The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Bottom Stories of the Day
“French Farmers Stage Protest on Champs Elysées”–headline, Reuters, Oct. 16
‘Futile’ Vassals
Whatever Aristotle might or might not have said, the flip side of establishing a “right” to medical care is that it also entails empowering the government to define the limits of that right. An Associated Press story offers a chilling hint of the potential implications:
A surprising number of frail, elderly Americans in nursing homes are suffering from futile care at the end of their lives, two new federally funded studies reveal.
One found that putting nursing home residents with failing kidneys on dialysis didn’t improve their quality of life and may even push them into further decline. The other showed many with advanced dementia will die within six months and perhaps should have hospice care instead of aggressive treatment.
Medical experts say the new research emphasizes the need for doctors, caregivers and families to consider making the feeble elderly who are near death comfortable rather than treating them as if a cure were possible–more like the palliative care given to terminally ill cancer patients.
We have no basis on which to quarrel with the findings of the study, and certainly it is true that some treatments are futile and circumstances exist in which palliative care is the least bad of all available options. But when government becomes the decision-maker, you end up with stories like the one we noted Wednesday, in which a British hospital manager tried to persuade a woman to make her grandmother “comfortable” (read dead) when, as it turned out, the old lady’s breathing difficulties were easily treatable.
In that same item Wednesday, we called attention to a speech Robert Reich, President Clinton’s labor secretary, gave, in which he set forth what he described–approvingly–as the “truth” about so-called health-care reform: that it amounts to telling old people, “We’re going to let you die,” forcing young people to pay more for insurance, and suppressing medical innovation.
We weren’t the only one to notice this Reich speech, and Reich has posted a response on his blog to the commentary that has ensued:
Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Rush, and the right-wing blogosphere seem interested in a talk I gave in September, 2007 to students in a political science class here at Berkeley, in which I played the role of a presidential candidate so politically incorrect and tone-deaf as to pummel every sacred cow in sight–including the notion that our society could afford and would continue forever to pay whatever amount of money was required to keep everyone alive forever. The whole point of the mock exercise was to show that presidential candidates can’t state what everyone knows to be the truth because they’ll be taken apart by the Right or the Left. I slew many other sacred cows in that mock exercise, some of which are held dearly by the Left. Nonetheless, two years later the Right has exhumed the lecture and taken my words completely out of context purportedly to show that Obama and the Democrats plan death panels.
If their desperation weren’t so pathetic it would be funny. After all, they have proven the whole point of my lecture. UC Berkeley maintains an archive of webcasts and my speech is available there verbatim, should you wish to listen to it in its entirety.
This is bizarre. We don’t know exactly what Dobbs, Hannity and Rush Limbaugh said, but we were in complete agreement with “the whole point” of Reich’s lecture, at least as it applies to President Obama and other politicians currently pushing “health-care reform”: that they are not telling the truth about their intentions. Reich almost certainly gave a far more accurate description of how ObamaCare would work in practice than Obama has ever given.
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