Obama's T4 Genocide Program
Has Just Begun
by Nancy Spannaus
April 30—If President Barack Obama is not impeached, or impelled to resign from office in the very near term, and if the economic policies of the U.S. government are not turned 180 degrees around, this President will preside over genocide worse than that of Adolf Hitler. That is the only honest conclusion that can be drawn from the initial moves to implement Obama's health-care bill, and from the creation of the President's second fascist budgeting panel, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
The means by which such mass killing will occur, like the operations of Hitler's Tiergarten 4 (T4) euthanasia board of medical experts from 1939 on, will be extremely "professional," of course. Hitler's board went through a process of evaluations which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of the handicapped, elderly, and sick, who were considered to have lives "unworthy to be lived"—i.e., costing too much to keep alive. Obama's boards are just beginning to set up similar procedures, with the explicit aim of cutting medical expenditures for the old and the poor, who are judged to be "too expensive" for the nation to carry.
As with Hitler, there is no public outcry of protest. After all, as Obama has been fond of saying recently, no panel is condemning grandma to death by denial of treatment. At least not in the public eye—yet.
Here Comes the IPAB
Obama's so-called health-care reform, modelled as it is on both the Nazi T4 and the British NICE model, is riddled with procedures which will permit the cutting of care, from the comparative effectiveness studies to the Accountable Care Organizations. But the chief measure, as Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag is at pains to stress, is the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), previously known as the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (IMAB), and popularly known as "death panels."
This board, to include 15 members appointed by the President (and subject to Senate confirmation), is what the President last Summer called "MedPac on steroids," because it can make decisions on what treatments will be paid for, and by how much, with minimal interference from Congress. At the time, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Orszag's health-care advisor Ezekiel Emanuel called it the equivalent of a Federal Reserve Board for health care.
But while MedPAC only makes the rules for Medicare, IPAB is clearly intended to make the rules for all health insurance. For, the new health-care law, which mandates enrollment by all, demands that all "qualified" plans can only pay doctors who implement the regulations set by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to improve health-care "quality." In other words, it's not just Medicare and Medicaid that will be forced to cut care, but all "qualified" plans
Speaking April 8, at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.—in a lecture sponsored by the British empire's HSBC bank and the Bush family's Carlyle Group—Orszag virtually gloated over the IPAB's power. He insisted that the Board "could prove to be far more important to the future of our fiscal health than, for example, the Congressional Budget Office. It has an enormous amount of potential power."
He delighted in driving home the point that the American people really don't know what had just been put over on them.
"Let me ... point out ... what we just created for Medicare. So this Independent Payment Advisory Board has the power and the responsibility to put forward proposals to hit a pretty aggressive set of [cost-saving medical rationing] targets over the long term. And furthermore, the proposals take effect automatically, unless Congress not only specifically votes them down but the President signs that bill. So the default is now switched in a very important way on the ... Medicare program."
To chuckles from the audience, the moderator asked, "Was that explained to Members of Congress very carefully?"
Orszag replied triumphantly, "Yes, it was, and that's why this was something that was very difficult to actually—this is why I think it was underappreciated—that this is a very substantial change. Again, ... those proposals take effect automatically if Congress ignores them, or if Congress votes them down and the President vetoes that bill. So in other words, inertia now plays to the side of this independent board."
In fact, substantial resistance in Congress to the IPAB, and its predecessor IMAB, was circumvented through the Senate's arcane reconciliation procedure, which denied the House the ability to kill that provision.
But, That's Not All
However, with the establishment of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the Obama Administration has signalled that it intends to go much, much further in slashing medical care. Obama named former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and former White House chief of staff under President Clinton, Erskine Bowles, to head the 18-person group, which he established by executive order in order to come up with a monetarist "solution" to the Federal budget deficit. As with the IPAB's recommendations, the Fiscal Commission's proposals are supposed to be rushed through Congress with an up or down vote at the end of the year, after the election.
Co-chair Simpson stated explicitly on national TV April 15 that the Commission intends to start a "bloodletting" of the American population: "We are using only the actuaries of Social Security. We are using only the actuaries of health care. We're using only CBO figures. We're not going to go by our own figures. We're not going to say we're going to grow our way out of this. Hell, we could have double growth for 30 years and never grow our way out of this. And hopefully we can all say, this is where we are. Then if we can do that—and that's my naive objective—then we can start letting blood."
Simpson also made it clear that the Commission would consider further cuts in Medicare, beyond those already made, including in Obama's Hitlerian death bill: "Somebody said, well, is the new health-care bill off the table? I said, nothing is off the table, absolutely nothing."
Indeed, the first meeting of the Fiscal Commission, held April 27, featured intensive discussion about budget cuts primarily in ... health care!
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, the first witness at the Commission hearings, channeled Hjalmar Schacht (Hitler's Economics Minister). Three times he blamed "the aging of the U.S. population" for the failure to achieve "fiscal sustainability." Social Security and Medicare—he repeated—are the major causes of the unsustainable deficit.
The incompetent Bernanke is lying again. Having presided over the dispensation of hundreds of billions of dollars to crooked financial institutions who caused the recent blowout, Bernanke shrinks from the idea of expending such sums on the health care of ordinary people. Nor does he have the faintest idea that "money," expended as credit for productive investment and work, creates a healthy economy—as opposed to "money" expended for waste and gambling. The United States has grown its way out of much larger deficits before, when its leadership, such as Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, understood the principles of physical economy.
But not Obama. He is determined to carry out the British fascist program he's been handed—and he's not going to stop until the American people make sure that he does.