Obama's Ezekiel Emanuel "Reinterprets" Hippocratic Oath Like the Original Nazi Doctors

May 31, 2008 (LPAC)—Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, called for a reinterpretation of the physician's Hippocratic Oath to take account of "costs" and "effect on others" (like HMOs), in an article in JAMA of June 18, 2008. The brother of Obama's chief of staff, Ezekiel Emanuel is a top designer of Obama's Hitlerian medical-care "reform," as health-care advisor to Peter Orszag's OMB and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness research. He wrote:      

"At least 7 factors drive overuse [of medical care], 4 related to physicians and 3 related to patients. First, there is the matter of physician culture. Medical school education and postgraduate training emphasize thoroughness. When evaluating a patient, students, interns, and residents are trained to identify and praised for and graded on enumerating all possible diagnoses and tests that would confirm or exclude them.  The thought is that the more thorough the evaluation, the more intelligent the student or house officer.  Trainees who ignore the improbable 'zebra' diagnoses are not deemed insightful. In medical training, meticulousness, not effectiveness, is rewarded.      

"This mentality carries over into practice.  Peer recognition goes to the most thorough and aggressive physicians. The prudent physician is not deemed particularly competent, but rather inadequate. This culture is further reinforced by A UNIQUE UNDERSTANDING OF PROFESSIONAL OBLIGATIONS, SPECIFICALLY, THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH'S ADMONITION TO 'USE MY POWER TO HELP THE SICK TO THE BEST OF MY ABILITY AND JUDGMENT' AS AN IMPERATIVE TO DO EVERYTHING FOR THE PATIENT REGARDLESS OF COST OR EFFECT ON OTHERS." [emphasis added].      

Compare the account in Robert Jay Lifton's book "The Nazi Doctors."  The anti-Nazi physician Ella Lingens-Reiner pointed to the chimneys in the distance, and asked Nazi doctor Fritz Klein, "How can you reconcile that with your [Hippocratic] oath as a doctor?"  His answer was, "Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind."