Obama's Fascist `Health-Care Reform'
Can Be Stopped
by Paul Gallagher
June 13—Following a decision in early June, behind the scenes at the White House, that President Obama had to personally "take the whip" and drive the health-care "reform" through Congress, Obama's public demands to cut medical care across the country are spreading conflict among his Congressional allies. To many Democrats who had thought that they had to support the President and Budget Director Peter Orszag—even in "cutting health care to reform it"—Obama's new public demands are feeding the widely discussed condemnation of the "reform" by Lyndon LaRouche and his movement, as a revival of the Nazi euthanasia program. Orszag and his deputy, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, have tried, in public events, to deny LaRouche's charges, and then to suppress coverage of them; but Obama's public speeches are confirming them. LaRouche's movement could stop the unstoppable health-care "reform" bandwagon.
In a Green Bay, Wisc. town meeting, and in his June 13 Saturday radio address, the President issued unseemly personal "orders" to cut Medicare, cut Medicaid, cut payments to hospitals for indigent care, eliminate "unnecessary" treatments, tests, and hospital care. Speaking arrogantly, Obama told the Green Bay audience, regarding the expenditures on health care in the United States, "That is untenable, that is unacceptable, and I will not allow it as President of the United States."
Obama demanded that 9-10% of Federal Medicare and Medicaid spending—more than $600 billion in 10 years and more than $100 billion the first year—be eliminated. That can't be done without causing denial of care and premature deaths in large numbers.
LaRouche said on June 12 that Obama does not understand what he's doing in pushing this Nazi health policy, massive bailouts of Wall Street, auto/machine-tool industry shutdowns, and green energy frauds. He is acting as a pawn of the British financial oligarchy around the royal family he admires so much, and the Tony Blair whom he praises as his "model" of government. They, with racist killers in his White House circle like Larry Summers and Orszag, are pulling his strings. The President is causing severe problems, including for his own Democratic allies, but he is, in a way, also a victim of his evil violations of the nation's general welfare, LaRouche said.
$600 Billion Medicare Cuts
Obama's arrogant blunder in Green Bay, where he demanded large and immediate cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, showed clearly that he does not really know what he is doing.
Unemployment in the United States has leaped up at an unprecedented rate in the past 18 months; 30 million Americans—nearly a fifth of the workforce—want and need a full-time job and can't get one. Some 5-7 million have lost their health insurance. Far from "exploding" as claimed in the health-care "debate," the medical-care costs of the HMOs and private insurance companies will have fallen to a 15-year low in 2009, projects the Federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Medicaid and Medicare are taking the brunt of this, even as states are eliminating people from Medicaid-type programs—2 million people in California alone. The same agency estimates that total Federal/state Medicare/Medicaid costs will have to leap by 20% this year, to $1.2 trillion.
Yet, in the face of this huge ongoing loss of employment and health coverage by millions Americans, dropping tremendous new costs onto Medicare and Medicaid, Obama is demanding large, immediate cuts in Medicare and Medicaid!
LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) activists were at Obama's Green Bay "town meeting," with a mass-circulation pamphlet entitled, "Stop Obama's Nazi Health Plan!" The audience's reaction to the pamphlet's denunciation and warning was very polarized, but also very serious, especially among younger people.
The following day, June 13, the President used his radio address to call for $313 billion additional Medicare/Medicaid cuts over a decade, bringing his total, he said, to $950 billion. He declared, "We can cut the payments that help hospitals treat patients without health insurance"—supposedly because insurance coverage will become mandatory—and altogether chisel $216 billion from Medicare/Medicaid's payments to hospitals. Orszag added matter-of-factly to the New York Times, that the chiselled hospitals could figure out ways of treating patients "more effectively, through health information technology, by a nurse coordinator instead of an unnecessary specialist." (!)
In addition to this, Obama's advisors well know that Senate committee chairmen are going to put into their health-care "reform" bill a Federal benefits tax on both employers and employees in corporate health plans; and likely, a tax on non-profit hospitals.
Community hospitals are already closing nationwide in the economic collapse and states' budget blowouts, with a deadly swine flu pandemic potential looming in the Fall; hospital directors immediately reacted in shock June 13 to the Obama cuts. "These cuts could be devasting to hospitals that serve inner-city communities," said Greater New York Hospital Association head Kenneth Raske, to the New York Times. American Hospital Association head Richard Umbdenstock said "Payment cuts are not reform."
