Discrimination against the elderly when it comes to healthcare is not discrimination — at least not to a key member of the Barack Obama administration.
Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and an architect of Obama's healthcare reform plan. He is also the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's White House chief of staff.
Express Riders, the blog of conservative businessman and philanthropist Foster Friess, reports that Ezekiel Emanuel has written that health services should not be guaranteed to "individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens."
He also stated, "An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia," according to Friess' site.
Friess also points to an equally troubling article co-authored by Emanuel, which appeared in the medical journal The Lancet in January. It read in part: "Unlike allocation [of healthcare] 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."
Friess asks: "Are these the values we want undergirding our healthcare system?"
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