So.
The infamous Section 1233 “death panel” has been pulled from the
Senate version of the House ObamaCare Bill. Or so goes the tale
as this is written.
Does this mean no more government rationing coming our way?
Naaaaah. This entire concept of ObamaCare is based on the
principle of government rationing. The President has even
jokingly talked about unplugging Grandma.
But “unplugging Grandma” is not much of a joke if you were
Barbara Wagner. Who?
Barbara Wagner was a waitress. She drove a school bus. She worked
as a home health care aide. Along the way as she worked her
fingers to the bone she was married, had kids, was divorced,
became a grandmother, then a great-grandmother.
Barbara also smoked cigarettes, and eventually this developed
into lung cancer.
So far, so good and so bad. Good — the jobs, the kids, the
family. The bad — the illness. Everyone doesn’t smoke, everyone
will die. Most will have a health issue somewhere.
Yet in death Barbara Wagner — who died in the last year at 64 —
may well be the cross to the Dracula that is ObamaCare. (A hat
tip here to Mark Levin, who brought attention to Barbara’s plight
on pages 109-110 of his bestselling book Liberty and
Tyranny.)
Barbara, you see, lived in Oregon. The state where there are two
interesting government programs.
The first is something called the “Oregon Health Plan.” Here is
the single sentence the OHP uses to describe its mission:
To plan and implement medical programs assuring access to basic
care for eligible clients.
In another words, OHP is a state-run plan that is not unlike what
the ObamaCare advocates refer to as the “public option” in the
sense that the State — as in the state of Oregon in this case —
is “assuring access” to care for those in economic distress.
There is also another law in Oregon (the only law of its kind in
the 50 states) called the “Death with Dignity Law.” Again, let’s
rely on Oregon to define this:
On October 27, 1997 Oregon enacted the Death with Dignity Act
which allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives
through the voluntary self-administration of lethal
medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that
purpose.
Meaning, if you wish to take your own life, the state will lend a
hand. No unseemly smothering with a pillow or anything like that.
Just a nice, simple drugged out exit with barbiturates. Not
unlike the way the King of Pop was popped. Snoozing one minute,
on into the eternal comfort the next. Free at last, free at last,
thank the State Almighty — free at last!
You can already see what’s coming, can’t you?
As things worsened for Barbara, she found herself acclimating to
wearing an oxygen tube wrapped around her face and running into
her nose. The State paid — and paid as well for a wheelchair,
for chemotherapy, radiation and a special bed. For a while things
were better. Remission seemed at hand. Then, one day, it didn’t.
What John Wayne called the Big C had returned with a vengeance.
Yet there was a glimmer — a faint glimmer but a glimmer
nonetheless — of hope for Barbara. That glimmer was a drug
called Tarceva, and her doctor recommended it to Barbara.
So the request went in to the State of Oregon — let’s call it
“The State” for short — and, as the sun rising in the East can
be predicted with a fair degree of certainty — what do you think
The State said to Barbara the waitress, the school bus driver,
the health care aide, the mother, grandmother and
great-grandmother?
Let’s let Barbara herself tell the story in her own words in a
report at the time from ABC News:
“It was horrible. I got a letter in the mail that basically
said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that
from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But
we won’t give you the medication to live.”
A letter in the mail. An unsigned letter in the mail. A letter
from The State “that basically said if you want to take the
pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will
stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the
medication to live.”
Now. Does any of this ring a bell?
Listen/read carefully here:
* The words of Barbara Wagner:
“I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you
want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor
and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you
the medication to live.”
* The words of President Barack Obama: “There’s
going to be some disagreement, but if there’s broad agreement
that, in this situation the blue pill works better than the red
pill, and it turns out the blue pills are half as expensive as
the red pill, then we want to make sure that doctors and patients
have that information available to them.”
In the case of Barbara Wagner, the Obama approach was followed,
literally and figuratively to the letter. The State decided the
“blue pill” that would take Barbara’s life was, in the
President’s own words, “half as expensive as the red pill.” The
problem? The proverbial “red pill” here — the drug Tarceva,
would be used to extend Barbara’s life. The “blue pill” — State
sanctioned barbiturates — was designed to quite deliberately
kill her.
