Nazi Precedent For Obama Health Plan

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When life becomes equated with dollars and cents....can't say we haven't been working towards it for a long time...

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Nazi Precedent For Obama Health PlanBy Nancy Spannaus5-23-9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1949, just three years after participating in the prosecution of 16 German Nazi officials for their role in the mass extermination of those considered "useless eaters" during the Hitler era, Dr. Leo Alexander put his finger on the core "philosophic principle" which led to those atrocities.[1] He called it "rational utility," a Hegelian, Benthamite doctrine which led to the designation of increasingly large portions of the population to be treated as animals, and slated to be killed, because they took up too many resources of the society, or were otherwise undesirable. Hundreds of thousands of German citizens, not to mention millions of foreign nationals, were sent to their death according to this "principle." This belief in utilitarianism-would Obama call it "pragmatism"?-has been encroaching for decades in the United States, and is now writ large in the health care policies of the Obama Administration. Obama has adopted Hitler's health program. We are at the proverbial 11th hour. Anyone who opposes Nazi mass murder, must act now to stop Obama's Nazi health care program from being put in place in the United States. The British Created Hitler The ideological preparation for Nazi mass extermination began many decades before Hitler took power-and it didn't begin in Germany. Not surprisingly, the home base for Nazi medicine was Great Britain, home of the fraud called Malthusianism, and the Eugenics movement, which claimed that mankind's nature was genetically determined. The leading theoretician was Sir Francis Galton, a dropout from British medical school who wrote his manifesto, Hereditary Genius, in 1869. By 1907, Galton had established the Eugenics Education Society, and had spread his filth about weeding out the "genetically inferior" around the world, including the United States, where it was particularly popular with the Harvard, Boston Brahmin set, including the Harriman family. This fascist propaganda spread like wildfire during the 1910s and 1920s in the United States, resulting in forced sterilization laws, and ugly immigration and racial restrictions. Such U.S. laws were, in fact, models for those picked up in Germany in subsequent years. The draconian austerity imposed on that nation by the Versailles Treaty, and British-dominated finance, spurred the support for such bestial thinking among the desperate population. It is no exaggeration to say that the only reason such fascist programs were not implemented by the Federal government in the United States, is because the American people elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who fought to his last breath against the British fascist financiers and ideologues, and brought the United States out of the Depression. In Germany, however, the British were successful in bringing Hitler to power, through the aid of their leading financiers, and U.S. collaborators such as Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush. Not surprisingly, Hitler was prepared to ram through their program-mass murder of the "unfit." Thus, the movement for "treating" the unfit through sterilization and euthanasia accelerated during the 1930s. Mass propaganda idealized "mercy" killing, as well as cost-accounting considerations. According to Dr. Alexander, a widely used high-school mathematics text, "Mathematics in the Service of National Political Education," included problems stating how the cost of taking care of "the crippled, the criminal and the insane," took money away from social programs of housing and family allowances. At the National Socialist Party Congress in 1934, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, leader of the Nazi Doctors group, was also explicit: "The economic burden represented by people suffering from hereditary diseases is a danger for the State and for society. In all, it is necessary to spend 301 million Reichsmarks per year for treatment, without counting the expenditures for 200,000 drunkards and about 400,000 psychopaths." With the accession of Hitler to power, a whole set of "racial purity" laws, with their consequent restrictions and sterilizations, was put into place. These laws resulted in the first waves of mass killings of the "unfit," estimated to have run into the hundreds of thousands. A Shift in Attitudes The Nazis carried out most of these murders in secret: most Germans were not ready to accept the brutal truth. But through the course of propaganda, and the hardships of Nazi rule, the population's attitude toward human life began to subtly shift. What Dr. Alexander explains as a shift in physicians' attitudes, was paralleled in that of the population as a whole. Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, and finally all non-Aryans. But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedge-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude towards the non-rehabilitable sick. It is, therefore, this subtle shift in emphasis of the physicians' attitude that one must thoroughly investigate.... 'Lives Unworthy of Life' The first direct order for euthanasia in Germany did not come until the Fall of 1939, when the pressures of the war mobilization brought the cost-cutting element of the program very much to the fore. Until then, the ruse was that euthanasia was a "blessing" for those suffering, and special permission for such a "mercy death," allegedly by the Fuehrer himself, had to be given for it to be carried out. In the Summer of 1939, Hitler had called in the Secretary of Health, plus State Secretary Dr. Hans Lammers, to tell them that "he considered it to be proper that the 'life unworthy of life' of severely mentally ill persons be eliminated by actions that bring about death." In this way, he continued, "a certain saving in hospitals, doctors, and nursing personnel could be brought about." Hence the Top-Secret Euthanasia Decree of October 1939 (backdated to September 1). Under the title "The Destruction of Lives Unworthy of Life," the order, handed to his doctor Karl Brandt, read: Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be accorded a mercy death. According to Dr. Alexander, from that time forward, all state institutions were required to report on patients who had been ill five years or more and who were unable to work, by filling out questionnaires giving name, race, marital status, nationality, next of kin, whether regularly visited and by whom, who bore financial responsibility, and so forth. The decision regarding which patients should be killed, was made entirely on the basis of this brief information by expert consultants, most of whom were professors of psychiatry in the key universities. Under that order, according to the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes for the U.S. at the Nuremberg Tribunal, at least 275,000 German nationals were killed. The best available breakdown is: 70-80,000 patients in medical and nursing homes; 10-20,000 invalids and disabled people in prisons; 3,000 children between 3 and 13 who needed special care. In addition to all this, were the millions and millions of Jews, Gypsies, and other "undesirables" who were killed, or worked to death, in concentration camps. The Nuremberg Tribunal It was the United States that insisted on bringing the perpetrators of the Nazi Doctors' crimes against humanity into the dock after the conclusion of World War II. Twenty-three persons, 20 of them doctors, were put on trial in late 1946. Count III read: Planning and performing the mass murder [of Germans], stigmatized as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed, and so on, by gas, lethal injection, and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums during the Euthanasia Program and participation in the mass murder of concentration camp inmates. Among the means identified as causing the "murder and ill-treatment of Civilian Populations" was the "inadequate provision of surgical and medical services." The Nuremberg Tribunal heard the defenses of Dr. Karl Brandt, et al., of course, who argued passionately that "I am fully conscious that when I said 'yes' to euthanasia, I did so with the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right. Death can mean deliverance. Death is life-just as much as birth. It was never meant to be murder." The Tribunal nonetheless ruled: We have no doubt that Karl Brandt-as he himself testified-is a sincere believer in the administration of euthanasia to persons hopelessly ill, whose lives are burdensome to themselves and an expense to the state or to their families. The abstract proposition of whether or not euthanasia is justified in certain cases of the class referred to is no concern of this Tribunal.... The Family of Nations is not obligated to give recognition to such legislation when it manifestly gives legality to plain murder and torture of defenseless and powerless human beings.... Seven of the doctors received death sentences, including Dr. Brandt. The Path to Mass Murder In his 1949 article analyzing the road to medical mass murder by the Nazis, Dr. Alexander found plenty of warning signs that American physicians (and he would have said society as well) are infected with he called "Hegelian, cold-blooded, utilitarian philosophy," and what we would rightly call Nazi ideology. He noted that increasingly: Physicians have become dangerously close to being mere technicians of rehabilitation. The essentially Hegelian rational attitude has led them to make certain distinctions in the handling of acute and chronic diseases. The patient with the latter carried an obvious stigma as the one less likely to be fully rehabilitable for social usefulness. In an increasingly utilitarian society, these patients are being looked down upon with increasing definiteness as unwanted ballast.... Hospitals like to limit themslves to the care of patients who can be fully rehabilitated, and the patient whose full rehabilitation is unlikely finds himself, at least in the best and most advanced centers of healing, a second-class patient faced with a reluctance on the part of both the visiting and the house staff to suggest and apply therapeutic procedures that are not likely to bring about immediately striking results in terms of recovery. I wish to emphasize that this point of view did not arise primarily within the medical profession, which has always been outstanding in a highly competitive economic society for giving freely and unstintingly of its time and efforts, butwas imposed by the shortage of funds available, both private and public. From the attitude of easing patients with chronic diseases away form the doors of the best types of treatment facilities available to the actual dispatching of such patients to killing centers is a long but

