A DIALOGUE WITH LYNDON LAROUCHE
Barack Obama and the Nazi Doctors
May 3—In his interview in today's New York Times Magazine, President Barack Obama uses his "difficult decision" on whether to pay for an operation for his grandmother, to illustrate his discussions with behavioral economist and Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag on "Comparative Effectiveness Research." Obama would have paid for his grandmother's hip-replacement surgery, even though she was "terminally ill," but he makes it clear that "comparative effectiveness research" dictates that your grandmother will not be covered, unless you have the money to pay for it yourself, as Obama did.
"This interview, the way he did it, gives you a real insight into his mentality," Lyndon LaRouche advised. "He's being conditioned to say the right thing. He's saying these things, none of which he actually believes. If he got a recommendation, 'Why don't you have a member of your family killed?' he'd probably say, 'Yeah, you've gotta do it.' "
Near the end of the interview, the swinish Times reporter David Leonhardt asks Obama, "Do you think this recession is a big enough event to make us as a country willing to make some of the sorts of hard choices that we need to make on health care, on taxes in the long term—which will not cover the cost of government—on energy?" Obama answers, "Well, part of it will depend on leadership. So I've got to make some good arguments out there. And that's what I've been trying to do since I came in, is to say now is the time for us to make some tough, big decisions."
"That's his brainwasher speaking," LaRouche said. "This is an ominous day today, the President's advisors have been brainwashing him again. And of course he looks a little bit the worse for wear, as usual."
Orszag has been issuing Comparative Effectiveness Research from the Congressional Budget Office since 2007. What's not usually recognized, even though Orszag is pretty brazen about it, is that all this is based on placing a monetary value on human life. First, how are two drugs or therapies compared for "effectiveness?" The answer is Quality Adjusted Life Years—QALY. If a therapy will prolong your life for two years, but with great pain, such that its "quality" is only 50%, then it has added one QALY.
How Much Is a Life Worth?
What if one therapy is slightly more effective, but it costs more? How do you make a judgment between them? You have to place a monetary value on a year of life. Orszag writes that some consider it sacrilegious to put a dollar value on life, but the experts agree that a QALY is worth $100,000.
"I've got to interrupt now, Dr. Orszag," LaRouche interjected, "because the monetary value of the continuation of your life has just ended with those remarks. The cash register just said, 'You're finished, Dr. Orszag.' "
This is bad enough, but top behavioral economist and Obama advisor Richard Thaler is even worse. He has been obsessed with reducing the value of human life to a dollar value for over 30 years. On March 14, he told the London Times, "When I was doing my doctoral thesis, which was an exercise about the economic value of saving lives, I began to ask the question, How much would people need to be paid to take risky jobs?"
"But why should he assume there's a monetary motive," LaRouche asked, "beyond the question of just being able to live?"
Thaler has continually returned to this question, "How much is it worth in dollars to save a human life?" again and again and again over the years. "This guy is a moral menace to humanity, and he's a threat to humanity, who should be kept out of government," LaRouche observed.
His dissertation, in 1974, was "The Value of Saving a Life: A Market Estimate." In 1975, he authored a follow-up paper, titled, "The Value of Saving a Life: Evidence from the Labor Market." "It's Aldous Huxley!" LaRouche interjected. In 1977, "Some Research on the Value of Saving Lives." 1982: "Public Policy toward Lifesaving: Should Consumer Preferences Rule?" "What does he want," LaRouche asked, "to adopt cannibalism?" Thaler returned to the subject in 1982, with "Precommitment and the Value of a Life."
"What the hell is the difference between this and Adolf Hitler?" LaRouche asked. It's pulling out the teeth of the dead Jews for the gold fillings!
In a footnote to a "dictator game" paper he wrote with the satanic Daniel Kahneman, Thaler said, "This is related to the well-known phenomenon that people are willing to pay more to save a 'known' life than a statistical life. At the societal level, leaving a girl in a well to die is beyond rude, but doing nothing about an unsafe highway is acceptable behavior."
"Dr. Thaler, would you be willing to be an experimental subject to test that principle?" LaRouche asked.
For the National Bureau of Economic Research, one of those organizations which represent the present-day continuation of the 1930s pro-Hitler opposition to Franklin Roosevelt, Thaler wrote a chapter, "Public Policy toward Lifesaving; Maximize Lives Saved, vs. Consumer Sovereignty," published in 1980. In its Abstract, he wrote, "We begin by demonstrating that the allocation of health expenditures to maximize lives saved may be inconsistent with the willingness-to-pay criterion and consumer sovereignty."
"This is Nazi stuff; there's no other way of describing it," LaRouche said. "These guys are all Nazis. And we should say, from what they write, they are really Nazi doctors.
"We have no mercy on these bastards, and we should say it openly. This is Hitler-type stuff. We're looking for what is the difference between President Obama and Hitler on health policy. We've done a lot of research, and we've not yet been able to discover the difference.
"But you can't blame Obama too much, because obviously he's been brainwashed. Obviously brainwashed. He couldn't be such a bad guy as to actually believe this stuff; he has to have been brainwashed," LaRouche concluded.
