What happens when a politician takes a look at the demographics and realizes that he has a serious problem with one particular group? In this case the politician is Barack Hussein Obama, and the problematic demographic are senior citizens.
Obama's strongest base of support was among voters age 18 to 29, which is a fancy way of saying voters who didn't have enough experience with lying politicians to know better and were easily awed by stadium rallies, social media and stylized posters. Over 30 it was already a dead heat, and over 50 the voters trended McCain's way. And 2008 only worked because of a large youth vote turnout, a demographic that traditionally doesn't do big voter turnouts. To win in 2012, Obama must either maintain that level of youth turnout or somehow reduce the voter turnout by senior citizens. A tricky problem either way, one that nationalized health care is meant to solve.
In the past politicians have tried segregation, redistricting and voter suppression as solutions... but none of those are enough at a national level. Nationalized health care however can effectively kill two birds with one stone, by getting rid of some of the elderly, and giving youth voters a new shiny toy that only works so long as they don't use it. And of course giving back to Obama's core demographic of corrupt unions, in this case the corrupt Marxist thugs of SEIU.
Now most people living in countries with national health care plans like having them... so long as they don't actually have to use them very much. Nationalized health care works best as a safety net for those who need the occasional doctor's visit or treatment for a broken leg after an accident. The more services they need however, the worse their experience becomes. And the largest and heaviest users of health care services are usually the elderly.
Health care rationing, by both private and government plans, depends on providing a base of basic services to the most people, while trying to ration the more expensive services needed for patients with more serious health conditions. It's easy enough to pay for the occasional dentist's visit, mammogram or to set a broken leg... and it's even profitable, because both business and government have a financial interest in healthy workers. The government however has much less interest in the health of seniors when it begins to require spending thousands on expensive drugs, major surgeries and regular nursing care.
When the Czars used to travel to see Russia, their subordinates would go before them erecting two dimensional facades of villages in order to create the illusion of a thriving peasantry. These villages were known as Potemkin villages after the Russian minister who originated the clever notion. Even with the rise of Communism, Potemkin villages continued to be constructed to hide the dismal truth. Even when Nixon visited Russia in 1972, he encountered more Potemkin villages. But when he overflew the sites he saw that the facades were nothing more than an illusion.
ObamaCare is a giant Potemkin village. It looks good from the outside, until you actually need it, and then like all national health care programs, it does its best to get rid of you. And it is designed to look good to younger voters who will need it the least and therefore have the least negative encounters with it, while shoving the elderly into the refuse bin. Like a mirage, it provides a glittering image of food and water, but when you step forward and reach for it, you come up with nothing but handfuls of desert sand.
In any rationing scheme the elderly will get the knife in a system that is designed primarily to offer HealthCare Lite. The result creates two kind of voters, satisfied voters and dead voters... which is a can't lose proposition. Either you don't need health care very much but are pleased to have it available if you need it, or you do need health care and then you'll probably be too busy writing letters and challenging the authorities to have any time left for politics anyway. Until you're finally hospitalized, put on a limited care plan and your IV drop gets disconnected. It's the European approach now being exported to America.
The Big ObamaCare Lie is that it will offer health care for the masses without rationing. The two of course are incompatible. The government rations its services no differently than private businesses do, the difference is that government services are more expensive and therefore delivered less efficiently, and that they come backed with a political agenda.
ObamaCare rewards the youth vote that came out for Obama with a health care mirage that is meant to make them feel grateful, and punishes senior voters who came out for McCain with health care rationing that's designed to get rid of them quickly. "...if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die." So spoke Obama advisor Robert Reich.
White House Health Care Advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, spoke of health care rationing by age, as well as limiting health care to those incapable of civic participation. Lee Siegel wrote, "Determining which treatments are cost effective at the end of a person's life and which are not is one of Obama's priorities. It's one of the principal ways he counts on saving money and making universal health care affordable."
It is of course the priority, not simply because it is the only way to at least try and balance the books at a level slightly above complete economic disaster... but because seniors are an obstacle to the Obama administration. The senior vote is expected to keep on rising to an ever greater share of the electorate. The median age in the United States is at its highest point ever, and that is a major problem for Obama and the Democratic party because senior citizens traditionally skew more conservative. An older America would also mean a more conservative America, and one that would find itself increasingly unable to support the socialist infrastructure that has become the fundamental platform of the Democratic party.
Immigration has partially balanced things out, just as it has in Europe, compensating for a growing older population, with Third World immigrants closely wedded to the left leaning parties. And if elderly people are more likely to be the victims of their crimes... well to the socialist way of thinking, that just evens out the class situation and makes the voter demographics look a bit better. But immigration alone in the United States cannot fill the gap. That's where euthanasia comes into the picture.
