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August 24, 2009

Will You Still Need Me, When I'm Sixty-four?

By Cliff Thier
There is a great intelligence at work in Washington, but we've failed to recognize it. I know that I have. And for that I apologize.

We know that Social Security is unsustainable because fewer and fewer workers are paying into the system to support more and more retirees. It is, as it was from Day One, a pure, a classic Ponzi scheme masquerading as a pension plan.

For decades, government commissions have repeatedly recommended increasing the retirement age. Everyone agrees that the system will soon run out of money.

Quietly -- without fanfare -- our President, Barack Obama, has come up with an inspired, brilliant solution: encouraging Americans to continue to pay into Social Security while discouraging Americans from asking for Social Security checks.

ObamaCare's rules and regulations will cause every American to rethink the idea of being retired. ObamaCare will steer health resources toward "productive" Americans, and away from society's "unproductive" Americans such as retirees (and very young children, the physically disabled, the mentally sick, et al.).

ObamaCare will require the creation of a federal "Office Of Life Worth." There some refugee from the Department of Motor Vehicles will decide which of us makes the "greater contribution to society."

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama's chief health-care architect (and brother of Obama's right arm, Rahm Emanuel), has been very honest and clear what ObamaCare will mean to retired Americans:

Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years." 
 -Lancet, Vol 373 June 31, 2009
 
"Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia." 
 -Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet Author(s): Ezekiel J. Emanuel Source: The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 26, No. 6, .
 
"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated." 
 -Lancet, Vol 373, January 31, 2009, 428
 
"Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years." 
 -Lancet, Vol 373 June 31, 2009
 
"Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects....
 -Lancet, Vol 373, January 31, 2009   425, 
 
Adolescents have received substantial substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments.... It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does." 
 -Lancet, Vol 373, January 31, 2009, 428
  
"Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change. Savings will require changing how doctors think about their patients. Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others." 
 -Health Affairs: The Policy Journal of the Health Sphere, 2008
 
"Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration's health-reform effort."
 -Health Care Watch, November 2008 

Under ObamaCare, the older you get, the more likely it will be that you will not be permitted to have an operation, or to receive the optimal medicines. The reason is that you likely will be taking more out of society than you will be contributing in taxes. Which leaves us with a simple question: Who in his right mind would dare to retire?

[An aside. In Nazi Germany, the mentally ill and physically disabled were labeled as "unproductive members" of society. As were, of course, the Jews. Euthanasia was the inevitable and logical result of such thinking then. It is also the inevitable and logical result of such thinking today. 

The prophet Ezekiel was supposed to have resurrected the dead. That it is an Ezekiel authoring the Obama Administration's "Robert's Rules of Death" must be God's little joke.
 
That it's an Israeli doctor who is advocating this system of rating the values of different human lives must be Dr. Mengele's little joke. ] 

You and I will have no choice but to continue to work into our 80s (God willing) and beyond. We will have to do everything we can to convince the government that we put more into society than we take out.

If,  however, you are younger than 15, older than 40, you've got a problem. If you're younger than 2, or over 65, or mentally ill, or physically disabled, you've got an even bigger problem.

If you love someone who is over 65 or physically disabled and they contribute something important to your life, that won't count. Only if they pay taxes will their lives be rated as worthy.

Good luck to you.
on "Will You Still Need Me, When I'm Sixty-four?"