First do no harm, unless that is, you are one of Obama’s health care advisors

Have you heard of Ezekiel Emanuel? He is Rahm Emanuel’s brother and a health policy advisor to President Obama. When it comes to health care he is one scary dude. Former Lt. Governor of New York, Betsy McCaughey, looked into Emanuel and what she found is bone chilling!

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Yes, that’s what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96).

Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.

Emanuel advoctes for discriminating against the elderly in favor of the young when it comes to allocation of health care dollars. He defends his belief because we were all young once. He also believes Americans are too enamored with techonology. I guess he’d like us to go back to the Stone Age when it comes to medical innovation. That would save money.

Emanuel isn’t the only advisor to President Obama who holds these beliefs.

Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.

Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they’re “associated with longer waits” and “reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices” (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001). But he calls it “debatable” whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you’ll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)

Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically deivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.

In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist “embedded clinical decision support” — a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.

No wonder physicians are showing up at town hall meetings to oppose ObummerCare. They took the oath to “first do no harm”  seriously.

Update: Video of Michele Bachmann calling these notions horrific.