If you want a national Cuomoization of the elderly, a Biden administration will deliver.
As coronavirus cases surge around the country, President-elect Joe Biden says voters have given him a mandate to take action.
“Daily cases are skyrocketing,” Biden said in remarks Friday evening in Wilmington, Del., as the nation waited for the election to be called. “I want everyone — everyone — to know on Day 1, we’re going to put our plan to control this virus into action.”
Who’s advising Biden?
Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and University of Pennsylvania professor who has briefed Biden on health policy, told NPR he got to see how Biden works during the Obama administration’s economic recovery efforts in 2009, which Biden managed as vice president. “You’re going to have rigorous evaluation and constant refinement” of policies and strategies, he said.
Ezekiel Emanual, Rahm’s even eviler brother, was the architect of ObamaCare who believes life isn’t worth living over 75.
He’s a co-chair of Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, and the author of, “Why I hope to Die at 75″.
And he’s got thoughts about a flu pandemic.
At 65, Emanuel promises to stop attempting to actively prolong his life. No more colonoscopies and no more flu shots, he assures us. “And if there were to be a flu pandemic,” he writes, “a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.”
When asked about this in relation to the coronavirus, the ObamaCare architect, a program whose policies killed a large number of people, offered this scenario…
In talking to lots to audiences, I’ve presented them with a choice not about the coronavirus, but about who gets a liver transplant. The scenario is: I have one liver and three people; one’s older, one’s a young adult, one’s a young child. Who gets it? Often, no one in the audience will give it to the old person. Or maybe one out of 100. I’ve presented this in the United States, China and scores of other countries. The responses are always the same — most people say the young adult gets the liver, and a smaller number opt for the young child.
Good news for coronavirus policy under a guy who believes that people over 65 or 75 should just die.
But he is the co-author of an article which had contended that civics should be the basis for providing health care, “Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”
And that infamous Lancet triage article,
In the Lancet, Jan. 31, 2009, Dr. Emanuel and coauthors presented a “complete lives system” for the allocation of very scarce resources, such as kidneys, vaccines, dialysis machines, intensive care beds, and others.
“One maximizing strategy involves saving the most individual lives, and it has motivated policies on allocation of influenza vaccines and responses to bioterrorism. . . . Other things being equal, we should always save five lives rather than one.”
“However, other things are rarely equal — whether to save one 20-year-old, who might live another 60 years, if saved, or three 70-year-olds, who could only live for another 10 years each — is unclear…When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated…”
Could Republicans have run on this and done better with voters by warning just what a Biden administration would mean for health care? Could this have moved the needle with some seniors who were panicked into voting for Biden by the media?
Sure. But that would have actually required having a coherent message. Election Day went so much better without it.
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