If there is anything that should send fear down your spine about greater government involvement in health care it would be the words of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White house Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and health advisor to President Barak Obama. Dr Emanuel has been appointed as health policy advisor to the Office of Management and Budget and to the Federal Counsel of Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Betsy McCaughey writes in the Wall Street Journal in “Obama’s Health Care Rationer in Chief.” Read the entire article here.

Dr. Emanuel believes the Hippocratic Oath, the moral center of our health care system since … well since Hippocrates, is obsolete. Doctors, in his view, should be as concerned for the overall benefit to society as they should be for the outcomes of a single patient. Doctors in his judgment should be more focused on providing “socially sustainable cost effective care.”

The doctor advocates redefining doctors’ ethical obligations. He even developed “a complete lives system” for allocating scarce resources. Life and death are reduced to mathematical models, i.e. the graph above. The very young and the very old become more expendable to provide better care to the more productive or valuable segment of society (my emphasis).

If we cannot prevent automobile dealers from gaming the system, begging their congressmen for special dispensation (see this video), can you imagine the cronyism and corruption when life and death lay in the hands of favor dispensing government officials and bureaucrats? Would Ted Kennedy have been denied expensive chemotherapy that may have added only a few months to his life at age 77?

I doubt it.

As McCaughey also appropriately noted, such decisions are not often clear; would we be willing to sacrifice three seventy year olds to save one thirty year old? What about an educated valuable active teacher who is 70 verses a thirty year old drug addict or criminal? Would we value Mother Teresa less in her senior years than a multi- millionaire athlete in his prime? Do we really want mindless mathematical models and government bureaucrats allocating health care?

There are many myths about our health care system. It is expensive, but the quality is far better than many policy critics and advocates insist. And no nation develops more life saving drugs and procedures than we do. We have one of the highest cancer survival rates in the world.

But in the name of cost control should we be willing to do to our health care system what Dr. Kevorkian was only willing to do to individuals?

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