by KATE RANDALL
In an op-ed piece published Friday, New York Times columnist David Brooks reveals the real thinking of America’s financial aristocrats in relation to health care spending. In chilling terms he gives vent to their bitterness over the “squandering” of resources to extend the lives of commoners and their determination to put an end to it.
The column made its appearance in the midst of discussions between the White House and congressional Democrats and Republicans on a bipartisan plan to slash trillions of dollars from health and retirement programs for the elderly and the poor, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The Obama administration has taken the lead in this unprecedented attack on basic social reforms dating back to the 1930s, insisting that any move to raise the debt ceiling must be tied to massive cuts.
The essence of Brooks’ column is summed up in the headline, “Death and Budgets.” In order to resolve the budget deficit, he argues, people will have to die sooner.
“This fiscal crisis is about many things,” he writes, “but one of them is our inability to face death—our willingness to spend our nation into bankruptcy to extend life for a few more sickly months.” It is the American people’s selfish and ignorant desire to live longer, not the mindless greed and extravagant wealth of the ruling elite or the trillions spent on war and bank bailouts, that is bankrupting the country, he argues.
In the typical manner of a sophist, Brooks holds up the case of one patient with a horribly debilitating and incurable disease to argue against “unnecessary” treatments for millions of others. Brooks cites Dudley Clendinen, a former editorial writer for the Times, who has ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and has chosen to forgo further treatment.
Speaking about the conditions of those who are diagnosed with ALS, Brooks declares, “Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag.” Here the venomous tone is as telling as the words. How many ailing and aging people alive today would Brooks and his ilk consign to the category of “self-enclosed skin bags?”
There is more than a whiff of fascism here. Brooks does not propose the Nazi solution to the “problem” of physically or mentally disabled people—mass extermination—but one can easily imagine the engineers of such horrors using similar language to describe their victims.
Extending to its logical conclusion the type of “cost-benefit analysis” of human life advocated by Brooks, one Nazi propaganda poster for euthanasia from the 1930s declared that individuals “suffering from hereditary defects cost the community 60,000 Reichsmark… Fellow Germans, that is your money, too.”
Brooks does suggest that anyone who is diagnosed with ALS should agree to end his or her life early. He is contemptuous of human feelings and ignores the social contributions that even seriously ill people can make. The case of scientist Stephen Hawking springs to mind, a brilliant intellect who, thanks to the life-extending advances of modern medicine, has made some of his most important contributions even while severely disabled by ALS.
The case of Clendinen is cynically cited by Brooks in order to argue for the rationing of health care. “We have the illusion that in spending so much on health care costs we are radically improving the quality of our lives,” he declares. Why this is an “illusion” he does not say. It is, however, a fact that since Medicare—the government health insurance program for the elderly—was introduced in 1965, poverty among senior citizens in America has declined sharply and life expectancy has climbed.
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