Administration Moves
To Ram Through Fascist Health Bill
by Nancy Spannaus
Oct. 2—When his Master speaks, the Obama Administration listens. Thus, with the White House managing the process every step of the way, this week the Senate Finance Committee was induced to ignore the mass strike ferment throughout the country, and pass the Nazi monstrosity called a health reform bill. The President, who has been under intensive pressure from the City of London to deliver on his Hitler-like austerity plan, immediately issued a statement of praise for the Committee, and began to set up a new round of pressure-tactic events to get it passed by Thanksgiving, or at latest New Year's.
The fascist nature of the so-called Baucus bill (really the White House bill) is undeniable. Not only does it include the establishment of the infamous Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC) which Office of Management and Budget (OMB) head Peter Orszag had demanded—the council of "experts," modeled on Hitler's T4 euthanasia council, to make rulings on who should get treatment, and who should die—but it is riddled with provisions for cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from health-care providers (i.e., from services), and delivering hundreds of billions into the coffers of the Wall Street and City of London sharks who control the major insurance companies in the United States.
Even in White House meetings, EIR has been told, it is admitted that the Obama health plan will cost more money, to provide less health care for the population. The reason, as Lyndon LaRouche noted yesterday, is simple: The Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) will stay in control. It is already established that the largest inflationary cost factor in U.S. health care is the administrative cost of the HMOs—which spare no effort in devising ways to deny care, and spend anywhere from 30-50% on overhead—and to which the Obama Administration is entrusting new cost-cutting measures, along with millions of new mandated policies.
The U.S. population, in its current mass-strike mode, is not about to take this assault lying down. The Senate leadership clearly knows that, because Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that he is cancelling the Senate's October recess. Some Senate aides admitted that Reid was afraid of "a second round of angry demonstrations during town hall-style meetings over the recess." But that the Senate has decided to hide from its constituents, will not stop the uproar from growing.
The only thing which will assuage the legitimate fear and anger of the citizenry, is for the Administration to be forced to shift its entire approach: First, to cancel the bailout of the banks and carry out a bankruptcy reorganization; second, to launch a massive campaign to create blue-collar jobs, especially building vital infrastructure; and third, to cancel the HMO system, and go back to the Hill-Burton approach of building the necessary medical facilities, and providing care, not insurance, first.
Orders To Kill
Anyone who doubts that London's orders to Obama are to kill en masse, those considered to have lives unworthy to be lived, is simply too much of a coward to face facts. LaRouche PAC has presented an airtight case, which has been picked up on and elaborated by many others. In addition, the Obama Administration itself continues to provide fresh evidence of its genocidal intent every day.
Take the case of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the special health-care advisor to OMB fascist Orszag, and a member of the insidious Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, who has written extensively on how to ration health care, Nazi-style. Emanuel, brother of White House chief of staff Rahm, should have been long since dispatched from government positions, along with Orszag and economic advisor Larry Summers. He is trying to clean up his image, but the truth keeps coming out.
For example, EIR this week obtained a chapter of a 2005 book entitled Ethical Dimensions of Health Policy, in which Emanuel discusses how government should deal with potential public resistance to mass cuts in health care. The key shift required, he says, is a focus on treating patients as members of populations, rather than an individuals. This shift would explicitly mean the abandonment of the Hippocratic oath—which, he complains, gives doctors the idea that "their primary duty is to the patient for whom they are caring." (Perhaps it should be to the Volk?) Among the changes he suggests, are that health insurance would only cover interventions for "illnesses that have a 15% or higher chance of being completely cured or extending life for 5 years." If the statistical probability of curing you is too low, you simply will be denied care.
This cost-effectiveness criterion for determining who should live, and who should die, is precisely what the Nazis did—and what the "effectiveness" criterion of the Obama health plan calls for as well.
But this very philosophy of dealing with the ill is not just a matter for the future, as demonstrated by the changes brought in to the Veterans Administration when Obama came into office.
Vets Asked If Their Lives Are Worth Living
A pamphlet encouraging sick or depressed veterans to consider themselves worthless and end their lives is still on the Veterans Administration (VA) website, despite a public furor over it. The 52-page propaganda piece, entitled "Your Life, Your Choices," was written in 1997 by VA "ethicist" Robert Pearlman, who was paid and trained in euthanasia advocacy by the George Soros "Project on Death in America." In 2007, a review by government officials led to the pamphlet being suppressed.
It was revived under the Obama Administration, and a July 2009 VA directive instructed primary care physicians to refer patients to "Your Life, Your Choices."
The new push for the pamphlet was reported in an Aug. 19 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Jim Towey, entitled "The Death Book for Veterans." The pamphlet came under public fire as an attempt to induce frail veterans to feel guilty that they were staying alive. Now the Obama Administration has posted a notice with the pamphlet, saying it is being made available "for information only" and that "some people say it is not balanced."
The entire pamphlet echoes the propaganda issued by Nazi German doctors who were subsequently convicted at the Nuremberg tribunals, for murdering people on the philosophy that some lives were unworthy of preserving. Particularly shocking is the questionnaire included on page 21, which asks the vet a series of questions on "what makes your life worth living," which includes a list of conditions to be graded, including the choice "not worth living." (emphasis in original) Rather than alerting the vet to seek help against such suicidal thoughts, the questionnaire asks: "If you checked 'not worth living,' does this mean that you would rather die than be kept alive?"
The LaRouche Alternative
From the beginning, Lyndon LaRouche has identified precisely what must be done to address the actual health-care crisis. First, kill Obama's plan, and then:
- Abolish the Health Maintenance Organization 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 are needed to restore the physical economy as a whole, the real problems of the U.S. health-care system are actually addressed. And the predators are put out of business.
