So read the Nazi propaganda sign, displaying a feeble old man seated in front of, and thereby blocking, a strong, young, healthy German. With the fall of the Third Reich, it is easy -- which is to say "convenient" -- to forget that before Germany began exterminating Jews, it was sterilizing and exterminating tens of thousands of the mentally and physically handicapped, all in the name of national socialism (in fact, quite literally: the word "Nazi" is actually short for Nationalsozialismus). This process of selective elimination, justified by a limitation of resources and a utilitarian desire on the part of the ruling class to create a model society, coercively when necessary, was by no means unique to Germany. Over time this practice has been put into effect in some form or another by governments worldwide, and no matter where it manifests its ugly head its guiding principles are the same: a certain segment of society is identified as being undesirable, disproportionately costly (either in monetary terms, or crime rate, or disease, etc.), inconvenient, and/or otherwise detestable, and they are targeted for systematic elimination. It is the ultimate repression of basic human rights at the hands of the government, and the men and women who championed it in the early part of the twentieth century would be happy to know that America may soon fall victim to it. 

            It was former President Gerald Ford who once cautioned, in an uncharacteristic display of sagacity, that "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."Unfortunately, too many in government mistook that warning for a promise, resulting in a Congress that now finds itself hard at work overhauling -- one wishes they would someday find another hobby -- the greatest, most effective, most comprehensive healthcare system in world history. Not content to leave fantastic alone, they have devised a socialized healthcare package that purports to guarantee health insurance for all "Americans" -- defined as anybody who is within American borders, legally or not -- by nationalizing the entire healthcare industry. Congress estimates it will cost over $1 trillion to American taxpayers over the next ten years alone. And when have any government programs ever run under budget?

            We are told that the new healthcare package -- "Obama-care" as it is both affectionately and derisively called -- is necessary because there are currently 45 million people living in the United States without health insurance. This number includes 12 million illegal aliens (a number that is sure to rise as the new entitlement will serve to encourage more to come), who are already eligible to receive medical care in any emergency room; 15 million Americans who are already eligible for Medicare or Medicaid; and 9 million Americans with household incomes greater than $75,000 annually. What Obama-care does not do, however, is meet this massive increase in patients with an increase in the number of healthcare providers: doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc. In other words, demand is increased without supply being increased. Under normal economic conditions (which is to say in the private sector) the result would be higher cost. But when costs cannot be increased due to government controls, the only result that can follow is rationing. 

            Because the package does not increase the amount of doctors, the idea that it increases the amount of available care -- and thus, overall national healthiness -- is a myth. It can only spread the treatment around, giving to some by taking away from others. The critical question, then, is who will have services taken away from them? Who will not be provided with the care they need so that the government can divert the resources to, for example, an illegal alien who elects to have an abortion?  (Obama-care, by the way, will make abortion a mandatory "health benefit." What about sex change operations?). 

            To discern who will be left without a chair when the music stops (or perhaps better put: left without a defibrillator when his heart stops), just take one look at the proposed bill's requirement of "mandatory counseling for all seniors at a minimum of every five years, more often if the senior is sick or in a nursing home." The obvious purpose of this is to counsel them on "end-of-life" decisions, which perhaps are better called "end-your-life" decisions, as they concern whether to continue living (the most basic human instinct), or to save valuable healthcare resources by throwing in the towel. Indeed, pages 425 through 430 of the House bill indicate that this counseling will include "An explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills…" The practitioner will also provide his/her elderly patients with the opportunity to "formulate an order regarding life sustaining treatment", including the patient's preference respecting, among other things "the intensity of medical intervention [desired] if the patient is pulseless, apneic, or has serious cardiac or pulmonary problems", and whether "the use of antibiotics; and the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration" should be withheld. Fear not, Philosopher-King Obama is in charge, thus we can rest assured that this is both the moral and ethical thing to do, and further that this sensitive task will be performed with "compassion," "understanding," and "respect," just as all objectionable liberal practices require compassion, understanding, and respect.

