Daschle: The Power To Kill You Must Be Independent of Your Interference

May 27, 2009 (LPAC)—Tom Daschle's 2008 book, Critical: What We Can Do about the Health Care Crisis, lays out the plan which the Obama Administration is now trying to put across. Though he withholds some crucial details, avoiding direct discussion of gruesome end-of-life matters central to the process, Daschle has spelled out what is now Obama's program.

When Senator Tom Daschle (Dem., South Dakota) was defeated for re-election in 2004, he went to work for a Washington lobbying-law firm, and was simultaneously hired by George Soros's Center for American Progress. Soros, the billionaire British agent, and Daschle, the political wire-puller, were the two most important early advocates of Barack Obama's Presidential candidacy.

Daschle was also the up-front spokesman for the demand from the London-Wall Street axis for a "reform" of U.S. health care to involve drastic, merciless cost-cutting. Daschle's idea of health-care reform became a central component of Obama's campaign.

Tom Daschle's book was published during the Obama campaign in February, 2008. Daschle himself was expected to implement the book's proposals as the health czar for the Obama Administration. But his income tax peccadilloes, and the status of both Daschle and his wife as millionaire lobbyist-power brokers, were used to scuttle his nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services. An informed Federal source has said that without Daschle's presence at the center of the battle, the push for "reform" would have a reduced chance of success under second-stringers like Budget Director Peter Orszag.

In his book, Daschle supplies two recent American precedents for his proposal to take crucial decisions out of the hands of an elected government: the Base Realignment and Closing Commission (BRAC — used by Cheney et. al. to privatize the military for Cheney's own Haliburton Corp.), and the "fast-track" mechanism for ramming through international free trade agreements like NAFTA — without Congressional debate.

Daschle claims that American health care is too expensive, not because of looting by insurance companies, but because Americans are technologically optimistic. They believe that new breakthroughs will benefit them, and, when applied to medical care, will save their lives. He asserts that high-tech scanning devices are vastly overused, and suggests, as does Orszag, that around 30% of current health care services and procedures are unnecessary.

Daschle proposes creating an all-powerful Federal Health Board. It would make command decisions over the American health care system, as the Federal Reserve Board does in the monetary system. Like the Federal Reserve, the Health Board would act independently of the elected Congress and U.S. President.

To emphasize his meaning, Daschle tells of the time when Wall Street's enemy, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, interfered with and partially suppressed the Federal Reserve's vaunted independence. He says that during World War II the Fed was forced to tailor its interest rates to the low rates on war bonds that Roosevelt's Treasury Department was selling. But under President Harry Truman, "an informal agreement in 1951 between the Treasury and the Fed, known as 'the Accord,' freed the Fed from its obligation to support the Treasury's low interest rates. For the first time, the Fed was truly independent, and during the next two decades it matured into a powerful economic force."

Daschle's Federal Health Board is to function precisely on the model of Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (N.I.C.E). That independent agency is in charge of rationing care under the United Kingdom's National Health Service, supervising the de facto euthanasia, the murderous denial of care to the elderly and others. Daschle points out approvingly that the recommendations of N.I.C.E. are used to monitor and train all British physicians.

Daschle proposes to extend some form of federal health insurance to those who want it, while keeping private insurance firms in place — not surprising, in that Daschle's Alston & Bird lobbying firm represents health insurance companies and drug companies (clients include the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, Abbott Laboratories, and HealthSouth).

Under his program, the Health Board would deeply reduce costs by making the "necessary, tough choices" to cut or withdraw care from the masses who would be in the system. Rich people could use private physicians to get the best life-preserving care, as they do in England.

The Board's decisions would be based on statistical "evidence" of what procedures to allow or ban. And a national grid of electronic medical records would allow the life-or-death authority to monitor all doctors and all patients.

Daschle concludes by warning that as the financial stakes are rising, it is now more crucial than ever to take the difficult decisions away from elected politicians, who would cater to the wishes of those who elect them.