RUSH: Betsy McCaughey, who is one of the people doing yeoman work deciphering the contents, the details of every Democrat health care plan that’s proposed starting with Hillarycare, has another piece today in the Wall Street Journal entitled, ”Obama’s Health Rationer-in-Chief — White House Health-Care Adviser Ezekiel Emanuel,” brother of Rahm Emanuel, ”Blames the Hippocratic Oath for the ‘Overuse’ of Medical Care’ — Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree. The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel.
‘They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House’s health initiative. Dr. Emanuel says that health reform will not be pain free, and that the usual recommendations for cutting medical spending (often urged by the president) are mere window dressing. As he wrote in the Feb. 27, 2008, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA): ‘Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.’
‘True reform, he argues, must include redefining doctors’ ethical obligations. In the June 18, 2008, issue of JAMA, Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the ‘overuse’ of medical care: ‘Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness,’ he writes. ‘This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition to ‘use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.’ In numerous writings, Dr. Emanuel chastises physicians for thinking only about their own patient’s needs. … Dr. Emanuel believes doctors should serve two masters, the patient and society, and that medical students should be trained ‘to provide socially sustainable, cost-effective care.’ One sign of progress he sees: ‘the progression in end-of-life care mentality from ‘do everything’ to more palliative care shows that change in physician norms and practices is possible.”
Here is your death panel head honcho! He’s Obama’s lead advisor. I don’t want anybody to ever call here again and tell me there aren’t death panels. We’ve got a guy who says the problem with health care is the Hippocratic oath, and that doctors need to be retrained. They need to rethink end-of-life treatment and what’s better for society at large rather than what’s better for the individual patient. ”In the next decade every country will face very hard choices about how to allocate scarce medical resources. There is no consensus about what substantive principles should be used to establish priorities for allocations,’ he wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, Sept. 19, 2002. Yet Dr. Emanuel writes at length about who should set the rules, who should get care, and who should be at the back of the line. ‘You can’t avoid these questions,’ Dr. Emanuel said in an Aug. 16 Washington Post interview.
”We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a ‘God committee’ to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.” So what happened? Did we get more machines because the market demanded it? ‘Dr. Emanuel argues that to make such decisions, the focus cannot be only on the worth of the individual. He proposes adding the communitarian perspective to ensure that medical resources will be allocated in a way that keeps society going: ‘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… An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.’ …
‘In the Lancet, Jan. 31, 2009, Dr. Emanuel and co-authors presented a ‘complete lives system’ for the allocation of very scarce resources, such as kidneys, vaccines, dialysis machines, intensive care beds, and others. ‘One maximizing strategy involves saving the most individual lives, and it has motivated policies on allocation of influenza vaccines and responses to bioterrorism. … Other things being equal, we should always save five lives rather than one. ‘However, other things are rarely equal — whether to save one 20-year-old, who might live another 60 years, if saved, or three 70-year-olds, who could only live for another 10 years each — is unclear.” Unclear? They’re thinking about it! It’s perfectly clear what their thinking is on this, and this is the guy that’s the number one health care adviser to Obama.
And they can sit out there and deny death panels all they want, but his number one adviser is saying: We treat too many people and we gotta change the focus. ‘Dr. Emanuel concedes that his plan appears to discriminate against older people, but he explains: ‘Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination. … Treating 65 year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.’ The youngest are also put at the back of the line: ‘Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life.’ Do you understand? We are robots! He is looking at individual Americans, ‘Okay, how much has the government invested in them? How much has the government invested in educating them?’
Not their parents, not your family. How much has Washington, how much has the government invested if getting you born, in providing for you after you were born, in educating you? And if the government’s invested a lot in you they have a reasonable expectation of a return on the investment so you might get health care, if you’re young. If you’re old, forget it. That’s why people are showing up at the town hall meetings because people know all of this. ‘Dr. Emanuel has fought for a government takeover of health care for over a decade. In 1993, he urged that President Bill Clinton impose a wage and price freeze on health care to force parties to the table. ‘The desire to be rid of the freeze will do much to concentrate the mind,’ he wrote with another author in a Feb. 8, 1993, Washington Post op-ed. Now he recommends arm-twisting Chicago style.
”Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda,’ he wrote last Nov. 16 in the Health Care Watch Blog. ‘If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.” This is what he’s advocating: This miniature version of fascism. This is the man who’s the number one adviser to Obama on health care, the brother of the chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Make no mistake where this is headed. Make no mistake. Obama’s got cover. He’s got all these other lackeys out saying these things while he’s on stage claiming, ‘No, no, no, there’s not going to be death panels! It’s outrageous. I can’t believe people are misquoting me, misinformation, the lying, and all of these targets my plan that are being lied about,’ and they’re not being lied about, and this is not what the American people want. Go ahead, put Ted Kennedy’s name on this bill and make this the most hypocritical decision you’ve ever made.