            But some people are afraid, including a woman who recently confronted our President with the story of her mother who, at the age of 100, needed a pacemaker. After one doctor refused on the basis that it would ultimately accomplish little given her age, another saw the desire to live in her eyes, her zest for life so to speak, and agreed to perform the operation. Five years later she is still alive. The woman then asked the President how her mother's situation would have been handled under his proposed healthcare system; specifically whether doctors would be permitted to take into account a patient's desire to continue living -- which is generally why someone visits a doctor in the first place -- when determining the course of action to take. Foolishly endeavoring to answer the question without the aid of his trusted teleprompter, Obama unwittingly revealed as much about himself as his healthcare plan:

"I don't think that we can make judgments based on people's spirit.  That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making… End-of-life care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we're going to have to make… At least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what, maybe this isn't going to help.  Maybe you're better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller."

            This is healthcare?!? According to Obama's statement, under his healthcare program an elderly patient will go to her doctor to make her well, only to be rebuffed on the basis that she is too old and therefore, a poor investment. In other words, a certain segment of society, in this case the elderly, has been identified as being undesirable, disproportionately costly, and/or inconvenient, and they are targeted for systematic elimination. 

            Sound familiar?

            It gets worse. After you've taken the moment you need to digest the implications of the President's statement, take a second look at it. When you do you should see three things that are even more sinister and revealing. 

            First, the elderly woman in the real-life example had the surgery and lived. Obama argues that maybe she would have been "better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller."Are we to understand that our President wishes the woman had died? Does he really regret that she had the surgery? Isn't that exactly what he said? It's hard to believe, but understand that the President does not see America as a nation of 300 million autonomous individuals, each with their own personal set of innate and inalienable human rights. The President views the nation through the prism of utilitarianism, the aim of which is to secure the greatest good for the greatest group, and if that means individual rights get trammeled along the way, well that's just the cost of doing business. Sound familiar? So in his mind, the operation to install the pacemaker was actually a failure because valuable resources that could have been spent elsewhere -- like on young illegal aliens -- were instead used to prolong the existence of someone who had already lived a full and complete life, and didn't have much time left anyway. Talk about depravity!

            The second thing you should notice upon closer inspection is that you and your doctor will not be making the "difficult sets of decisions" in question, the government will be: "we can make judgments", "decisions that we're going to have to make." Yes, the same people who are bankrupting Social Security; who are bankrupting Medicare; who are running the failing public schools; who raise taxes on businesses and then can't figure out why unemployment is so high; who raise taxes on Wall Street and then don't understand why the market suffers; who raise taxes on the rich and the middle class and then can't figure out why consumer spending has collapsed; who encouraged banks to loan money to people with bad credit and now can't understand why we had a record number of foreclosures; who spend billions of dollars a year on ridiculous pork projects like bridges that don't go anywhere; or "swine odor and manure management research" (a real, $1.8 million program, that is designed to study why pigs stink); or $3.4 million to build a thirteen foot "turtle tunnel" under a highway in Florida so that turtles can safely cross (assuming the turtles can figure this out); these are the same people who will be making the "difficult sets of decisions" regarding your healthcare. Sleep well knowing that! 

            The third thing you should notice is perhaps the most important.  It is that the presumptuousness on the part of the President to run the healthcare industry is not only based, as the conventional wisdom says, on Obama's supreme confidence in his ability to manage resources.  That would be foolish enough, but in fact it's worse than that. His ego, knowing no limits, has actually convinced him that he knows more about medicine than doctors: "we will let doctors know… maybe this isn't going to help." Never mind that in the situation concerned it did help, and the patient is still alive (a result that is apparently lamentable to the President),  government is nevertheless determined to substitute its judgment for that of doctors not just based on cost-effectiveness, but also medical-effectiveness. Obama -- does he today prefer to be called "President" or "Doctor"? -- is going to let physicians know what is acceptable medical practice, thereby effectively reducing doctors to middlemen, waiting at the behest of government both for permission to expend resources, and to confirm or reject the soundness of their medical judgment!  And lest there be any doubt about his intentions, at a recent town hall-style meeting at AARP headquarters, Obama reiterated his plan to tell doctors what, in his mind, is acceptable medical practice:

"My interest is not in getting between you and your doctor….  What we've said is, we just want to provide some guidelines to Medicare and by extension the private sector about what works and what doesn't."

