensive system in the world per capita, but we lag behind many developed nations on virtually every health statistic you can name.

Zeke, you're a big, fat liar. This is a lie of Michael Moore proportions. Even Bill Clinton would blush at that lie. The World Health Organization ranks us as number 1 out of 191 countries for responsiveness to the needs and choices of the individual patient. Life expectancy for cancer patients is higher here for virtually every sort of cancer than it is in any socialized-medicine country. Zeke, you're a liar, and you fit right in this administration.

Now here's something which might be stretching it a bit, but considering the sound of jackboots that I hear coming from Washington now, it bears considering. Totalitarian governments have never been slow to experiment on undesirables--the Nazis, under the infamous Josef Mengele, horribly medically abused the Jews, gypsies, and others they thought inferior. People in a free country like America, for now at least, grasp any medical care that they can get when faced with certain death. If the government has decreed that because you're not breeding or raising future breeders that you're not worthy of existing care that might actually work, wouldn't you be fodder for happy little American Angels of Death to try out experimental medicine on you? Which you'd take, preferring to be a guinea pig to being dead.

But if we don't have these totalitarians running things, you might be neither.

If the purpose of socialized medicine is to insure a healthy polity, doesn't it follow that there will be mandatory genetic screening of fetuses, with compulsory abortion of less-than-perfect ones? Think of all those lovely stem cells to be used for breeders who need them. But why stop at abortions? Dr. Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton, has written:

I do think that it is sometimes appropriate to kill a human infant. For me, the relevant question is, what makes it so seriously wrong to take a life? Those of you who are not vegetarians are responsible for taking a life every time you eat. Species is no more relevant than race in making these judgments.

Singer is listened to among the good and great and his thinking must be comforting to people with a certain mindset. Say a totalitarian mindset.

Under this thinking, if that baby you wanted so much develops an expensive disease, then put it down. If your son suffers brain damage in an accident, finish him off.

How much longer until we do genetic engineering on humans? Rationing by fertility is just one form of eugenics.

And if you follow this line of reasoning a bit further, you'll see something even more chilling. The Nazis sterilized the feeble-minded, who were then allowed to live. Under Dr. Emanuel, people who are not promoting the continuity of the polity just don't get medical services. In other words, in this at least the Nazis seem more humane.