Duty To Die

This article by Austin Hill is something that everyone needs to watch out for in the coming months:

Welcome to the Era of Obama. You now have a duty to die.

I'm not saying that someday you will die (that's a given).

And I'm not saying that you should be given the "right to die" - - the freedom to take your own life, or to direct your Doctor to put you out of your misery - - that's something entirely different.

I'm saying that someday, if current trends continue, your United States Government will determine that you have a “duty,” an obligation, to die.

It’s bad enough that hundreds of congressional members voted to spend nearly one trillion of our dollars, without even reading the so-called “economic stimulus bill” and without knowing fully what our money is being spent on. It’s even more horrific to know that more of our tax dollars are being allocated to the Office Of Health Information and Technology, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, and that the bill also provides for the beginnings of a nationwide “health records database” that will track the healthcare of every person in the country.

As recently as last Monday, President Obama was praising the nationalization of health records, and the “conversion” of health records to electronic formats, noting that managing electronic data is less costly than managing hardcopy documents. But unfortunately, the creation of a nationalized health records database also creates another means of “cost cutting” - - namely, the denial of medical treatments to severely ill and elderly patients.

Language in the health care sections of the “stimulus bill” stipulates that the Department of H.H.S. will provide “appropriate information to help guide medical decisions at the time and place of care,” and also allows for “penalties” to be assessed to physicians who “spend too much” on individual patients. Essentially, we now have the beginnings of a governmental agency that eventually will, by force of law, determine which persons will be eligible for health care, and what treatment they will receive.

As noted in a recent Bloomberg news article, the way in which the Office Of Health Information and Technology is being expanded emulates the plans put forth in “Critical: What We Can Do About The Health Care Crisis,” a book authored by former Senator (and would-be HHS Secretary) Tom Daschle. In the book, Daschle praises the Western European nations for, among other things, the ways in which they have “nationalized” health care, and have ‘contained” health care costs.

Yet, not surprisingly, Western Europe’s utopian ambitions to “insure everybody” and make healthcare “free” have by no means been realized. In fact, the nationalizing of healthcare in Europe has led to worsening government deficits, and increased healthcare costs, and efforts to contain those costs have resulted in the denial of treatment to those persons not expected to live much longer - - that is, the elderly and the seriously ill.

This “need” to deny people health care has frequently, in Europe, been cast in terms of one’s “duty to die.” The idea is that, once you have lived “long enough;” after you have consumed your “fair share” of the earth’s resources; and when your combined age and health conditions make it “obvious” that further efforts to prolong your life just simply “aren’t worth it;” you will then have a responsibility to accept these consequences, and to accept that you’ll just have to get along without life-sustaining healthcare.

In other words, once a government employee has determined that spending healthcare resources on you will not produce much of a “return on the investment,” you will then have a “duty to die.”

Forget the notion that the Doctor-patient relationship is “sacred,” or that you will make “private” decisions about your health care, in consultation with your Doctor. If Democrats continue the trend of "Europeanizing" our American health care, the office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will eventually be overseeing your healthcare, making sure that if your Doctor spends “too much” on you, they will face federal “penalties, ” the likes of which have yet to be fully defined.

For over three decades, the Democratic Party has insisted that it is wrong for government to “interfere” with a woman’s medical decisions with respect to the child in the womb. Now, President Obama and congressional Democrats are insisting that government must be involved in everybody’s medical decisions. Worse yet, their proposals threaten human life on yet another front: not only are unborn children threatened by their policies, but so, also, are the ill and the elderly.

If Americans continue voting for “more government” as a means to “cure” all our societal ills, we will continue to move closer to the point where anonymous government bureaucrats determine when you have lived “long enough,” when you have consumed your “fair share” of resources, and when it is “obvious” that you won’t live much longer.

President Obama and the Democratic Congress are determined to take us to this point.

The liberal Democrat Left has already embraced the culture of death, and this will only further their death-seeking agenda. The tragedy is that this philosophy and these policies in their final phase will lead to the cold-blooded killing of Americans who are deemed useless by the government. This is not conjecture, nor flight of fancy - it happens all over the world today, in countries where socialized medicine has been fully implemented.

Stop and think how you would feel about your grandparents or parents being deemed 'old enough' to have to forego medical treatment 'for the common good'. How about yourself? What do you do when the government denies you the medication or procedures that would ease your pain and provide comfort simply because you've met some nameless bureaucrat's definition of 'old enough'? It's the epitome of soulless evil to demand an individual's duty to die because they're not worth the cost of treatment.

Welcome to the era of Obama, indeed.

There's my two cents.