It sounds absurd, but reread the Presidents words and one cannot help but visualize a patient, sitting in a medical office, staring in disbelief as his doctor tells him: "Sir, my experience as a physician, my education, and every medical text says that given your symptoms this is the appropriate medical diagnosis. But let me check with the White House to make sure that I'm right."

            Sadly, even if President Obama, M.D., is someday able to admit to himself that maybe doctors know a bit more about medicine than he, that will still not correct the fundamental flaw of Obama-care: that it is being administered by a President who has demonstrated time and again that he has no respect for even the most basic individual human rights. Remember, this is the same President who has appointed as his science czar John Holdren -- why do we suddenly need all these czars? -- who once penned a book "that approved of and recommended compulsory sterilization and even abortion in some cases, as part of a government population control regime." This is the same President who has appointed Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel (the brother of Rahm Emmanuel, White House Chief of Staff) as health policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget; a man who has been very outspoken in his belief that doctors are effectively community property whose decisions should not center exclusively on the best interests of the patient, but should also consider whether resources should be withheld from a given patient in order to be better spent on others. Dr. Emmanuel calls this "communitarianism", a doctrine that is basically just communism with the superfluous suffix "itarian" stuck in the middle of its name. Maybe Dr. Emmanuel should be a "czar."

            And this is the same President who, as a member of the Illinois State Legislature, refused to vote for the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA), which would have made it illegal for doctors to allow babies who survived abortions to die once they were born. This decision is impossible to reconcile with the President's stated position that he is in favor "of limits on late-term abortions, if there is an exception for the mother's health", unless one concludes that Obama voted against protecting living infants because BAIPA did not include a provision to allow for the child to die if it threatened the health of the mother. 

            But President Obama is too smart to know that a living child that has already been born could endanger the mother's health in any substantial way. All that is left to conclude is the obvious: that Obama simply withheld his support because he does not value the life of that child, laying there in a hospital, struggling for its existence, as much as he values the approbation, votes, and financial contributions of likeminded far left radicals, in particular the feminists and others with substantial monetary interests in the multibillion-dollar-a-year abortion industry. Hence his complaint uttered on the floor of the Illinois State Senate on March 30, 2001, that BAIPA "would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause [of the Constitution] does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute." 

            If this is a child!?!

            That's right, in the President's warped mind, a living, breathing infant, already born, is only a child if he (Obama) deems it to be. In that one impossibly arrogant line,Obama managed to demonstrate one of the key differences between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives understand that our rights as human beings come from our very existence as human beings; "Endowed" as we are "by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Liberals believe human rights come not from God but from government, thus if government determines that society should not bear the cost of sustaining your life, neither will government acknowledge your right to it. 

            Nearly a year later, on March 5, 2002, as the legislation was still pending, Obama returned to the Senate floor to complain that "What we are doing here is to create one more burden on women, and I can't support that."

            Yes, a living human being, just a child, yet so burdensome that he or she is not entitled to continue living. Once again a certain segment of society is identified as being undesirable, disproportionately costly, and/or inconvenient, and they are targeted for systematic elimination. 

            Sound familiar?

            If that's how much our President values a new life, full of potential, how much do you really think he values the lives of the elderly, by far and away the greatest consumers of "our" healthcare resources? How do you think Obama's socialist health plan will care for them? How many resources will be spent prolonging the lives of our grandparents and our veterans? What are their lives worth to President Obama?