Zeke Emanuel, the father of Obama Care, was recently quoted as saying that he wants to die at 75 because living past 75 renders us disabled, faltering and declining, robbed of creativity, feeble, ineffectual, and pathetic. As a key player in the creation of Obama Care, Emanuel has done an enormous disservice to this country. He knows that this monstrosity of law was passed by loathsome legislative procedural gamesmanship, and that it remains deeply unpopular to this day. Only a progressive true believer from the Washington Post could view Emanuel’s comments with anything other than cynicism. But the personal impact of such a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic approach is devastating.
My father recently turned 80. He is healthy, active, self-sufficient, intellectual, and very much enjoys his life on the Northern California coast, where he enjoys watching the Blue Heron skilfully hunting the gophers in his yard, drives his Corvette on twisty mountain roads, flies his private plane, and develops his own photographs in his custom dark room the old-fashioned way–using photo paper and chemicals.
I can assure you that my father would not have wanted to die five years ago, and he doesn’t want to die now. But he was recently informed by his physician that he was no longer eligible for any kind of preventive care that could save or extend his life. Why? Because under the Obama Care mandates written by Zeke Emanuel, old folks aren’t eligible for the kind of medical care they have previously enjoyed. Zeke has decided that everybody should want to die at the age of 75, just like him, and that we shouldn’t waste precious medical care on the elderly. And as a good progressive technocrat, he thinks it’s just fine to forcibly impose his views on the rest of us.
So my dad has to die sooner for lack of medical care because Zeke Emanuel, Barack Obama, and the Democrats in the House and Senate, have decided that they have the right to control what medical care my dad is allowed to have–whether he pays for it himself or not.
But the damaging impact of Obama Care is far greater than just the rationing and deprivation of care by government bureaucrats. It is driving medical innovation out of the country. This piece from the Wall Street Journal has the numbers. It is inevitable that as more and more people personally experience the negative impact of Obama Care, and witness the decline in quality and access, there will be backlash. But by the time Obama is out of office, Obama Care will probably have developed such a large constituency that it will be impossible to repeal.
