Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free?  Betsy McCaughey has the answer in her Wall Street Journal column and it is not pretty.

The Congressional majority wants to pay for its $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion health bills with new taxes and a $500 billion cut to Medicare. This cut will come just as baby boomers turn 65 and increase Medicare enrollment by 30%. Less money and more patients will necessitate rationing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 1% of Medicare cuts will come from eliminating fraud, waste and abuse.

The assault against seniors began with the stimulus package in February. Slipped into the bill was substantial funding for comparative effectiveness research, which is generally code for limiting care based on the patient’s age. Economists are familiar with the formula, where the cost of a treatment is divided by the number of years (called QALYs, or quality-adjusted life years) that the patient is likely to benefit. In Britain, the formula leads to denying treatments for older patients who have fewer years to benefit from care than younger patients.

Emphasis mine.  However, the President insists that his cost savings will not come from cuts in patient care....

Driving these cuts is the misconception that preventative care can eliminate sickness. As President Obama said in a speech to the American Medical Association: “We have to avoid illness and disease in the first place.”

However, not all "illness and disease" are preventable (Dr. McCaughey mentions heart disease and cancer).  Many, like multiple schlerosis, autism, cystic fibrosis or hemophelia are all genetic diseases that are NOT preventable (except by forced abortion of suspect fetuses) - only treatable.  What is going to happen to these people under an ObamaCare?  If the writings of President Obama's health care policy advisers are any indication, the answers are not good at all!

Ezekial Emanual (Rahm's brother) is President Obama's special health policy advisor.  In a 2009 article written for the medical journal "The Lancet" wrote (with co-authors Govind Persad and Alan Wertheimer) that an a "complete lives allocation" system of rationing care - a system which prioritises younger people at the expense of the elderly is a preferable method of doling out limited resources.  In an older article (written for the Hastings Center) Dr. Emanual wrote (in a discussion on what services should and should not be provided based on of all things wealth) that people who were "irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic (health care recipients) and should not be guaranteed (health care services).

How would it (who gets what services) be decided?  By a process called the "Quality-Adjusted-Life-Year" (QALY) formula (HT my favorite econ professor).

But, make no mistake about it, rationing will be an integral component of Obamacare. Last Sunday the President's budget chief admitted, "I'm not prepared to rule it out," when pressed for a straight answer on the issue. And another of Obama's advisors famously frets about the insistence of American physicians on doing "everything for the patient regardless of cost." Thus, stopping such costly interventions will be a primary mission of the "Federal Coordinating Council for Effectiveness Research," a new hive of health care apparatchiks created by the infamous "porkulus" bill. This new bureaucracy is intended to operate like its European counterparts, meaning that it will assign a monetary value to your life and deny your care if you contract a malady whose cost-of-treatment exceeds that amount.

If you are under the impression that it is impossible to calculate the value of a human life, you are obviously not a progressive policy expert or health care bureaucrat. This calculation, so elusive for philosophers and sages throughout the millennia, is child's play for such people. They have, in fact, already devised a formula for pricing out your life. It is called the "quality-adjusted-life-year" (QALY), and it assigns a numerical value to a year of life. A year of perfect health, for example, is given a value of 1.0 while a year of sub-optimum health is rated between 0 and 1. If you are confined to a wheelchair, a year of your life might be valued at half that of your ambulatory neighbor. If you are blind or deaf, you also score low. All that remains is to assign a specific dollar value to the QALY and, voilà, your life has a price tag.

Imagine if this kind of calculus would have been applied to Ludvig Von Beethoven or Stephen Hawkings or even Christopher Reeves (post paralysis).  How were any of their lives any less full or meaningful than anyone elses?  Remember that they (like people with severe Down Syndrome, people with advanced MS or CF, people who are old and arthritic, people paralyzed due to car accidents) would be considered people who are "irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens".  What would their lives be worth under ObamaCare.

When arguing in favor of "universal care" many of it's proponents say that providing health care for all is a "moral" obligation.  While I do not necessarily disagree that there isn't a moral obligation for man to help their fellow man in extraordinary situations - I do vehemently disagree with the notion that one must withhold services from one group of people in order to provide services to others.  THAT does not strike me as being highly moral at all!  Then again, I don't think that making people wait 10 years for treatment is highly moral either.

Dr. Emanual is not the only member of the Obama Administration's cadre of "Czars" to hold these kinds of views.  I wrote the other day about John Holdren, President Obama's Science Czar and his views on rationing health care as a means of controlling the population and there are sadly more where these two came from (stay tuned). When one looks at the Emma Lazarus poem which is carved into the base of Lady Liberty, one has to wonder what kind of "freedom" the new immigrants to this country will face.  Will they be lining up for jobs, or worse under ObamaCare?

Again, you can tell a lot about a person's political and life philosophies by who they surround themselves with.  Conservatives tried to bring this up during the election.  Can we now say we told you so?????