President Obama’s “Regulatory Czar,” chief of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein believes and espouses that the State owns your body and can, at what it considers sufficient need, use it how it  wishes to, up to and including harvesting your organs without your permission.

In his eyes we’re all merely meat for the State.

Some disturbing and salient points from Worth Reading:

President Obama’s newly confirmed regulatory czar defended the possibility of removing organs from terminally ill patients without their permission.

Cass Sunstein also has strongly pushed for the removal of organs from deceased individuals who did not explicitly consent to becoming organ donors.

In his 2008 book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” Sunstein and co-author Richard Thaler discussed multiple legal scenarios regarding organ donation. One possibility presented in the book, termed by Sunstein as “routine removal,” posits that “the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone’s permission.”

“Though it may sound grotesque, routine removal is not impossible to defend,” wrote Sunstein. “In theory, it would save lives, and it would do so without intruding on anyone who has any prospect for life.”

– Aaron Klein

Now Obama’s followers and Liberals in general would dispute the validity of the the sources for this post. They favor only sources within the Obama-approved MSM and absolutely despise the original source of this material, World Net Daily. Sadly for them, I actually perform independent research on the material I post and Cass Sunstein did actually commit those disgusting thoughts and beliefs to published paper.

To be fair to the Liberals, I’m not overly trusting of World Net Daily either. They do not cite sources, as if they were themselves a primary source. Given the current regime, that would be doubtful.

As is often the case with intelligent psychopaths, Sunstein does carefully work around the edges of what he wants to enforce. Much like President Obama, he is fond of maintaining enough “nuance” to uphold plausible deniability and therefor claim that any outrage leveled at his evil is merely a “false rumor.”

Sunstein was quite careful to couch his desires as one of several options. He put it forth as the “Routine Removal” option, alongside the “Explicit Consent” (America’s choice) and the “Presumed Consent” option used in some foreign nations. What is telling though to anyone that is trained to read for meaning and intent is that Sunstein had little to say against harvesting the organs of the dead and dying by fiat, whereas he had much to say against either the current “Explicit Consent” methodology or the “Presumed Consent” option.

This is an established technique for espousing controversial and/or evil ideas in a manner that both makes those ideas seem more reasonable and writer less strongly in favor of them, and hence less controversial or evil himself.  The more vile or unacceptable idea – the one truly being suggested – is put forth alongside two or more other, more palatable alternatives and thereby is presented as a possibility with equal weight as the acceptable ideas. The then writer or speaker elaborates on all of the practical problems with the more acceptable ideas while limiting his or issues with the suggested vile or unacceptable idea to those of beliefs or ideologies.

Given the times and Sunstein’s employer, perhaps I should have spoken simpler and just said that he presented a “nuanced” case for the State owning Americans’ flesh.

This is exactly what Cass Sunstein did by putting his idea of  “Routine Removal” of terminally ill patients’ and the recently deceased organs, alongside the “Explicit Consent” (America’s choice) and the “Presumed Consent” option; he attempted to grant his desire to harvest organs from sick Americans and our dead by fiat as course of action that had equal validity to the other ways of increasing organs for transplantation.

Then Sunstein goes on to showcase all the practical problems with both “Explicit Consent” (America’s choice) and the “Presumed Consent” options, whereas all that he has to say against his obviously preferred “Routine Removal” is that people would complain about it because it violated a “generally held principle.”

[sic]…many people would object to a law that allows the government to take parts of people’s bodies when they have not agreed, in advance, to the taking. Such an approach violates a generally held principle, which is that within broad limits, individuals should be able to decide what is to be done with and to their bodies.

– Cass Sunstein
Nudge, pg. 179

Combine Cass Sunstein’s views on who owns your body and its organs with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s Complete Lives System, which details a merit-based approach to healthcare rationing, and you can begin to put together a potentially horrifying future for Americans if ObamaCare is allowed to be enacted upon us.

Is this post inaccurate? Needlessly scary? Overly hyperbolic? Nothing but fear-mongering? You’d all better hope that it is so, or do something  to this stop scenario from happening.

When President Obama’s chief of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein believes that we’re all meat for the State, and President Obama’s special advisor to the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget for health policy, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel has already made plans for determining what relative value to place on individuals, the framework for atrocity has certainly been created.

Would such atrocities actually take place though? Maybe, maybe not and, in no case but the most extreme, would it happen all at once; it would come, if it were going to,  in seemingly easy to swallow, plausible phases.  It would also depend a great deal upon just how bad things get in America over the next few years and how well silenced we are by the government.

Worse has happened elsewhere though, and similarly vile and horrifying things are happening elsewhere right now. It would be foolish hubris to think that it couldn’t happen here.

A case in point; during President Obama’s August 11, 2009, Portsmouth, NH staged and scripted “Town Hall” meeting President Obama conjured up mythical support for ObamaCare.

We have the AARP on board because they know this is a good deal for our seniors.

Of course, given the concerns over Dr. Emanuel’s involvement, this is a poorly chosen bald-faced lie. ABC News, of all the unlikely places, has the truth of the matter.

“We have the AARP on board because they know this is a good deal for our seniors,” the president said.

At another point he said: “Well, first of all, another myth that we’ve been hearing about is this notion that somehow we’re going to be cutting your Medicare benefits.  We are not.  AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare, okay?”

The problem?

The AARP hasn’t endorsed any plan yet.

The country’s largest advocacy group for Americans over 50 issued a statement after the event saying, “While the President was correct that AARP will not endorse a health care reform bill that would reduce Medicare benefits, indications that we have endorsed any of the major health care reform bills currently under consideration in Congress are inaccurate.”

Busted! Hell, Busted in less than 24 hours and deemed so blatant a lie that even ABC felt that they had to refute it.

