Congresswoman and great pro-life advocate Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) stood up on the floor of the House last month to highlight the writings of three people from whom it is widely acknowledged President Obama is taking his cues on health care reform. Since then, her remarks have garnered over 50,000 views on YouTube from concerned citizens all across America.
Quoting directly from Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, Peter Orszag, and Dr. David Blumenthal, Bachmann sharply questions the views of President Obama’s health care advisers and calls on the American people to listen closely to commentary she calls “very enlightening.” Watch the video above to see for yourself.
Bachmann begins her remarks by acknowledging an op-ed piece written by Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and staunch opponent of President Obama’s health care reform plan. McCaughey points out that, with the passing of health care reform, decisions will be taken out of the hands of doctors and patients and placed directly into the hands of government. Bachmann used this a starting point to explore just exactly how “government” envisions health care in the future.
Bachmanns’s strongest and most powerful critique was of Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, brother to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who is also the Health Policy Advisor for the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. Bachmann quotes Emmanuel directly as saying “[financial] savings will require changing how doctors think about their patients. Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously.” Too seriously? Bachmann asserts that Emmanuel “wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice—such as whether the money would be better spent on someone else.” “It is a horrific notion to our nations doctors, and to each American,” she remarks.
“Americans believe social justice is given out one patient at a time,” explains Bachman. The representative goes on to say that, contrary to Dr. Emmanuel’s ideas, American health care should not be based in communitarianism to decide who gets care. Quoting again from Dr. Emmanuel, Bachman explains that under his proposed regime, care would be “reserved for the non-disabled…[not for] those who are irreversibly prevented from being contributing members to society.”
Pointedly, the Congresswoman mentions her father-in-law, a victim of dementia, who passed away two months earlier. Mr. Bachmann received excellent health treatment right up to the end of his life. Would he have received the same care under President Obama’s proposed health care plan? “If you’re a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy,” says Bachmann, “watch out!”
Representative Bachman also discussed Dr. Emmanuel’s defense of age discrimination in rationing health care. Allocation of health care by age is not discrimination, Emmanuel claims because “even if a 25-year-old receives priority over a 65-year-old, everyone who is 65 now was previously 25.”
She turns next to Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag and Dr. David Blumenthal, who have also advised the President on health care. “Bills that are being rushed through congress right now will cut over 500 billion out of medicare in the next 10 yrs, putting it onto the backs of state legislatures,” explains Bachmann. “Knowing how unpopular these cuts are, [Orszag] has urged Congress to delete their own authority,” says Bachman, “to a new presidentially appointed bureaucracy that will not be accountable to the public.”
Blumenthal, on the other hand, is noted for advocating the slowing of medical innovation in order to control health spending. He has “long advocated government health spending controls,” says Bachmann, despite that these measures will increase wait time and reduced availability for new treatments. Blumenthal, Bachmann says, claimed it was “debatable” whether the timely health care Americans receive today is really worth the cost. Bachmann concludes her spirited and heartfelt comments with this, “Americans need to wake up and read what the president and his advisers are saying, it may scare them to go the phones and call their representatives.”
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