Long-time civil rights advocate Nat Hentoff has joined the chorus of those claiming that the health care reform bill backed by the Obama administration will create "death panels."
"I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him," the 84-year-old Hentoff writes. "I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board … decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive."
Hentoff was regarded forty years ago as one of the nation's greatest exponents of free speech, but he has grown steadily more conservative in recent years. Raw Storycommented when he was laid off by the liberal Village Voice last winter, "He supported the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds and became an opponent of abortion to the point where he refused to support the candidacy of Barack Obama."
In his current reference to a "federal board" making decisions about treatment, Hentoff draws upon — but also goes well beyond — a concern that proposals to study the comparative effectiveness of various drugs and surgical approaches could lead to some patients being denied expensive but potentially life-saving treatments.
"The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question," Hentoff writes direly, raising the specter of an impersonal panel handing down case-by-case death sentences to the elderly with no possibility of appeal.
The function of the proposed board, however, would be to study treatments, not make rulings about individuals. As the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly noted last spring, this sort of "comparative effectiveness research … has been employed for years by state Medicaid programs, the Veterans Health Administration and many private health plans" and is credited with saving hundreds of millions of dollars.
Hentoff also raises the much-debunked issue of end-of-life counseling, implying that rather than being voluntary, these "fateful consultations" may be imposed by "Obama's doctors" as a means of steering patients away from treatment and towards hospice care.
Hentoff thanks the "invaluable" Wesley J. Smith for bringing this issue to his attention. Smith, a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, is a self-proclaimed bioethicist, best known for his opposition to assisted suicide, human cloning, and radical environmentalism. He is considered a "pro-life hero" by the anti-abortion movement.
Hentoff's latest column has already been seized on by conservative bloggers, withcomments such as "When Obamacare scares even the uber leftwing, you know it's bad."
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