But President Obama was apparently on a roll in Portsmouth – to where, Americans do not know. Not satisfied with falsely claiming the support of the AARP for a healthcare plan that their clients are largely dead set against, President Obama went on to claim not only Republican support for ObamaCare, but actual Republican sponsorship of parts of it!

The irony is that actually one of the chief sponsors of this bill originally was a Republican — then House member, now Senator, named Johnny Isakson from Georgia — who very sensibly thought this is something that would expand people’s options. And somehow it’s gotten spun into this idea of “death panels.” I am not in favor of that. So just I want to –  I want to clear the air here.

What a coup for President Obama! He got to proclaim GOP sponsorship for controversial provisions – this was in regards to the end-of-life counseling amendment to the bill – in front of the MSM.

Of course it was either a lie or a foolish error. Even more surprisingly than ABC above, MSNBC has the truth of this matter:

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., today denounced comments made by President Obama and his spokesman regarding Isakson’s alleged connection to language contained in the House health care bill on “end-of-life counseling.”

Isakson vehemently opposes the House and Senate health care bills and he played no role in drafting language added to the House bill by House Democrats calling for the government to incentivize doctors by offering them money to conduct “end-of-life counseling” with Medicare patients every five years. Isakson also strongly opposed the House bill language calling for doctors to follow a government-mandated list of topics to discuss with patients during the counseling sessions.

By contrast, Isakson took a very different approach in July during the Senate HELP Committee hearings on the Senate version of the health care bill. Isakson’s amendment to the Senate bill says that anyone who participates in the long-term care benefit provided in the bill – if they so choose – may use that benefit to obtain assistance in formulating their own living will and durable power of attorney.

Isakson’s amendment, which was accepted unanimously by all Republicans and Democrats on the Senate HELP Committee, empowers the individual to make their own choices on these critical issues, rather than the government incentivizing doctors to conduct counseling on government-mandated topics. Isakson ultimately voted against the Senate health care bill.

“This is what happens when the President and members of Congress don’t read the bills. The White House and others are merely attempting to deflect attention from the intense negativity caused by their unpopular policies.  I never consulted with the White House in this process and had no role whatsoever in the House Democrats’ bill.  I categorically oppose the House bill and find it incredulous that the White House and others would use my amendment as a scapegoat for their misguided policies,” Isakson said.  “My Senate amendment simply puts health care choices back in the hands of the individual and allows them to consider if they so choose a living will or durable power of attorney. The House provision is merely another ill-advised attempt at more government mandates, more government intrusion, and more government involvement in what should be an individual choice.”

Busted again! Worse, busted in less than 24 hours and refuted by MSNBC, President Obama’s and his Liberals’ propaganda corps. Ouch! That’s about as bad as it gets.

I’m going to do my utmost best to remember this the next time I’m set to rant about the Liberal bias of the bulk of the MSM. They apparently do have lines that they won’t cross.

What real support that there was for ObamaCare is crumbling under the weight of American values and President Obama can’t even successfully conjure up mythical support for it either without his previously adoring and tame media exposing his lies.

Our war for America is nowhere near over, but American steadfastness is holding firm in the face of the enemy and President Obama and his Liberals are beginning to break apart as they dash themselves against our lines. Today is a very good day for America and Americans.

In an example of Orwellian TrueSpeak he calls his plan the Complete Lives System.

Dr. Emanuel first published his ideas of merit-based healthcare in the 1996 Hastings Center Report (Volume 26, No. 6) where he declaimed:

This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity – those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations – are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, 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. A less obvious example is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason.

You can download the article in PDF format here.

Over the ensuing years Dr. Emanuel fleshed out his plan over the following years and published it in the January, 2009 issue (Volume 373, Issue 9661) of The Lancet. Some excerpts from the article follow:

Some people wrongly suggest that allocation can be based purely on scientific or clinical facts, often using the term “medical need”. There are no value-free medical criteria for allocation.

~*~

Consideration of the importance of complete lives also supports modifying the youngest-first principle by prioritizing adolescents and young adults over infants. Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments. Similarly, adolescence brings with it a developed personality capable of forming and valuing long-term plans whose fulfillment requires a complete life.

~*~

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.

~*~

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.  Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.

~*~

Accepting the complete lives system for health care as a whole would be premature. We must first reduce waste and increase spending.

The complete article in PDF format, entitled, Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions, can be downloaded here.

Dr. Emanuel’s Complete Lives methodology of applying his interpretation of both allocative and distributive justice to healthcare is put forth in the context of having scarce medical resources available. That’s an important consideration when reviewing his Complete Lives proposal; it is not meant to address the allocation and distribution of readily available and plentiful medical resources, only scarce ones. It is a two-tiered system divided between basic (guaranteed) and discretionary (not guaranteed) medical services.  Some citizens will receive only basic services while others will receive both basic and some discretionary health services.

So we have to take Dr. Emanuel’s ideas in the context in which they were set, which makes them somewhat less monstrous and horrific than some of the commentary on the subject would have you believe.

That being said, one of the oft-stated goals of President Obama’s healthcare “reform” was to reduce costs and the amount of America’s GDP being spent on healthcare. That certainly implies that money – tax dollars or deficit dollars – will essentially be a medical resource. This could very easily create the sort scarcity that would call Dr. Emanuel’s bio-ethical philosophies into play. Dr Emanuel is, after all, a special advisor to the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget for health policy. He would definitely be consulted on streamlining expenditures.

How does that you feel? It definitely makes my skin crawl more than a little bit. There are just too many ways that Dr. Emanuel’s particular twist on eugenics could be quietly and on-legislatively introduced into any government ran healthcare system for me to be comfortable with the idea.