nevertheless logical step. Resources for the so-called incurable patient have recently become practically unavailable. The trend of development in the facilities available for the chronically ill outlined above will not necessarily be altered by public or state medicine. With provision of public funds in any setting of public activity the question is bound to come up, 'Is it worth while to spend a certain amount of effort to restore a certain type of patient?' This rationalistic point of view has insidiously crept into the motivation of medical effort, supplanting the old Hippocratic point of view. In emergency situations, military or otherwise, such grading of effort may be pardonable. But doctors must beware lest such attitudes creep into the civilian public administration of medicine entirely outside emergency situations, because once such considerations are at all admitted, the more often and the more definitely the question is going to be asked, 'Is it worth while to do this or that for this type of patient?' Evidence of the existence of such an attitude stared at me from a report on the activities of a leading public hospital unit, which stated rather proudly that certain treatments were given only when they appeared promising.... If only those whose treatment is worth while in terms of prognosis are to be treated, what about the other ones? The doubtful patients are the ones whose recovery appears unlikely, but frequently if treated energetically, they surprise the best prognosticators. And what shall be done during that long time lag after the disease has been called incurable and the time of death and autopsy? It is that period during which it is most difficult to find hospitals and other therapeutic organizations for the welfare and alleviation of suffering of the patient. Under all forms of dictatorship the dictating bodies or individuals claim that all that is done is being done for the best of the people as a whole, and that for that reason they look at health merely in terms of utility, efficiency and productivity. It is natural in such a setting that eventually Hegel's principle that 'what is useful is good' wins out completely. The killing center is the reductio ad absurdum of all health planning based only on rational principles and economy, and not on humane compassion and divine law. To be sure, American physicians are still far from the point of thinking of killing centers, but they have arrived at a danger point in thinking, at which likelihood of full rehabilitation is considered a factor that should determine the amount of time, effort and cost to be devoted to a particular type of patient on the part of the social body upon which this decision rests. At this point Americans should remember that the enormity of a euthanasia movement is present in their own midst. To the psychiatrist it is obvious that this represents the eruption of unconscious aggression on the part of certain administrators alluded to above.... The case, therefore, that I should like to make is that American medicine must realize where it stands in its fundamental premises. There can be no doubt that in a subtle way the Hegelian premise of 'what is useful is right' has infected society, including the medical portion. Physicians must return to the older premises, which were the emotional foundation and driving force of an amazingly successful quest to increase powers of healing and which are bound to carry them still farther if they are not held down to earth by the pernicious attitudes of an overdone practical realism. Genocide Again? President Obama's repeated statements that he intends to make the "tough choices" of slashing medical costs, including by means known to rule out medical treatment for those very old (like his grandmother), or incurable, or simply poor, leaves nothing to the imagination. The Administration is gripped by a utilitarian Nazi mentality, and it will move inexorably toward mass murder unless you move to stop it now. nancyspannaus [1] Dr. Alexander's quotes in this article come from his July 14, 1949 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, entitled "Medical Science Under Dictatorship." his article appears in the May 22, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

