a word from our betters

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Oct 15, 2009

James Taranto cites a 2007 address made in Berkeley by Clinton's Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Reich gave the speech which he believed a Democratic presidential candidate should make, were he free to speak his mind on the matter of health care:

"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you -- particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people -- you're going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you.

"And by the way, we are going to have to -- 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.

Who is this "we" with the power of life and death? The patients? No. The medical profession? No. "We" refers to policy wonks in the executive branch: in short, the party apparatchiks. They are the "we" who, when they deem it too expensive to treat you, will let you die.

Remember the scare about government controlled health care erecting Death Panels? Ridiculous. There will be no Death Panels. They will be called Resource Allocation Committees, and when the "resources" in question become too pricey, "we" shall decide whether yours is a life worthy of living.

Now who can object to that?

P.S. Reich belongs to a political party that refuses to ban partial birth abortion on the grounds that it permits government restriction of medical treatment options. "We" mustn't interfere.