Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel
Democrats announced on Wednesday that a deal was finally reached in the house to move healthcare reform forward, clearing the way for a vote in September.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is one of the key players in helping the Obama administration create sweeping reforms in the health care system. His role is to make the case for reform while reassuring medical professionals that it will not lead to an unwelcome upheaval.
“You are not going to flip a switch and change our system,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s got to be an evolution, not a revolution.”
Ezekiel is the older brother of Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, whom he speaks to daily. Described as an outspoken, accomplished academic with impressive medical and policy credentials, Ezekiel has spent the past two decades writing about guaranteeing health care for all. He brings a multitude of strengths to his position, including a medical perspective which was lacking during the debates over health care reform in the Clinton presidency.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (abcnews.com)
According to Vitals.com, he received his medical degree at Harvard University, completed a residency in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a fellowship in Hematology and Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
There are those who are critical of his ability to improve the system. In a controversial editorial printed in Bloomberg, former Lieutenant Governor, Betsy McCaughey blasted Emanuel, warning Americans that provisions of the stimulus bill “are bad for your health” and discriminates against older patients.
And although he is well-respected in medical and academic circles, health care reform advocates question his experience.
But Emanuel feels he has had unique preparation.
“I can say things that other people may not be able to. It’s the perspective of having been in the trenches, having had to negotiate with insurance companies and doctors and patients and trying to get services. I think I understand the mechanics out there better than an economist or a health policy expert who has studied it from afar.”
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who recently earned a black belt in tae kwon do, is prepared for anything as he travels the perilous bi-partisan road in pursuit of improved healthcare in America.
Complete Lives System
Created by Obama’s special health advisor, Ezekial Emanuel who according to the Huffington post is involved in restructuring the health care system of America.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/19/zeke-emanuel-obamas-healt_n_176884.html
Dr. Ezekial Emanuel in January 2009.
“Complete Lives System“
Quotes,
“The death of a 20-year-old young woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects. Youngest-first allocation also ignores prognosis, and categorically excludes older people. Thus, youngest-first allocation seems insufficient on its own, but it could be combined with prognosis and lottery principles in a multiprinciple allocation system.”
Because none of the currently used systems satisfy all ethical requirements for just allocation, we propose an alternative: the complete lives system. This system incorporates five principles: youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value. … 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 … the complete lives system is least vulnerable to corruption. Age can be established quickly and accurately from identity documents. Prognosis allocation encourages physicians to improve patients’ health, unlike the perverse incentives to sicken patients or misrepresent health that the sickest-first allocation creates.”
For more by Ezekial Emanuel,
“Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions”
http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/PIIS0140673609601379.pdf
In Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet” (Hastings Report) 1996 Ezekial said;.
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.“
I question Ezekial’s ethics.
PERIOD!
Well look, he wrote that nearly 15 yrs ago, and with a medical ethicist, they are drawing on old information and ideas when they come to some conclusions or suggestions. Then sometimes they are just putting things out there to stimulate discussion.
I agree, his screed sounds ridiculous and shows a genuine lack of respect for life, in general because many people see a lack of value in another person, when they have no emotional connection to them. Easy to say this old person is not worth it until it is YOUR old person.
I am only disturbed that people like Palin who are clueless, namely about everything, but particularly about her own son, is out there riding a truck over the nuance, AND the fact that it was written quite a long time ago. I would expect Dr Emmanuel to respond, and do so quickly! Most people’s life views change in that same amount of time, and I would be he got an earful when he first wrote it.
When I was in college, for Physical Therapy, one of my professors tried to introduce the idea of how one assigns human value, and care. Triage is often a part of medical care~that is deciding who you prioritize, and sometimes in the midst of an emergency, medical providers DO have to make the decision to let some go.
In providing insurance, we are not in the midst of an active emergency, so the deicision is different; it might be do we go into debt, or do we take money from other programs to provide full and complete on demand, health coverage. These are still questions, but then he has left out the real life example. A friend of mine had a grandmother with dementia, at 98, she got pneumonia each winter, and eventually the doctors came to her asking if they should give her antibiotics the next time she sick. She said yes, they were not so sure–afterall her life, was more like a rag doll at that point that you feed, bathe, and turnover. In the meantime, she got gangrene, lost a leg, they questioned my friend on whether or not they should amputate,again to prolong this woman’s life. She said yes, and they did. She survived, and she didn’t even seem to notice the leg was gone, to their surprise. Then my friend said, yes, they could stop any treatments like antibiotics so that nature, when it happened again, could take it’s course. Oddly enough, she did not die, but she did get sick, and she recovered, and she lived another 10 yrs.
