I am the dog

If I seem a little preoccupied with the debate over Obamacare, it’s because I have a dog in this fight.

Actually, I am the dog in the fight.

I was born July 14, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was hoisted to the top of the steel tower in the New Mexico desert. Depending upon whose definition you use, that may or may not put me in the Baby Boom generation. Either way, it makes me 64 this year and a member of the demographic group whose quality of health care will be seriously compromised by the various plans being advanced by the Democrats.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy advisor to President Obama and the brother of the President’s chief of staff. Dr. Emanuel has written that some medical services should not be guaranteed to those“who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens….An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

Dr. Emanuel has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”

Fuck Dr. Emanuel and fuck his attenuated “chances!”

This is the slippery slope to eugenics. Here’s what Jonah Goldberg has to say about it:

“More children from the fit, less from the unfit…” [Margaret Sanger] frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by [H.G.] Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children…and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” [...]

Of course, orthodox eugenics also aimed at the “feebleminded” and “useless bread gobblers” — which included everyone from the mentally retarded to an uneducated and malnourished underclass to recidivist criminals. When it comes to today’s “feebleminded,” influential voices on the left now advocate the killing of “defectives” at the beginning of life and at the end of life. Chief among them is Peter Singer, widely hailed as the most important living philosopher and the world’s leading ethicist. Professor Singer, who teaches at Princeton, argues that unwanted or disabled babies should be killed in the name of “compassion.” He also argues that the elderly and other drags on society should be put down when their lives are no longer worth living.

Singer doesn’t hide behind code words and euphemisms in his belief that killing babies isn’t always wrong, as one can deduce from his essay titled “Killing Babies Isn’t Always Wrong” (nor is he a lone voice in the wilderness; his views are popular or respected in many academic circles). But that hasn’t caused the Left to ostracize him in the slightest (save in Germany, where people still have a visceral sense of where such logic takes you).

So what we have is a government plan to withhold quality-of-life enhancing health care to those of us who were responsible, productive tax-paying citizens all of our adult lives so it can extend health care benefits to able-bodied younger people who refuse to work or engage in any activity that would get them private health care.

Can you see why I take this personally? And why it pisses me off more than I can say?

I didn’t work and contribute to society all of my life just so I could be denied quality health care during my retirement years and have to listen to some government “death panel” counsel me on my end-of-life options.

I’m heartened today to see I apparently have a lot of company. The most recent Rasmussen polls show public support for Obama’s health care reform is dropping like an anvil. Fifty-three percent of the respondents in a national telephone survey say they oppose Obamacare, up 9 points since late June.

More significantly, 44% of voters strongly oppose the health care reform effort versus 26% who strongly favor it. Intensity has been stronger among opponents of the plan since the debate began.

Sixty-seven percent (67%) of those under 30 favor the plan while 56% of those over 65 are opposed. Among senior citizens, 46% are strongly opposed.

And, Rasmussen Reports said today, Obama’s poll numbers are below the 50% approval level and still falling.

Overall, 47% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. That’s the lowest level of total approval yet recorded. The President’s ratings first fell below 50% just a few weeks ago on July 25. Fifty-two percent (52%) now disapprove.

I’d like to believe the tide is turning, but I refuse to underestimate the forces of evil.