 

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Obama's Nazi Doctors And Their 'Reforms'This article appears in the May 22, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

 

Obama's Nazi Doctors And Their `Reforms'by Tony Papert5-23-9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 16-Since at latest the mid-1920s, Adolf Hitler had wanted to institute mass programs to kill off Germany's chronically ill and other "useless eaters," but, at the same time, he knew that the German population would not let him get away with it yet. This was still the case even after Hitler became Germany's absolute dictator in February 1933, in the aftermath of the Reichstag Fire. He had to wait six years longer; only the beginning of World War II gave him the opportunity he had been waiting for. Thus, it was not until October 1939, that Hitler finally issued his (top-secret) decree launching the "T4" extermination program against tens of thousands of selected patients in hospitals, nursing homes, and insane asylums. The Fuehrer himself emphasized the connection to the war by backdating his order to Sept. 1, the first day of the war.

Just so, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, special health-care advisor to Obama's Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, and a member of HHS's 15-man Competitive Effectiveness Research Council, which is deciding what drugs and treatments will be prohibited. Ezekiel Emanuel recognized by October 2008, that the current economic breakdown crisis, and even the multi-trillion dollar costs of the Paulson-Summers bank bailout fraud, could be used as the equivalent of war, to force Americans to acquiesce to Nazi-like health-care policies they would not otherwise tolerate.

In October 2008, when George Bush was still President, Ezekiel wrote in the onlineHuffington Post that,

with trillions of dollars evaporating in this crisis, millions of Americans face the prospect of losing their homes and jobs, and witness a dramatic contraction of their retirement savings. In response, the public will desperately want financial security, and health care is a critical element of that.... Under the threat of losing everything, Americans may feel content with the guarantee of a decent plan that covers cost-effective treatments with some restrictions on choice and services to save money.... The huge increase in the federal debt that these bailouts will entail intensifies the pressure to rein in healthcare costs.

Emanuel wrote that his sometime co-author,

the dean of health-care economists, Victor Fuchs of Stanford, has long maintained that we will get health-care reform only when there is a war, a depression or some other major civil unrest. It's beginning to look like we might just get all three.

What sort of health-care reform does Emanuel hope to push through under cover of crisis and panic? Just consult his 1998 paper written with Margaret Pabst Battin, "What are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide?"

Emanuel's co-author Battin is not a physician; her degrees are in philosophy and fiction-writing. But her professional career has been devoted to legitimating mass murder of the aged and sick, with special reference to Hitlerian "health-care reform." Her works include, "Should Medical Care be Rationed by Age?" (1987), "Choosing the Time to Die: The Ethics and Economics of Suicide in Old Age," (1987), "Can We Copy the Dutch? Can Holland's Practice of Voluntary Euthanasia Be a Model for the United States?" (1993), "Is There a Place for Euthanasia in America's Care for the Elderly?" (1996), and "Age-Rationing and the Just Distribution of Health Care; Is There a Duty to Die?" (1987).