Sustainable socialism requires workers to pay for it, and needs to edge retirees out of the picture. Keeping the Democratic party leaning left requires freezing or lowering the median age of Americans by getting rid of them. ObamaCare will reduce benefits for seniors and put them on a government controlled treadmill that will encourage them to die sooner rather than burden society with their presence. The outcome will look like the Tuskegee experiments on a national scale with medical problems in seniors going untreated due to rationing... and the final outcome benefiting Obama and the Democratic party.
Some might deride it as alarmist to call such an outcome politically motivated euthanasia. Yet in practice it will mean that a part of the American people who did not vote for Obama have been put at the greatest risk by his proposed policies. Had a Republican President proposed a plan that would ration medical services most for African-Americans, opponents would rightly make comparisons to eugenics and segregation. What then are we to make of ObamaCare, whose victims will be chiefly those Americans who did not vote for Obama?
Obama's strongest base of support was among voters age 18 to 29, which is a fancy way of saying voters who didn't have enough experience with lying politicians to know better and were easily awed by stadium rallies, social media and stylized posters. Over 30 it was already a dead heat, and over 50 the voters trended McCain's way. And 2008 only worked because of a large youth vote turnout, a demographic that traditionally doesn't do big voter turnouts. To win in 2012, Obama must either maintain that level of youth turnout or somehow reduce the voter turnout by senior citizens. A tricky problem either way, one that nationalized health care is meant to solve.
In the past politicians have tried segregation, redistricting and voter suppression as solutions... but none of those are enough at a national level. Nationalized health care however can effectively kill two birds with one stone, by getting rid of some of the elderly, and giving youth voters a new shiny toy that only works so long as they don't use it. And of course giving back to Obama's core demographic of corrupt unions, in this case the corrupt Marxist thugs of SEIU.
Now most people living in countries with national health care plans like having them... so long as they don't actually have to use them very much. Nationalized health care works best as a safety net for those who need the occasional doctor's visit or treatment for a broken leg after an accident. The more services they need however, the worse their experience becomes. And the largest and heaviest users of health care services are usually the elderly.
Health care rationing, by both private and government plans, depends on providing a base of basic services to the most people, while trying to ration the more expensive services needed for patients with more serious health conditions. It's easy enough to pay for the occasional dentist's visit, mammogram or to set a broken leg... and it's even profitable, because both business and government have a financial interest in healthy workers. The government however has much less interest in the health of seniors when it begins to require spending thousands on expensive drugs, major surgeries and regular nursing care.
When the Czars used to travel to see Russia, their subordinates would go before them erecting two dimensional facades of villages in order to create the illusion of a thriving peasantry. These villages were known as Potemkin villages after the Russian minister who originated the clever notion. Even with the rise of Communism, Potemkin villages continued to be constructed to hide the dismal truth. Even when Nixon visited Russia in 1972, he encountered more Potemkin villages. But when he overflew the sites he saw that the facades were nothing more than an illusion.
ObamaCare is a giant Potemkin village. It looks good from the outside, until you actually need it, and then like all national health care programs, it does its best to get rid of you. And it is designed to look good to younger voters who will need it the least and therefore have the least negative encounters with it, while shoving the elderly into the refuse bin. Like a mirage, it provides a glittering image of food and water, but when you step forward and reach for it, you come up with nothing but handfuls of desert sand.
In any rationing scheme the elderly will get the knife in a system that is designed primarily to offer HealthCare Lite. The result creates two kind of voters, satisfied voters and dead voters... which is a can't lose proposition. Either you don't need health care very much but are pleased to have it available if you need it, or you do need health care and then you'll probably be too busy writing letters and challenging the authorities to have any time left for politics anyway. Until you're finally hospitalized, put on a limited care plan and your IV drop gets disconnected. It's the European approach now being exported to America.
The Big ObamaCare Lie is that it will offer health care for the masses without rationing. The two of course are incompatible. The government rations its services no differently than private businesses do, the difference is that government services are more expensive and therefore delivered less efficiently, and that they come backed with a political agenda.
ObamaCare rewards the youth vote that came out for Obama with a health care mirage that is meant to make them feel grateful, and punishes senior voters who came out for McCain with health care rationing that's designed to get rid of them quickly. "...if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die." So spoke Obama advisor Robert Reich.
White House Health Care Advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, spoke of health care rationing by age, as well as limiting health care to those incapable of civic participation. Lee Siegel wrote, "Determining which treatments are cost effective at the end of a person's life and which are not is one of Obama's priorities. It's one of the principal ways he counts on saving money and making universal health care affordable."
