Paul Krugman Seems to Favor the Supposedly “Nonexistent” Death Panels UPDATED!

If you remember, we were discussing rationing throughout the ObamaCare debates.  Of course, we were called “fear mongers,” among other things.  Now that the law has been passed, and the other predictions we made are coming to pass, the entire rationing issue continues to brew under the surface.  However, every now and again, it rears its ugly head.  It started in the very early days of the Obama Administration…

We must always remember that what the messiah and his minions cannot accomplish outright, they will accomplish incrementally.  For more, look at this.

In testimony yesterday before the Senate Committee on Finance, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf presented options for controlling health care costs.  He warned that “reducing or slowing spending over the long term would probably require decreasing the pace of adopting new treatments and procedures and limiting the breadth of their application.”  That’s rationing by another name, not a comfortable concept to Americans.

As all of this was going on, we took a look at a special health care advisor at the White House, Ezekiel Emanuel.

In discussing the “death panels,” we have to take yet another look at Ezekiel Emanuel.  Besides being the brother of Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm, Dr. Emanuel is a prominent if medical ethicist that has, shall we say, some rather interesting ideas about medical treatment.  Here are some quotes from Dr. Emanuel:

This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. 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. Conversely, 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, the government will have the authority to deny treatment for those individuals that they deem unfit for living.  What criteria would be use?  Do you get to appeal?  Do you have any choice?  Under a government controlled plan, I would venture to guess no.

Source: First Things

“Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects…. Adolescents have received substantial substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments…. 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.”

Note that the decision has been made based on the amount on money the government has spent “developing” a human.  He is essentially reducing the value of human life to the amount of resources that society has expended upon the said human.  Now, the left can decry the 2% profit margin of the insurance companies; yet engage in far more sinister statistical calculations for who gets care and who gets to die?

“Ultimately, the complete lives system does not create ‘classes of Untermenschen whose lives and well being are deemed not worth spending money on,’ but rather empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible.”

This is phenomenal wordsmithing.  He denies in the first part of the sentence, and endorses in the second.  Sir, just saying that the grass isn’t green does not make it orange!

“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, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated”

Then, after many counter-claims and insults from the left, ObamaCare eventually passed, and we heard this from David Orszag.

So, we have the IPAB, which stands for Independent Payment Advisory Board.  From what Orszag is saying; that it will cut costs by not being “based on quantity,” I think we can safely assume that this is a rationing body.

Now, if this is a rationing body, and they are going to cut costs by not treating things, might this also be the “death panel?”  Both Sunstein and Emanuel (EZKILL, not Rahm), have both tagged end of life care as something to be limited.  IPAB would seem to be a great way to accomplish just that.  No, you won’t have to stand before them and justify your life, but they might just arbitrarily decide to not pay for something that keeps you alive.  Considering that this already happens in the UK with cancer drugs, and 20,000 Brits with cancer are killed by the NHS each year, are we seeing a pattern here?

But that wasn’t the end of it.  Not content with simply having Emanuel and his ideas, he did a recess appointment for Donald Berwick, who now is in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s but one quote from him.

The Redstate article also shows that Berwick publicly embraces rationing.

The interviewer pointed out: “Critics of CER have said that it will lead to the rationing of health care.” To which Berwick replied: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

So, can we safely assume that there is a pattern here?  While the “progressives” in power say that rationing is not part of their plans, they certainly seem to like appointing people that do.

And now, for the latest, Paul Krugman appeared on This Week with the Latest Host, this past Sunday, and had the following exchange.

Pay particular attention at 4:35, where Krugman mentions “death panel people,” and that the host then mentions IPAB-all in reference to controlling costs.

Seriously folks, how many times does this have to come up before our “progressive” friends drop all pretenses?  Just admit it! It’s about rationing.  It always has.  It’s not like they’re speaking in some unbreakable code.

H/T: NewsMax

Update: NewsBusters has Krugman’s feeble efforts to back away from his statements…

(a) health care costs will have to be controlled, which will surely require having Medicare and Medicaid decide what they’re willing to pay for — not really death panels, of course, but consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much we’re willing to spend for extreme care

Er…so…they’ll have death panels, but just call it something else?  Noel Sheppard is right.  Krugman dug himself a bigger hole with his response.

Come to think of it, if I were wrong as often as Krugman, my employer would have discarded me long ago…and rightfully so.   Apparently, disingenuousness and incompetence are big resume items over at the Times.