RUTHFULLY YOURS

Consider two immensely influential individuals in healthcare. Dr. Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist, and Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, oncologist, NIH ethicist, Penn Professor, and brother of Rahm. Their common link, both were key architects of the widely unpopular Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The concern we should all share, within the last two months certain admissions by these healthcare heavyweights about ObamaCare surfaced that should make even the most ardent ObamaCare supporter stop and ponder.

The Gruber tapes have been all over the news. The American voter is stupid, the taxation was “hidden,” and transparency was absent in the process leading up to the vote on the law. Gruber has expressed these troublesome sentiments in various forums, including in front of a camera. The gist of it all, Gruber knows more about what is best for us Americans when it comes to healthcare than we do. It appears that this supremacy complex seemingly justified the deception of the people and the morass of text in the massive bill that worked to hide the truth about the real intent of the law, considering Gruber’s reasoning. But what more is hidden, besides the taxes? That leads us to Zeke’s viewpoints.

“Why I Hope to Die at 75,” is the title of Dr. Emanuel’s manifesto published last month by The Atlantic. In the essay, Zeke tells us why he plans to pursue no care whatsoever once he reaches age 75, not so much as a flu shot. And while Zeke’s words convey his personal wishes as to his own care, one cannot help but wonder, allegorically, if this influential physician feels that he, too, knows better than us when it comes to our healthcare, just as Gruber does. Even more frightening, Dr. Emanuel doesn’t consider the health status of the individual at age 75, the quality of that person’s life, of even the company he or she provides to loved ones but, in a stoic and scientific manner, Emanuel cites the average age of significant accomplishments of Nobel laureates (for physicists, age 48 at the time of discovery) and gauges a human being’s worth by their level of productivity. Wow! Zeke helped write the law, Zeke gauges human worth by productivity and not familial ties or quality of life, and himself a highly accomplished individual in academia (just like Gruber) Zeke sets the bar pretty high by citing the age of Nobel prize winners as a measuring stick of the age of peak human productivity as he correlates it to the collective worth, and worthiness, of the person.

Is healthcare rationing on the horizon? Age-based eligibility requirements for certain healthcare services? Category A disorder at age 40: procedure approved. Category A disorder at age 60: procedure denied. Could it happen?

So with the heavy involvement of these two ideologues in the development of ObamaCare, given their viewpoints, and apparent willingness (at least as admitted by Gruber) to hide the truth for the public good, what does the future hold for healthcare in America?  Have the delays we have seen (such as to the employer mandate) been part of an intentional design, perhaps to mask the destruction of the third party payer system which will pave the way to full socialized medicine? Even ObamaCare supporters oppose, nearly universally, government healthcare. Could ObamaCare be an elaborate design to slowly ease us into socialized medicine? Dr. Emanuel has stated, post-ObamaCare implementation, of course, that the number of individuals covered under employer benefit programs will decrease.

So, just what else is hidden in that half-million word beast that is ObamaCare?

Jason Miller is a health law attorney and author of the book Obamacare Healthcare Apocalypse