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RUSH: Back to the phones we go to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Hi Vickie, great to have you with us today.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m just angry. I love talking to you. But let’s say they do it, they force it through against the will of the American people, which is shown overwhelmingly in every poll in the country. They do it anyway. I understand that they can and probably will most likely be voted out when they come up for election, virtually every one of them, I believe. And conservatives will be sent in in their place with an overwhelming mandate to get rid of it, get rid of government-run health care. However, in the meantime there are people in this country, people with courage, anger, and a brain who will not partake, who will not cooperate. Just like there are people who will not answer the questions in the census. There are doctors and patients who will not do what they’re supposed to do. What will the government do about these millions of people?
RUSH: Now, that is an interesting question. The first thing to stipulate here is that if the bill passes, if it passes as it’s planned now, it will be four years before it’s implemented. And this is one of the reasons we ask, ‘What the hell is the hurry here? The thing doesn’t get implemented until 2013, what’s the big deal?’ They wanted to get it implemented before all this rotten economic news and debt and deficit news hit. That is an interesting proposition. There will be a number of people who will just refuse to play, and they will become targets of the government. Now, with the empowerment of the IRS on here, you remember the IRS, if you don’t play, you are going to pay. They are going to fine you, they’re going to charge you as much as $2,500 to $8,000 a year taxes. The IRS is already an agency that is in existence that has a lot of people intimidated. I mean people do not want to get audited, people will pay their taxes, they’re scared to death of the IRS, government’s successfully built up this fear of the IRS over the years and that’s why the IRS is the number one enforcer here because they’ve already got —
CALLER: Except, except that there are people with courage and anger enough to say, ‘Screw you, I don’t do it, put me in jail,’ and they put, what, thousands and thousands of people in jail? What are they going to do? Have them all fired? What can they do? I don’t have enough money to pay them anything.
RUSH: Wait a second. Wait a second. If this bill passes, I’m glad you asked the question. They’re going to have access to your bank account.
CALLER: How?
RUSH: They’re going to have digital online access to your bank account. I mean there are hideous things in this piece of legislation.
CALLER: How do they get it?
RUSH: How do they get it?
CALLER: How do they get access to my bank account?
RUSH: They order every bank to turn over every account number to the IRS and they’re going to be able to go in and if you don’t pay they’re going to debit your account for you.
CALLER: So you don’t have any money, what do you do? There are people like my son who is 30 years old, he’s professional, he’s working, he’s upper middle class —
RUSH: They will garnish your wages. What does the IRS do now when you’re in arrears?
CALLER: Yeah, but if you’re working for yourself, and you don’t pay, what are they going to do, put thousands of people in jail?
RUSH: No, they’re going to fine you. They’re going to make sure that you pay. Even if you can’t pay they’re going to get their money and you’re going to be in debt.
CALLER: Do they say, you owe us and now we’re going to leave you alone?
RUSH: No. They’re going to take money that you don’t have and put you in debt. Put a lean on your house or any number of things they can do, put a lean on your house, they can take away a car, whatever.
CALLER: But seriously, Rush, are you seriously saying that all of the people that have gone to these town hall meetings who are angry enough —
RUSH: No.
CALLER: — who have been shown to be in the millions.
RUSH: No, no.
CALLER: They will all have their cars taken away; they will all have their jobs taken away; they will all be in debt?
RUSH: No. I’m saying that if that effort is made you’re going to have even more angry people and you might end up with a revolution.
CALLER: There you go. That’s my answer. Thank you.
RUSH: All right. See, I just had to string you along to a commercial break here.
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RUSH: My friends, don’t doubt me on this bank business. Remember, the Obama administration succeeded in destroying Swiss banking. United Bank of Scotland gave up all those names of private accounts held by Americans so that Obama can collect their taxes, see if they’re evading taxes. Now, they own all the banks, anyway, for crying out loud. How many banks does Obama own? Now, something else. You know, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s plan is already being carried out. The UAW. United Auto Workers wanted their retirement pension fund bailed out to the tune of $10 billion, and they got it. It’s hidden in the health care reform bill, and they got it in exchange for supporting Obama’s health care plan. ‘The UAW was among a number of unions to meet with Obama at the White House on July 13th –‘ this is in the Detroit News, by the way ‘– to discuss health care reform and other issues. UAW legislative director Alan Reuther said last week the UAW had already taken an active role in pushing for health care reform.’
