PRESS RELEASE
Obama Backs Down: A Victory
in the World-Wide Fight
Against T4 Euthanasia
Jan. 5, 2011 (EIRNS)—The Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LaRouche PAC) has received official confirmation of the report in today's New York Times, that the Obama Administration is withdrawing the death-counselling regulation that it attempted to sneak in by fiat, after a similar provision known as Section 1233, was rejected by Congress last year.
This limited but important victory, comes as the world-wide fight against Hitler's T4 program and its modern revival is intensifying. In recent days, LPAC has reported on the discovery of mass graves of victims of the original T4 program at an Austrian state hospital, the creation of a website in Germany dedicated explicitly to the memory of the victims of the Nazi T4 program, the fight in France against proposed euthanasia legislation, and the growing fight in the United States against Obamacare's "death panels."
In an online story this morning, the New York Times cited unnamed Obama Administration officials, saying that they will revise the Medicare regulation issued in November on end-of-life death counselling. Calling this an "abrupt shift," the Times noted that while officials give "procedural" reasons for changing the regulation, political concerns were also a factor. "The renewed debate over advance care planning threatened to become a distraction to administration officials who were gearing up to defend the health law against attack by the new Republican majority in the House," said the Times.
These "procedural" reasons undoubtedly centered on the fact that the Section 1233 provision was not in the draft regulations when they were published for public comment in July, but it was contained in the final regulations published on November 29 — a highly-irregular procedure. As LaRouche PAC and EIR have reported, two euthanasia enthusiasts, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-VW) sent a letter to Obama's man in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Sir Donald Berwick, in August, and Blumenauer surreptitiously reported to his cronies in early November that death counselling would be in the final regulation to be made public later in the month.
A CMS spokesman told EIR this morning that the Times story that the regulation would amended to remove the end-of-life planning provision, is correct.
Nonetheless, LaRouche PAC warns that the fight against Obama's "useless eaters" policy is far from over, and will not be completed until Obama is removed from office. The Obamacare bill and the regulations implementing it are based on the Hitlerian premise behind Hitler's T4 program, that there are "lives unworthy of life" which must be eliminated for cost reasons. Thus it is full of measures aimed at cutting off medical treatment for the sick and elderly, under the guise of "quality outcomes," "value-based purchasing," "comparative effectiveness research," and of course the biggest "death panel" of all: the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).
Even death-counselling is still deeply embedded in the Medicare program. It remains part of the initial, "welcome-to-Medicare" examination, and it is included in Medicare's Physician Quality Reporting System, under which physicians are "incentivized" according to the percentage of patients who execute "advance care directives," such as living wills and "DNR (Do Not Rescusitate) Orders" authorizing withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment.
