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Orszag's Emanuel Ponders Suicide as Health Care Reform

May 13 2009 (LPAC)—Ezekiel Emanuel, a leading advisor to Budget Director Peter Orszag for drastic cutbacks in medical care, co-authored a 1998 article entitled  "What Are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide?" (New England Journal of Medicine,  Volume 339:167-172, July 16, 1998 Number 3).

  Emanuel and his co-author, Margaret Battin, begin the article, "In the Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill decisions rejecting a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Supreme Court allowed each state to decide whether to legalize the intervention."

  The authors proceed to coldly dissect the financial benefits to be derived from killing patients "with their consent." No opinion is ventured as to whether such killing, or the cost-benefit discussion of it, is right or wrong.

  They include quotes from euthanasia advocates, such as "the cost effectiveness of hastened death is as undeniable as gravity. The earlier a patient dies, the less costly is his or her care."  

With delusional nazi-doctor precision they conclude, "We estimate that legalizing physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia would save approximately $627 million in 1995 dollars."  

Since this was a negligable part of the vast sums Wall Street and London financiers have demanded be slashed, the authors said that physician-assisted suicide would not materially aid the cause, for the time being. The proposal is left open for implementation as a cost-saving measure if the admitted numbers change.  

(In a 1997 New York Times Op-ed, Emanuel had opposed physician assisted suicide and proposed instead, not to prolong life, but to "make it easier for doctors to prescribe narcotics [for] people in pain .... to use the power of medicine to improve the final days of the terminally ill.") 

A decade after writing that 1998 article, Emanuel is now tasked by Orszag with finding the means to the same end by denying "expensive" medical care to the old, poor and sick.  

Ezekiel Emanuel is a Fellow of the right-to-die Hastings Center, for which his 1998 co-author Margaret Battin is a policymaker.  A professor of "Medical Ethics" at the University of Utah, Battin has written many gems for Hastings, including: "The Least Worst Death: Selective Refusal of Treatment" (1983); "Assisted Suicide: Can We Learn from Germany?" (1992); a review of Norman Daniels' book "Am I My Parents' Keeper?" (1990); and "Terminal Sedation: Pulling the Sheet Over Our Eyes" (2008).


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