Lyndon LaRouche Repudiates Obama's
Fascist Sophistries on Health Care
by Nancy Spannaus
July 17—Since his return from Europe approximately two weeks ago, President Barack Obama has conducted a non-stop campaign, in his unique Nero-like fashion, to demand that the U.S. Congress ram through his Hitler health program immediately—or else. There is no alternative to my plan, for those who are suffering from lack of medical care, or high-cost medical care, the President rants. "We're going to get this done!" he decrees.
As on so many other issues, the nutty President is lying—on behalf of his British masters.
Lyndon LaRouche has not only repudiated the President's fascist sophistries, but he has put forward, in precise detail, the measures which can and must be taken in order to solve what is real about the health care crisis. The essential elements of the LaRouche Plan are three:
- Abolish the Health Maintenace Organization (HMO) system;
- Revive the principles and implementation of the 1946 Hill-Burton Act;
- Implement the Single-Payer plan (Medicare for all), as the key means of financing adequate health care for all.
By taking these measures, in the context of the necessary bankruptcy reorganization and return to Hamiltonian national banking, which is needed to restore the physical economy as a whole, the real problems of the U.S. health care system are actually addressed.
First, abolishing HMOs eliminates from the medical system, the Nazi premise that health care can be made a profitable enterprise by measuring the value of human lives in dollars and cents. This corrosion of our system, which began under President Richard Nixon in 1973, and now encompasses, in its various forms of managed care—the majority of those with health care coverage in the United States—has led to millions of people being deprived of medical care, if not sent to their deaths, by an army of accountants, and the bankers they work for, who fundamentally believe, as Hitler did, that there are lives "not worthy to be lived."
As LaRouche put forward in draft legislation back in 2000, HMOs should be not only shunned, but banned for leading to crimes against humanity for which the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg. (See box.)
Second, the revival of Hill-Burton, the 1946 "Hospital Survey and Construction Act," will put on the agenda government funding of the hospitals and public-health centers which are urgently required in order to provide adequate health care to all. It is a cruel hoax, if not a crime, to talk about expanding health care in the context of the shrinking number of hospital beds and medical facilities, which has been proceeding at an accelerating pace over the past 35 years. Instead, the Federal government should be extending the credit necessary to build new, modern facilities that will make medical care available to the entire population.
The third element of LaRouche's approach, the adoption of the Single-Payer plan being proposed by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and his allies, is a crucial means for wiping out the criminal and wasteful layers of administrative bureaucracy, which have been built up to both increase profit and deny care. The Medicare model, which Conyers uses, for example, has administrative costs of 3%, rather than anywhere from 15 to 35% under HMOs, and other private insurance plans. A Medicare-style plan thus frees up hundreds of billions of dollars, which are now being spent for insurance companies, not health care. Hospitals, physicians, and others in the medical-care delivery system can, under the new Medicare-for-all system, be provided full payment for their services, instead of consistently cheated and underpaid, as in recent years. In fact, private insurance should not be permitted to be involved in the Medicare system—although it could be available as an option for separate, supplemental coverage, for those who want it.
Among the immediate savings of the LaRouche Plan would be reducing the cost of pharmaceuticals, by a crackdown on the role of speculation in pushing up their prices.
There is no rational argument that can be made against LaRouche's proposals. They provide health care and funding sources—whereas the Obama plan provides neither. What Obama's does, instead, is to provide a British-Nazi-style apparatus to kill people, as part of a British imperial drive to utterly destroy the only threat to their world domination, the republic of the United States. And that must be stopped.
The Hitler Health Model
What has to get through the heads of the American people, on the health-care and other issues, is that the President is trying to push through a fascist program, which is a mortal threat to them and to the world as a whole. This fact could not be clearer than it is in the Obama health plan.
The model for the Obama Plan is, quite literally, Hitler's T4 program, which took its name from its Berlin office, Tiergarten 4. This program began in October 1939, immediately after Adolf Hitler issued his infamous secret order, in his own handwriting, under the title "The Destruction of Lives Unworthy of Life." That order read:
"Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable, according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be accorded a mercy death."
The T4 program operated through the circulation of information on patients, obtained through questionnaires, and their evaluation by teams of psychiatric "experts," who indicated their opinion about whether the patient (whom they had never seen, much less examined, and whose medical history they were unfamiliar with) were to live or die. These panels of experts then submitted their evaluations to a chief expert, who passed the final judgment, which was unappealable. Those to be denied treatment (i.e., were to die) were then sent to killing centers, where their extermination was overseen by medical personnel, and fraudulent death certificates were sent out to their families.
Hundreds of thousands of the young, mentally and chronically ill, and the elderly were killed—before the mass extermination of the Jews even began.
It is obvious that the Obama program operates from the same premises as that of Hitler's. First, according to Obama and his henchmen like Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag and his health advisor Ezekiel Emanuel, there are some (many) lives that we "can't afford," i.e., are unworthy to be lived. Second, we can rely on "experts" to determine who these people are, and send them to their deaths. But we can't afford to let people know precisely what we're doing, or have institutions such as the Congress interfere to save the lives we've determined to end. We have to lie about the cause of their death.
Therefore, from the start, the formulators of Obama's "health" program have insisted on the establishment of a professional "board of experts," which would make the decisions on medical payments—i.e., who would live and who would die. While stressing, without end, that the core of the "health reform" was to cut costs, particularly from programs from the poor and elderly, such as Medicare and Medicaid, the Administration realized that this could only be guaranteed to happen, with the same measures that Hitler used, measures that, not coincidentally, are also at the core of the British health-rationing board, called NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence).