In an economic collapse they are, as LaRouche says, part of a policy of genocide.
Obama's Democratic Congressional allies are also reacting in shock—largely behind the scenes; but LaRouche's stark charges that this is a Nazi policy, are making an impact and being studied nowhere so closely as in the White House.
On June 13, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told Bloomberg News that Congressional Democrats don't want the deep Medicare/Medicaid cuts Obama is demanding.
Meanwhile public support, especially among Democrats, is shifting toward Rep. John Conyers' (D-Mich.) HR 676 "single payer" legislation, which would invite all uninsured and insured Americans into Medicare, with its 2-3% overhead cost as opposed to the 30% wasted by the HMOs on executive salaries and "care-denial" bureaucracies. Conyers, whose approach is effectively opposite to that of the health-care Nazis, finally got a high-impact hearing on June 10 in Rep. George Miller's (D-Calif.) Health, Education, and Labor Committee.
The Importance of Exposure
Starting with Orszag's and Obama economic advisor Larry Summers' responses to a question from this writer, intervening in a White House health-care session June 2, their intention to deny medical care to save money has been starkly exposed.
Both said there were two phases to this deadly cutting for which the Obama Administration was driving. First, to cut Medicare and Medicaid sharply in the immediate future (Orszag spoke of $300 billion in cuts, but that appears to have tripled in Obama's script, within two weeks), while getting some large chunk of the 50 million uninsured Americans into a national health-insurance exchange. Second—while keeping a "Medicare for all" option off the table, and leaving HMOs dominant over health care—to wage a 10-15 year war against "unnecessary" medical care, tests, and hospitalizations of Americans of all incomes and ages, but especially those considered nearing the end of their lives, with serious and chronic illnesses.
After these shocking admissions, the White House then covered up the apparently high-powered June 2 event. There was essentially no media notice or official record of it, nor of chief economist Christina Romer's Brookings Institution speech the same day, in which she was publicly confronted on the Nazi policy by LaRouche PAC's Stuart Rosenblatt and the LaRouche Youth Movement's Michelle Lerner.
On June 10, EIR's Anton Chaitkin's forceful denunciation of the new White House Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research at its first major public meeting (see below) stunned its members and provoked Orszag deputy Ezekiel Emanuel into an attempted denial and a heated exchange with Chaitkin. White House "Health Czar" Nancy-Ann DeParle had made it known, according to reports, that their policy was not to respond to LaRouche public condemnations, in order to avoid giving them still more force.
The next day, LaRouche PAC activist Alan Ogden shook up a meeting of the Consumer Union and the Commonwealth Fund with White House senior health-care advisor Nera Tanden, by denouncing the Nazi nature of the health-care "reform." "The truth is," Ogden said, "the Obama 'health' policy is a reenactment of Hitler's T4 policy, written in October 1939, by Adolf Hitler personally, setting in motion the 'medical' euthanasia of targetted groups, who were denied health care. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has said that under this policy, one-third of spending on medical care will be eliminated. You people are launching the Nazi-style murder of millions, because you cannot eliminate spending on that scale without mass killing. Orzag has called his Nazi policy, 'Quality-Adjusted Life Years.' And you have sent Obama, the President of the United States, to Green Bay to praise that city for its leadership in advance directives and cuts in medical services to the elderly." He concluded, to the whole meeting, "Here's a question for you all to think about: Senator Kennedy has cancer and he is in his 70s Do you think he should be denied medical care?"
To Ogden's charges, Tanden replied, "See, this is why we're all here today! So that we can counter these kinds of myths which are floating around out there." But the response to LaRouche's charges went beyond apprehension; Ogden was escorted all the way to his car by security guards, and then was visited at his home the following evening by FBI agents.
With LaRouche spikes now in the road to this drive to Nazi cost-cutting "reform," President Obama has been thrust out, by those writing the cues for him, to take the point personally. Obama promoted Green Bay, which is 87% white, relatively high-income, and features aggressive programs to get people to sign end-of-life directives denying "unnecessary care, as a "health-care model for America."
In trying to take the personal whip hand in this drive for a Nazi health-care policy, said LaRouche, Obama will not only step on his Congressional allies' toes, he'll be stepping on their faces. When he makes specific demands and "orders" huge cuts, he draws a strong reaction fueled by LaRouche's campaign, and puts his Congressional allies into conflict and confusion.