So in other words, while Obama ridicules the notion that his
critics are talking about “pulling the plug on Grandma” — in the
world of hard cold fact that was quite literally what that
unsigned letter from the State of Oregon to Grandma Barbara
Wagner was all about. Offering to pick up the tab for pulling the
plug on this Oregon Grandma because, in the words of Dr. Walter
Shaffer, medical director of the state Division of Medical
Assistance Programs, “We can’t cover everything for everyone. We
try to come up with polices that provide the most good for the
most people.”
Translation in ObamaCare language? You’re out, Grandma Barbara.
No red pill that might stand a chance of making you better. But
don’t worry. We’ll pay for the blue pill that will take you out.
We will be right there at your side to see you off. Oh, and
thanks for cleaning all those tables, driving the bus, changing
all those old people diapers. Did we mention the grandkids said
to say goodbye?
Now.
The pharmaceutical company that manufactures Tarceva heard about
her plight and stepped up the plate, giving her the drug. Sadly,
it was not enough to prevent her death. But Barbara Wagner’s
legacy is considerable.
She has become the real-life and deeply disturbing face of
ObamaCare. The woman who wanted so desperately to live but was
told in cold, chillingly banal bureaucratese by The State: tough
cookies.
Again, let’s listen to what is being said here.
“We need evidence to say it is a good use of taxpayer’s dollars.”
— Dr. Jeanene Smith, administrator for the
Office of Oregon’s Health Policy and Research staff, on why
Oregon rejected Wagner’s plea for the drug.
Medical care should not be given to those “who are irreversibly
prevented from being or becoming participating citizens…. An
obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients
with dementia.” — Obama health care advisor Dr. Ezekiel
Emanuel writing in the Hastings Center Report,
Nov.-Dec. 1996.
In other words, Oregon, using the language of government
rationing, was attempting to practice with Barbara Wagner what is
called “passive euthanasia.”
For those who are unfamiliar with or startled by the term, here
is a succinct definition as provided by a 1997 New York
Times story focusing on the time in a life when “doctors,
family members or they [patients] themselves” decide it is no
longer possible or reasonable to sustain life.
”It’s called passive euthanasia,” said Dr. Norman Fost,
director of the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of
Wisconsin. ”You can ask who’s involved and is it really
consensual, but there is no question that these are planned
deaths. We know who is dying. Patients aren’t just found dead
in their beds.”
Catch that phrase? “Planned Deaths.”
A deliberate decision is made to withhold treatment — because of
costs — and let someone die.
Doubtless Dr. Fost is correct that this kind of thing happens
frequently. The difference between what Dr. Fost was discussing
in 1997 and what is being discussed with ObamaCare is the
insertion of The State into this decision — which is exactly
what the state of Oregon tried to do with Barbara Wagner.
With utter predictability, the New York Times of August
14, 2009, has tried to rescue ObamaCare by publishing a
front-page attack
headlined this way: “False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some
Familiar Roots.”
Quite aside from the usual attacks that have nothing to do with
health care — citing people “falsely calling him [Obama] a
Muslim and questioning his nationality” — the article fails
completely to address the central charge of ObamaCare critics
that it would inevitably lead Americans to a horror-scape of
government rationed care — precisely as was practiced in Oregon
with Barbara Wagner. Specifically, the Times says this:
“There is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would
call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental
body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a
cost-cutting measure.”
Yet there is no mistake here with ObamaCare and its prime
advocate, Mr. Obama himself. The core objective is to establish a
system that, inescapably, will lead to government rationing. The
Wall Street Journal
asks the question this way:
From the point of view of politicians with a limited budget, is
it worth spending a lot on, say, a patient with late-stage
cancer where the odds of remission are long? Or should they
spend to improve quality, not length, of life? Or pay for a hip
or knee replacement for seniors, when palliative care might
cost less? And who decides?
In Britain, the answer is the government decides. In Oregon, that
is precisely what was happening with the official letter from The
State to Grandma Barbara.
The frightening core of ObamaCare that is increasingly understood
is this:
The next Barbara Wagner could be you.
