There are many reasons to be concerned about where health-care reform, in particular efforts to control soaring health-care costs, will lead.

Many are concerned, as Mike Perry here is, about whether a UK-style NICE board would be set up that would lead to rationing of care.

But Ezekiel Emanuel has been given a bad rap.

His ethical writings are far more nuanced that has been portrayed by opponents of Democratic health-care reform proposals.

And, if anything, he is for more protections for the elderly, disabled and terminally ill than they are afforded now.

To get a broader perspective of Emanuel’s writing read the recent New York Times profile:

Here are some excerpts:

He has written more than a million words on health care, some of which form the philosophical underpinnings of the Obama administration plan and some of which have enough free-market elements to win grudging respect from some conservative opponents.

Yet his past writings, some largely quoted out of context, have made him a lightning rod for critics of the president’s efforts to remake the health care system.

Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, has labeled Dr. Emanuel a “deadly doctor” who believes health care should be “reserved for the nondisabled” – a false assertion that Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, repeated on the House floor.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has asserted that Dr. Emanuel’s “Orwellian” approach to health care would “refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly, the infirm and the disabled who have less economic potential.”

Given Dr. Emanuel’s well-publicized repudiations of doctor-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia, and his calls for a national health insurance voucher system that would eventually eliminate Medicare, Medicaid and employer-provided insurance – nonstarters at the White House – Dr. Emanuel has said that he is perplexed by depictions of him as a socialist euthanasia proponent.

And…

In a 1997 article in The Atlantic, he argued against doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia, warning it would “become the rule in the context of demographic and budgetary pressures,” and “would make us want to extend the option to others who, in society’s view, are suffering and leading purposeless lives” – concerns reflecting the exact opposite of the views his critics now ascribe to him.

Michael McCarthy, Editor

Dr. E. Emanuel has made it clear in numerous journal articles that older people, meaning those on Medicare, should get less spent on them than on those in their twenties. (Disabled people, particularly children, also get less care. Essentially, he wants people rated by their economic value to society.) Their lives, he claims, are worth less to society, so less should be spent on them.

Search for his name in Google, and you’ll find out who is driving policy under Obama and what he intends to do. You don’t even have to use secondary sources. You can read Dr. Emanuel himself in medical journals such as Lancet.

Noted civil libertarian Nat Hentoff has warned of what Obama wants to do:

“I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law.”

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff081909.php3

You can also look to the UK and something called NICE if you want to see the final goal of single-payer schemes. It isn’t pretty. Lots and lots of money for bureaucracies. Very little money for the disabled, the chronically ill and the elderly. As almost anyone in England can tell you. NICE isn’t nice.

–Mike Perry