While Obamacare’s proponents continue to insist that the program presents no threat to Americans’ healthcare, new comments from Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber demonstrate that Obamacare was designed to do just that. Gruber stated:
You get a law which said healthy people are going to pay in, it made explicit that healthy people pay and sick people get money, it would not have passed…Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage and basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to get this thing to pass.
In other words, yes, Obamacare redistributes healthcare. Yes, Obamacare will endanger people who cannot afford healthcare because they are young and healthy, all in order to pay for government benefits for those who are sick. And yes, in order to control the resulting costs, care will have to be cut for the elderly.
Gruber isn’t the only Obamacare architect to tell the truth about Obamacare’s view of redistribution. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who has said that he wishes to die at age 75, wrote in February 2008 in the Journal of the American Medical Association:
Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.
He added that the Hippocratic Oath was to blame, since it encourages doctors to care for the patients before them without concern for “cost or effect on others.” He told the Washington Post, “We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a ‘God committee’ to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.”
If the idea of a God committee sounds rather like Sarah Palin’s death panel, that’s because that’s what it is.
Then there’s former Clinton Labor Secretary and Obama economic advisor Robert Reich, who explained in September 2007: “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.”
These are the great minds behind Obamacare. Or we could just listen to Dr. Howard Dean, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, who said in July 2013 in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board “is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.” He added, “There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system.”
So are those who worry about healthcare rationing simply paranoid? Of course not. Everyone with a shred of brainpower understands that government cannot create independent supply of medical care, but can merely redistribute what is already present. That means redistributing cost from old to young, and care from the elderly to everyone else. Anyone who argues to the contrary is merely mimicking the strategy of Jonathan Gruber: lying to the “stupid” American people.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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