It is of course the priority, not simply because it is the only way to at least try and balance the books at a level slightly above complete economic disaster... but because seniors are an obstacle to the Obama administration. The senior vote is expected to keep on rising to an ever greater share of the electorate. The median age in the United States is at its highest point ever, and that is a major problem for Obama and the Democratic party because senior citizens traditionally skew more conservative. An older America would also mean a more conservative America, and one that would find itself increasingly unable to support the socialist infrastructure that has become the fundamental platform of the Democratic party.
Immigration has partially balanced things out, just as it has in Europe, compensating for a growing older population, with Third World immigrants closely wedded to the left leaning parties. And if elderly people are more likely to be the victims of their crimes... well to the socialist way of thinking, that just evens out the class situation and makes the voter demographics look a bit better. But immigration alone in the United States cannot fill the gap. That's where euthanasia comes into the picture.
Sustainable socialism requires workers to pay for it, and needs to edge retirees out of the picture. Keeping the Democratic party leaning left requires freezing or lowering the median age of Americans by getting rid of them. ObamaCare will reduce benefits for seniors and put them on a government controlled treadmill that will encourage them to die sooner rather than burden society with their presence. The outcome will look like the Tuskegee experiments on a national scale with medical problems in seniors going untreated due to rationing... and the final outcome benefiting Obama and the Democratic party.
Some might deride it as alarmist to call such an outcome politically motivated euthanasia. Yet in practice it will mean that a part of the American people who did not vote for Obama have been put at the greatest risk by his proposed policies. Had a Republican President proposed a plan that would ration medical services most for African-Americans, opponents would rightly make comparisons to eugenics and segregation. What then are we to make of ObamaCare, whose victims will be chiefly those Americans who did not vote for Obama?
Comments
Now most people living in countries with national health care plans like having them... so long as they don't actually have to use them very much.
ReplyDeleteLOL Very true!
ObamaCare=MediocreCare for all.
ReplyDeleteBTW: Either ABC or CBS recently had a segment on the top notch medical policy Washington politicians get, including a free clinic and free prescriptions right in the captial.
Don't forget that most seniors are White and have memories of what America once was. They are the children and grandchildren of people from the 19th century.
ReplyDeleteThere is more than cost cutting here, it's ideas that must be crushed. The official policy of the obama government is to extinguish the White race. Listen to his wife, and if you can stand it, look at her.
Unfortunately Rexrs is not talking loony.
ReplyDeleteThe worst what could have come out of the black community now rules America.
Understand that these people think every white person is making plans to destroy the black people.
We all can see in our environment most white folks have different thinks on their mind.
And they will treat their "enemy" as they see they treat them.
Obama has practice hurting the elderly. He threw his own grandma under the bus.
ReplyDeleteIf Obama and the left really want to lower the age of a "captive" population, they should probably oppose abortion on demand. Black women in the USA have had the vast majority of the millions of abortions that have occurred since Roe v Wade. It is yet another example of how the left never seems to anticipate those unexpected consequences of their actions. By now there would be millions more democrat voters of the appropriate ethnic groups to keep the democrats in office in perpetuity.
ReplyDeleteI happen to be in my 7th decade of life and have been a practicing physician (unlike Dr. Emanuel) treating the elderly for the past 30 plus years. I am one of the “soldiers in the foxhole” of our current healthcare system. The cost of futile care in the last 2 weeks of life for many seniors is indeed a significant problem. It consumes an enormous amount of money with no benefit for the patient. It may assuage the gilt of some family members to keep grandma alive as long as possible but not much else. Because the costs of that care are not born by the patient or their families (Medicare pays some of it, but hospitals absorb the rest and will cause the closing of many in the future) there is little incentive for families to look at the situation from a realistic perspective. Because of the threat of the plaintiff's bar, doctors are reluctant to “tell it like it is” and therefore recommend comfort care much too late. I would plead for patients and their families to have more of a financial stake in the costs of care and for doctors to have more autonomy in our dealings with patients and their families at those times. Government and bureaucrats should have no roll in those decisions.
Sultan, another great article. I'm just sad to see that some of your readers want to take the racial route. Obama and his "white" advisors could care less about the color of someones skin, or age, if they are expendable.
ReplyDeleteThe comment alluding that most blacks vote democratic is junk. Blacks vote just like whites and hispanics do: some democrat, some republican, some independent. It's time people quit listening to the media, they LIE. Of course they want black people to feel wrong if they vote republican just like they do with the hispanic vote. It's time to turn off your t.v. when you actually believe what political pundits tell you...
I think that it absolutely should be left up to the individual in question. If an elderly person wants to end their life, who are we to stop them? If they are sick and the quality of living has diminished to nothing more than days of suffering then the most humane thing to do to let them choose to make the pain and suffering stop.
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