Imagine a scenario in which, in your old age, you are required to make periodic visits to your doctor to discuss your “end of life” options, including hospice and palliative care, powers of attorney, and how to modify or terminate life-sustaining treatment.  Moreover, if you have a serious or terminal illness, you are required to make these visits more frequently. 

This probably sounds like a scene from George Orwell’s 1984, but it’s actually a provision from the health care bill (H.R. 3200).  Section 1233 to be exact.

Is it any wonder that Rahm Emanuel was trying to get the House of Representative to vote on the health care bill this week: he and other top-ranking Democrats (including President Obama) wanted to ram the bill through before anyone knew what was in it.

Provisions like section 1233 would make George Washington throw up in his grave.  It effectively mandates physician consultations with the elderly that will educate them on how to die with dignity.

On page 425 of the bill, it requires an “advance care planning consultation” for the elderly if a similar consultation has not been conducted within the past five years.  This consultation concerns “the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice.”  It also focuses on “orders regarding life-sustaining treatment or similar orders.”

It also states, on page 428, that this consultation “may be conducted more frequently . . . if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual,” and then proceeds to list various general descriptions of terminal illnesses and conditions.

Section 1233 is a slick way of mandating consultations that educate the elderly on how to die with dignity.  In other words, euthanasia.

That is not a far-fetched interpretation of the bill.  Recall that it mandates these consultations and focuses on “end-of-life services,” including “orders regarding life-sustaining treatment.”  One of my liberal friends emphasized that this language specifies “life-sustaining treatment” and not terms like “euthanasia.”  But the complete phrase describes “orders regarding life-sustaining treatment.”

When someone goes into cardiac arrest at a hospital or falls into a coma, a doctor’s natural and legal inclination is to “sustain” that person’s life.  That effort continues until a person properly designated pursuant to a will or a will itself orders the doctor or doctors to cut off life-sustaining treatment.  These “orders” modify or terminate the treatment that is given, and they represent what section 1233’s language refers to: “orders regarding life-sustaining treatment” or orders that modify or terminate the life-sustaining treatment given to someone who is terminally ill. 

There may be nothing wrong with such orders.  But there is something sickeningly wrong when the federal government mandates consultations that educate the elderly regarding such orders.  Why do liberals feel the need to exert control over someone’s end-of-life planning?  What is behind this?

The answer is simple.  This health care bill has nothing to do with helping the uninsured.  Such compassionate motives do not appear to exist when you actually read this bill.  And I don’t think they ever existed at all.  This bill is about control.  And it makes perfect sense.  Any health care plan that dumps 100+ million people into a government-run, public option and that does not add a corresponding number of doctors into the mix inevitably has to ration out care.  Such a system must eliminate waste, and the most “waste” in the system results from the elderly, who account for most of the costs via their frequent checkups, tests, surgeries, and multiple life-sustaining devices (e.g., pacemakers, oxygen tanks, etc.).

Given the costs incurred by the elderly, I am not surprised that provisions like section 1233 were included in this bill.  It helps the government eliminate much of the “waste” in the system and attempt to bridge the gap between what this bill would cost and the revenue the government currently has.

One of the ways to bridge that gap is to place the elderly on a “fast track” of sorts when their days become numbered.  It is a perverted role for the government to assume, and it illustrates how important it is for Americans to understand what is in this bill and why it must be defeated.