It was nearly impossible to say that she was happy, or sad, or anything except old, and confused. But it raises a LOT of questions about the amount of money that was spent. In the end my friends’s grandmother did not survive so much because of intervention, but because as the doctors later said, it was as if her body just forgot to how to die, unlike all the other things it forgot. But some, perhaps most will need intervention to survive when things get very bad, and the question really is, does anyone of us really wish for that to be our end?
We all know and it is well-documented that Rahm Emanuel is the ultimate “cut-throat.”
Now we have brother Dr. Zeke who promotes “survival of the fittest” without compassion or thoughts about one’s value to friends and family.
Palin’s “death panel” remarks may be over the line — but if Dr. Zeke has publicly stated his biases, what are the “private” discussions like?
The problem with any of these discussion from Dr. Zeke Emanuel is that individual rights are not even considered. Too much government intervention — and way too ghoulish for America.
Well, no he wrote that in January 2009. That was 8 months ago.
Wendy, Your lengthy note has some valid points, but it appears you missed hitting the nail on the head in the end. As you say, in triage emergency conditions are in place and justify the making of emergency judgments. Building that criteria into an national insurance solution ignores the fact that even in triage those decisions are not easy and are intrinsically based on personalized medical involvement with the patient, not a accountant looking at balance sheets. By the theories exposed by this idiot, a life of a baby in Dr. Stephen Hawking’s condition would be viewed as too expensive, but the world would have missed out on one of the greatest theoretical physicists of our timee since Einstein. I mention him as just one example of how ignorant we are to base the choices of others on the medical treatment they choose for themselves. Maybe their choices are not “economically viable” in an accountant’s eye, but the future is uncertain. I pose this question in response to the doctor’s statement that ” ti was if her body forgot to how to die.” The doctor forgot how to live and how to be a doctor. A doctor who does not approach every patient as an opportunity to learn and grow in their knowledge does a disservice to those he treats, or fails to treat. That is not to say everyone is a test subject, but maybe there was something to earn from the poor woman’s end of life that could benefit those that followed. It is not ours or any other person’s right to make those decisions for anyone else. As for what an individual wants in there final hours regarding medical care, the tools for that already exist for the individual, not government, to specify in the form of living wills and advance directives. They are simple, personal, and free to anyone who asks for the papers in a hospital. So do anyone wish the same for that in the end? It is your undeniable right as a human being to make that individual decision in private, and that right should not be denied. To deny treatment to someone based on a belief that they are, for whatever reason, not “worth” the expense, is nothing less than thoughtful killing with good intentions. No one has that right over the other, ever!
wendy, as soon as you start tearing down others to try to make a point, you invalidate your point. medicine and government should stay at arms length. any time that social, economic, and “community” factors get in the way of medical decisions, there is a problem. period.
Wendy, your intentions are good I’m sure but check your notes. He said this not 15 years ago but THIS YEAR!!! January 2009. I love watching politicians and talking heads roll their eyes at people’s “paranoid and irrational fears” about rationing while Obama’s health care advisor is saying just a few months agoa that he is in favor of exactly that… and no one is talking about this when I turn on the news. Bizarre…
Here is what Vitals.com tells you:
He got out of medical school in 1988. He than went on to his residency which he completed in 1992. Than joined the faculty of Dana Farber.
He is a doctor in name only – he is just an academic who probably couldn’t cut it in the day to day world of medicine and obviously has a problem with the Hippocratic Oath. There is always a difference betwee “theory” and “practice”.
Dr. Emanuel was educated at the following institutions:
Medical School
Harvard Medical School
Completed: 1988
Residency
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center•
Internal Medicine, Completed: 1990
Top 25%
Fellowship
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute•
Hematology & Oncology, Completed: 1992
Awards & Distinctions
Appointments:
The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health
Chair of the Department of Clinical Bioethics
Associations:
American Society of Clinical Oncology
Member
General Information
Biography & Background:
Ezekiel Emanuel earned his PhD and MD degrees from Harvard University where his doctoral dissertation received the Toppan Award for the finest political science dissertation of the year. After earning his MD PhD, he was a Fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions at Harvards Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Emanuel completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Bostons Beth Israel Hospital and an Oncology Fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and then joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Before accepting his current position as the Chair of the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in 1998, Dr. Emanuel was an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Widely published on the ethics of clinical research, advance care directives, end-of-life issues, euthanasia, the ethics of managed care, and the physician-patient relationship, Dr. Emanuels articles have appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Journal of American Medical Association, and many other medical and ethics journals. His book, The Ends of Human Life, has been widely praised and received the Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Dr. Emanuel served on the ethics section of former President Clintons Health Task Force, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and the International Advisory Board on Bioethics of the Pan American Health Organization. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, UCLA, and Brin Professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He is an oncologist.