In the first year that Obamacare was the law of the land, there was a growing debate about government’s desire to pick winners and losers in the healthcare game via “death panels” and healthcare rationing. While this never officially happened, coronavirus tyranny might be the opportunity government has been looking for to make death panels the new normal.
In a story carried by the Denver Post at the time, we got a picture of what death panels and healthcare rationing looks like when they reported that the “nation’s organ-transplant network is considering giving younger, healthier people preference over older, sicker patients for the best kidneys.”
Instead of giving priority primarily to patients who have been on the waiting list longest, the new rules would match recipients and organs to a greater extent based on factors such as age and health to try to maximize the number of years provided by each kidney, the most sought-after organ for transplants.
“We’re trying to best utilize the gift of the donated organ,” said Kenneth Andreoni, an associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University who chairs the committee that is reviewing the system for the United Network for Organ Sharing, a Virginia-based private nonprofit group contracted by the federal government to coordinate organ allocation. (emphasis mine)
“Best utilized” is politispeak for “sorry grandma, but you simply won’t live long enough for Uncle Sam to recoup his investment.”
When questioned about the ethical and moral issues of denying someone life-saving care simply because they are too old or too sick, this Bio-ethicist had this to say.
“It’s a big shift,” said Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bio-ethicist. “For a long time, the whole program has been oriented toward waiting-list time. This is moving it away from a save-the-sickest strategy to trying to get a greater yield in terms of years of life saved.” (emphasis mine)
While this study was specific to kidney transplants, Caplan admitted that such an approach could be applied in other situations. For example:
“If adopted, the approach could have implications for other decisions about how to allocate scarce medical resources, such as expensive cancer drugs and ventilators during hurricanes and other emergencies.” (emphasis mine)
The reason I shared this nearly 10-years-old article is to show how death panels and healthcare rationing have always been a part of the far-left’s healthcare agenda, and the similarities that exist today in the Age of Coronavirus Tyranny and the “new normal” it has created.
While it took several years to come to fruition, the LA Times is reporting that “Southern California’s medical system is faced with the prospect of not being able to provide critical medical care to everyone who needs it, which would significantly increase the chances of patients dying as they wait for help.”
Translation? In the name of what socialist/communist countries like Russia used to refer to as the “common good,” the state will be rationing healthcare while deciding who gets to live and who gets to die in the war against the so-called pandemic to ensure Big Brother gets the biggest return on resources.
Many hospitals are preparing for the possibility of rationing care in the coming weeks as the number of patients exceeds their staffs’ abilities to care for them. A document obtained by The Times outlining how to allocate resources in a crisis situation was recently circulated among doctors at the four hospitals run by Los Angeles County.
The guidelines call for a shift in mindset that is unfamiliar to many medical providers.
Instead of trying everything to save a patient, their goal during a crisis is to save as many patients as possible, meaning those less likely to survive will not receive the same level of care they would have otherwise. Doctors will no longer be pulling out all the stops to save a life but instead strategizing about how to keep as many people as possible from perishing.
Healthcare rationing has been a part of coronavirus tyranny and the new normal from the very beginning. In an April 2020 report by The New York Times, we learned about the story of Luis Arellano’s struggle to receive care during the early days of COVID; a struggle he would lose to New York’s defacto death panels.
After feeling unwell with what seemed like symptoms of the coronavirus, Luis Arellano first tried going to a nearby hospital in Brooklyn, where he was told to come back if his condition worsened.
Days later, as his health deteriorated, his family took him to a New Jersey hospital. He waited eight hours, and after being told they’d have to wait another seven to nine hours, the family left, they said.
By the time Mr. Arellano, 65, was finally determined to be sick enough to be immediately admitted into a hospital, his body had already been ravaged by Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
He died of cardiopulmonary arrest on April 5 after five days in the hospital.
In the LA Times article, we read how this god-like power to decide who lives and who dies under coronavirus tyranny is completely justified by the bureaucrats and other “essential” workers who, unsurprisingly, enjoy the protection of the state.
The county memo said the shortages are unlikely to be of tools like ventilators but instead of highly trained staff, specifically respiratory therapists, ICU nurses and critical care physicians. Decisions would be made by an appointed triage officer. For patients who receive a scarce resource, they will be given up to two days to see if it is helping, at which point they should be reassessed to determine whether the treatment should continue.
If the patient has not shown improvement or has gotten worse, the resource may be reallocated to someone else.
“The ethical justification … is that in a public health emergency when there are not enough critical care resources for all, the goal of maximizing population outcomes would be jeopardized if patients who were determined to be unlikely to survive were allowed indefinite use of scarce resources,” the document states. (emphasis mine)
Barack Obama and the rest of the far-left ridiculed conservatives who warned of death panels and healthcare rationing under Obamacare, saying that there wouldn’t be any government bureaucrats making life and death decisions about whether-or-not seniors will receive life-saving healthcare.
Of course, what Obama didn’t deny was that instead of government bureaucrats, non-government bureaucrats receiving funds from the government would be making those decisions.
However, that was before coronavirus tyranny; now the new normal created by the socialist/communist agenda of the far-left is seeing a great deal of success.
- Ivanka’s feminist socialist dream of government-mandated paid family leave became a reality
- Families First Coronavirus Response Act included taxpayer-funded paid family leave
- So-called prison reform
- New methods of gun control
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal
- Laying the foundation for Universal Basic Income
- Record-breaking deficit spending worse than Bush and Obama combined
Unfortunately for the elderly, the poor, and anyone else the state deems unworthy, it looks like death panels and healthcare rationing can be added to the list of the new normal.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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