So Ezekiel Emanuel’s plan, ‘You want to be treated favorably, then you gotta support our plan.’ The UAW, no-brainer here, I mean they’re Obama supporters, but what they got out of it is a $10 billion bailout, essentially, of their pension fund, which is in trouble. The story is three days ago. ‘The United Auto Workers is urging its members to back efforts in Congress to reform health care coverage, citing a provision that includes $10 billion to defray the medical costs of union members and others in retiree group health care associations.’ So they pledge their support for Obamacare, and bammo, they get a provision in the bill. And this is how Obama’s doing it with Big Pharma and a number of others. It’s got even some of the liberals out there a little bit in a tizzy because they hate corporations.
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RUSH: From Colorado.com: Representative Betsy Markey told a gathering of constituents in Fort Collins, Colorado, yesterday that ‘Some people, including Medicare recipients, will have to give up some current benefits to truly reform the nation’s health-care system.’ That’s exactly right, Representative Betsy Markey told a gathering of her constituents in Fort Collins, Colorado, she’s a lib, that some people, including Medicare recipients, are going to have to give up some current benefits to truly reform the nation’s health care system. Now, the last living Kennedy brother, Barack Obama, says no, that’s not true. Obama is saying we’re going to cut waste and fraud in Medicare; nobody is going to suffer any benefit cuts. But here are his Democrats running around, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re going to get some, there are going to be some.’ Of course there have to be! There have to be. Folks, Medicare doesn’t have any money; Social Security doesn’t have any money; everything the Democrats have given us is bankrupt, including the country.
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RUSH: Phillip in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you. Good afternoon. First-time caller. I’m a group health insurance broker, Rush, and what we are experiencing right now, obviously, besides the fight of our absolute lives we are experiencing out of 111 groups that my small agency services, we’re finding that more and more of them are calling or, as we speak to them, they’re understanding and appreciating their type of health coverage much better than they did just say 12 months ago. And I really credit this to the fact of these town hall meetings that some of them have said they have attended. My father, who is also my partner, has attended. I have not been able to ’cause I do spend a good portion of my time on the road. But this has been, I’m sorry to say, this has been good for our business at this point. Now, obviously should a single payer, a universal health care system go into play —
RUSH: Yeah, you can kiss your business good-bye.
CALLER: Yes, sir, you’re right, and, you know, I’m a sole provider in my family with an autistic child, and my health insurance, though I sell the company in which I have my insurance through, doesn’t provide for my son, because of state law, you know —
RUSH: See? State law prevents your company from covering autism.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Is that right?
CALLER: Well, now, it covers it but because my group is not 50 or more, my insurer is not required.
RUSH: I got you.
CALLER: I’m not complaining about that, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: No, no, I understand that. No, your point is that a year ago people thought their health care sucked, that their insurance was a rip-off, and now they see what’s going to be done, ‘Oh, no, no, we like it.’ They’re telling you, ‘No, no, don’t touch it, we like it.’
CALLER: Out of 111 groups, Mr. Limbaugh, we have one out of 111, one is opening for this universal health care. Now, I suspect that —
RUSH: What’s the average age of that group?
CALLER: The average age, knowing the group leader, group leader is probably about my age, which is 38.
RUSH: Okay. So he’s just a brain dead liberal then, has to be.
CALLER: Well, you know, in case he’s listening to you, which I would truthfully doubt, I would have — yes, sir. Yes, sir.
RUSH: Granted. That’s why you know he’s not listening, he’s a brain dead liberal. But I will bet you, I will bet you you’ll be surprised. If he’s not listening he’ll hear about it because you obviously have a lot of friends and you have a lot of associates, you got 111 groups out there that you insure.
CALLER: Yes, sir, we do —
RUSH: And there’s some 38-year-old numskull out there in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, somebody will know who he is.
CALLER: (laughing) Well, yeah, but out of 111 groups he’s the only one that has expressed interest in wanting that. I’ve had conversations with him, and it came to a point I was beating my head up against a well, I can’t discuss this with him. He doesn’t hear me, he doesn’t listen. And so, you know, if I lose one group out of that we’ll continue, but, you know, Ms. Pelosi —
RUSH: Let me tell you something.
CALLER: — has her way and the president, we’re already making strategy changes here to go to a property casualty. I’m opening up a property and casualty side on it as well.
RUSH: And what country are you moving to?
CALLER: (laughing) I am not leaving. I am staying here and will fight the fight.
RUSH: I know. I was just kidding —
CALLER: I love our country, we have a great country, I have a great state, and I’m proud of my city, and I don’t like the naysayers but you know they’re out there.
RUSH: Well, I’m glad you called.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: I appreciate it and you will hear from that 38-year-old guy.
CALLER: Oh, I’m sure I will.
RUSH: If he doesn’t hear it himself he’ll hear about it. Did you know that Rush Limbaugh was talking about you? ‘Why, what did I do?’ You’re a numskull on national health care, that’s why. The whole country knows it. They just don’t know your name.