The Hastings Center is a foundation-funded so-called "right-to-die" outfit in Garrison, N.Y. (As in Nazi Germany, euphemisms are used to disguise the reality of mass-murder. While the Nazis called their murder policy "mercy-killing Gnadentod," today's, proponents call it "the right to die." The reality is the same.) The Hastings Center propagandizes for suicide, "assisted suicide," and hastening death by withholding medicine, food, and water from the sick. Naturally enough, as we shall see, this Hastings Center is a sort of Mecca for the Nazis preparing Obama's health-care reforms. Margaret Pabst Battin is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, and in 1983, she wrote a paper for Hastings titled, "The Least Worst Death: Selective Refusal of Treatment."

Ezekiel Emanuel is also a Fellow of the Hastings Center, as is his longtime policy partner and deputy, Christine Grady.

How will America's veterans be used as guinea-pigs for the new Nazi health-care policies? Ask Veterans Health Administration Chief Research and Development Officer Joel Kupersmith, also a member of Orszag's 15-member Coordinating Council. Kupersmith has been a Hastings Center Visiting Scholar.

Or consult Margaret Battin's 1992 essay, "Physician-Assisted Suicide-Yes, But in the V.A.?"

The 'Electronic Records' Ruse

If you think the Obama team's fixation on "electronic medical records" is nothing but an attempt to trim clerical costs, cut errors, and the like, look at the career of Obama's "health reform czar," Nancy-Ann DeParle. DeParle was a director of the Cerner Corporation from 2001 until she was appointed Counselor to the President and Director of the White House Office for Health Reform in March 2009. Cerner is a global electronic medical record programming and control enterprise with 8,000 employees. It is involved in a pilot project through the Cook County Bureau of Health Services, which provides health care to the indigent in Chicago. Doctors, pharmacy workers, and others are given bonuses for cost-cutting, denying care and medication, to these poor patients. One leading physician in the program reportedly got $400,000 in bonuses last year.

On the electronic medical records, Cerner says it is using them to "eliminate error, variance and waste in the care process." The reference to "variance," refers to a long-running fraud pushed by Dr. Jack Wennberg of Dartmouth University, which was picked up by Obama's OMB Director Peter Orszag. Wennberg and Orszag use statistics to point to alleged cost differences between geographic areas of the United States, in the treatment of one single ailment. Orszag wants all costs nationwide reduced to the lowest cost anywhere, claiming that this would save $700 billion. (Wennberg's fraud would have it that teaching hospitals and imaging machines increase the cost of health-care, when just the opposite is the case.)

Thus, Cerner's (and DeParle's) reference to use of electronic medical records in eliminating "variance and waste," confirms what the knowledgeable have long known. These records will be used to police and punish physicians who insist on giving treatment to those Orszag doesn't want treated, or insist on giving them better treatment than Orszag thinks they should get.

DeParle is also a trustee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, reportedly the biggest funder of "right-to-die" causes in the United States, exceeding even euthanasia and drug-legalization funder George Soros. Robert Wood Johnson is a major funder of the Hastings Center.

Nor is rationing medical care by age, so as to deny it to the old, simply an academic idea of Margaret Battin. It is implicit in the reports of OMB Director Peter Orszag from 2007-08, when he was Director of the Congressional Budget Office. Orszag wrote repeatedly that medicines and treatments should be rationed according to their effect in increasing the number of "Quality Adjusted Life Years" (QALY) of the patient. (Placing a dollar-value on human life, Orszag wrote that experts agreed that a QALY was worth $50,000 or $100,000.)

Translated into English, this simply means that medicines should be withheld from the old, as is now being done in Britain, where Hitlerian fascism was first invented.

Orszag accepted the Hastings Center's invitation to speak before them on May 20, 2008, eventually sending his deputy, Philip Ellis, to speak in his stead. Ellis bemoaned the fact that one-third of health-care expenses go to treat people from conditions from which they die anyway, saying, "this translates into a stark economic crisis."

Orszag's insistence that human life must be measured in dollars is shared by top Obama advisor and fellow-behavioral economist Richard Thaler, who has written a half-dozen papers on such subjects as "The Value of Saving a Life: A Market Estimate" (1974), and "Public Policy toward Lifesaving: Should Consumer Preferences Rule?" (1982).

Historian Henry Friedlander has shown that the Hitler "T4" program to exterminate the handicapped, the sick, and the aged as "useless eaters," was the wedge-end and the model for the subsequent extermination programs against the Communists, the Gypsies, and the Jews. Indeed, the gas-chambers, the killing-squads, and all the procedures set up under "T4" were exactly those used to launch those later, larger extermination-programs.

One is reminded of the famous poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984):

In Germany, they came first for the Communists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

And then, they came for me,

and by that time there was no one left to speak up.

The substance of other statements of Niemoeller would permit one to add a verse citing "the incurably ill," before the one on the Communists.

-Anton Chaitkin contributed research for this article.

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