But the challenge for the Administration remained: How to get the Congress, which was being educated and shocked by the revelations put out by LaRouche and his associates about how Obama's plan was "Hitler health," to pass such a Hitler-like measure.
Obama Demands T4 program
In fact, when Obama returned from his recent foreign trip, he found that Congress was not going to comply. Bills had been drafted in the Senate and the House which paid lip service to his cost-cutting mantra, including the alleged substitution of "quality for quantity" and other such sophistries. But neither the Kennedy-Dodd bill, which was going through the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, nor the House bill, which was drafted in collaboration among the Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Labor committees, included the required "stick" to dictate cuts: the panel of experts free of Congressional control.
If the President were going to get his Hitler health program through, he was going to have to do more than wield his fascist thuggery to pass the bill. He would have to change the bill itself.
Thus, just after midnight, on July 16, the White House forced the three House committees managing the health-care legislation to rewrite the bills, to incorporate the Emanuel-Orszag T4 board into the legislation. Introduced as a "manager's amendment," the relevant section, according to Politico, which saw a draft, calls for the creation of an Independent Medicare Advisory Council, which would be under Obama's direct control. A five-member council would be appointed by the President, with the consent of the Senate, for terms of five years. The Council would be authorized to make broad recommendations for reforms in Medicare, but its chief role would be to help set payment rates. It would send recommendations to the President twice a year on reimbursement rates. Within 30 days, the President would be required to send a message to Congress reflecting his approval or disapproval, at which point Congress would have 30 days to overule them—or they would go into effect.
This, in fact, follows the model of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission, as demanded by Sen. John D. Rockefeller's (D-W.V.) S. 1111. But, in fact, Obama's Council is less independent, as its rulings first go to the President, who also appoints the board. The President is apparently determined, like Hitler (or Nero), to take "personal responsibility" for decisions which will lead to mass death.
Since his in-the-dead-of-night action on July 16, the President has been, if anything, even more active in pursuit of this goal. He and his henchmen, like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, were successful in getting the Ways and Means Committee to pass its revamped bill out onto the House floor. This was despite the fact that Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) had the nerve to break decorum and denounce the President as a "fascist dictator," for his actions—the first public figure, other than LaRouche, to have the guts to do so.
The bill still has to go through the Education and Labor and Energy and Commerce committees, where it is facing continuing resistance, including among some Democrats. In addition, there is the problem of the Senate, where Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who has been working intimately with Orszag, top economic advisor Larry Summers, and the President, on the Nazi health-cut plan, has been unable to get a bill formulated, in the face of opposition. Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is responsible for formulating the financial aspects of the health "reform," which the Kennedy-Dodd bill, which has already passed through committee, does not touch.
Get Rid of the Nazism
Meanwhile, Obama continues to issue diktats on how his health plan must be passed. He did it at the NAACP Convention July 16, and again, on July 17, in a press conference with New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D), who is campaigning for re-election.
But our modern-day Nero wouldn't leave it at that. He then called a press conference to specifically elaborate his drive to ram through the Hitler program. After a sophistical spiel about how the bill will allegedly help people, and the need to make it "deficit neutral," Obama let out what's really on his mind: establishing a board with the power to cut Medicare and Medicaid costs, which he considers the major long-range "problem." We quote:
"The bill I sign will also include my commitment and the commitment of Congress to slow the growth of health-care costs over the long run.
"This is a separate issue. And I just want to be clear. There's an issue of how do we pay for health-care reform immediately, in a way that's deficit neutral, but how do we also bend the cost curve so that we're not seeing huge health-care [cost] inflation over the long-term that would not only make any health-care reform package more expensive, 15, 20 years out, but would also make sure that people who have nothing to do with the government programs like Medicare and Medicaid—how do we make sure that their costs are under control as well?
"I realize there's going to be a lot of debate and disagreement on how best to achieve these long-term savings. Our proposal would change incentives so that providers will give patients the best care, not just the most expensive care, which will mean big savings over time.
"This is what we mean when we say that we need delivery system reform. I've proposed to Congress, and I am actually confident that they may adopt these proposals, that independent—an independent group of doctors and medical experts will oversee long-term cost-savings measures.
"Every year, there's a new report that details how much waste and inefficiency there is in Medicare, how best practices are not always used, and how many billions of dollars could be saved.
"Unfortunately, this report ends up sitting on a shelf. And what we want to do is force the Congress to make sure that they are acting on these recommendations to bend the cost curve each and every year, so that we're constantly adjusting and making changes that will reduce costs for families and for taxpayers. We need an independent group that is empowered to make these changes, and that's something that we've proposed.
"I'm confident that if we work with the foremost experts in the field, we can find a way to eliminate waste, slow the growth of health-care costs, and provide families more security in the long term" (emphases added).
Call His Bluff
Obama's Nazi policies are now more obvious than ever. The question is, will the American people act to stop them?
In effect, Obama is daring them to do so. As he said in his July 17 appearance with Corzine: "Now is when we've got to get over the finish line. This is when you start hearing the same criticism, the same scare tactics that have held us back in the past. And if you do hear these critics, I want you to ask them a question I always ask: What's your plan? What's your alternative?"
Tell them you know precisely what the alternative is. It is the obliteration of every aspect of the Obama reform, in favor of a health-care system based upon American System principles of providing for the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of every citizen. The system, as outlined by Lyndon LaRouche, is what must be on the table. And if Obama doesn't like it, he's the one who should get out of the way.
