Holland's Horrific 'Cost of a Downer' Show Exposes Gov't-Run Eugenics

P. Gardner Goldsmith | December 18, 2017
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There’s a darkness in the West, especially when it comes to collectivist health systems, moral and ethical decay, and the destruction of the Hippocratic Oath.

A case in point has arisen which whispers of this anti-human mentality, and which joins in a chorus of stories and admissions from places like the UK, Canada, and the U.S. telling us to be very aware that state-run health care requires the faceless government machine to pick and choose who gets care and who does not.

The story comes to us via a Dutch television show given the horrifying and significant title, “The Last Downer." Referring to people born with Down Syndrome, the program featured a Down man watching as a mathematician calculated the “costs to society” his life represents.

What?

Yeah. They actually told him that, by existing, by simply living, this man was “costing society” 48,000 Euros per year. As the narrator explained:

“The Dutch National Institute for Health (RIVM) has, at the request of The Last Downer, calculated what the costs are to care for a Downer.”

This is Hitlerian thinking.

But it is not alien to many Western nations, including the U.S.

In Holland, where economic fascism and socialism have had footholds for a long time (despite the eugenics-loving national socialist Nazis invading in World War Two and devastating the population), the idea that “everyone pays” has been prevalent since at least 2006, when the Dutch government did something a few Americans might find familiar. Politicians mandated that all citizens buy health insurance, and that all health insurance companies accept “guaranteed issue” mandates – meaning health insurance was no longer insurance, because the companies had to accept people who already had health problems.

As free market economists in the U.S. predicted in the 1970s, this sets people against one another. Prices rise because the insurance companies are not allowed to rate policies based on risk assessment, and then payments are capped and care is rationed. And that’s only in a fascist system like what the Dutch and US currently have.

In England, the National Health System (NHS) -- which is a “universal” (i.e. socialist) health payment bureaucracy -- the demand for government-paid services has become so astronomically burdensome, the NHS instituted the so-called “Liverpool Pathway”, which sees doctors and nurses withhold life-sustaining hydration and medicine from elderly and very young terminally ill patients. The UK system also has been revealed to have used the bodies of aborted babies to help fuel hospital furnaces, and many managers of the NHS were revealed to have exchanged secret messages with each other discussing ways to hide their bankruptcy and impending clinic closures from the public. Just this year, the NHS floated the idea that civilians should be approached to house patients in their homes for payments from the government, rather than having patients stay in the incredibly expensive hospitals. Its managers also discussed not allowing smokers and overweight people to get elective surgeries.

Beginning in the mid 1990s, not only were Canadian citizens so disgusted with the waiting periods for doctor visits and elective surgeries their socialized system inspired that they flooded over the US border, folks also realized that government caps on payments to doctors were prompting doctors to cut back on the time they saw patients. It got so bad that in 1996, civilian complaints in British Colombia were met with new proposals by politicians to tell doctors how many patients they would be able to see per day, and what maladies would take precedent. I know this because I lived in Vancouver at the time.

Which brings us back to Holland. As seen in practice in the UK, a government-mandated health system always trends towards politicians making decisions about “our collective resources”. This, by definition, means that individual preferences and moral/ethical choices are no longer permitted, and even the Hippocratic Oath is replaced by a new definition of “harm”: harm to the collective. If a patient is “burdensome” to the state, the state is permitted to cut off aid to that patient. This is a quantitatively based decision, a purely utilitarian process in which the only morality is that which promotes the state.

Hence, “Downers” – a term already infused with negative connotations – are seen not as individuals, but as expenses, not as living, breathing souls blessed with the capacity for happiness and goodness, but as ledger entries on a broad government-mandated, “we all pay” spreadsheet.

The same for overweight people in the UK. We all pay, so you’d better change your behavior, or “we” will withhold the healthcare “we” manage via the emotionless state.

Think this is alien to the US? Think again. Many politicians want the equivalent of “Death Panels” as written into Obamacare under the title, “Independent Payment Advisory Board” (IPAB) and the term “Best Practices.”

These functional apparatuses place politicians and bureaucrats in charge of what the government will pay, and for what. They are partly the brainchild of Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, a doctor who helped fashion Obamacare, and who has openly stated that he does not want to live past 75, because he believes people who do so are a burden on “society” (ie the government-funded health system he espouses). In fact, in his seemingly endless 2014 piece for The Atlantic, Emanuel not only offers this choice as his own, but implies that his example should be the norm, and that policy should lead the way. He goes so far as to quote Sir William Oster, from his textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine:

“Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old man escapes those ‘cold gradations of decay’ so distressing to himself and to his friends.”

Sure thing.

And this kind of soulless conceit – wherein someone can assume for another what is best for him or her, simply undercut another’s personal hopes, preferences, dreams, and very life -- is what “policy-makers” (also known as political thugs) like Emanuel have promoted for years. In fact, Emanuel has stated that he sees it as essential that the U.S. health system decide which people get the government resources. Like the Liverpool Pathway, if one is older and ill, or very tiny and not standing a great chance of survival, government resources should be cut off. It’s all about the value you represent to the state, i.e., the potential you have of surviving to become a taxpayer who will be a good “investment” for the government.

To them, you are government livestock, and Emanuel is the manager of the slaughter shack.

So when you see reports about the Dutch calculating the “expense to society” of a “Downer”, don’t think this is a foreign concept, or lost with the Nazis. It’s already been written into U.S. policy, and the attitude that produced it is prevalent among the left.

As Princeton professor Robert George asked:

"Do the Dutch, who suffered under — and in many cases heroically resisted — Hitler's domination, forget that the 'final solution' began with the dehumanization and eugenic killing of the handicapped?"

It seems many in Holland do. And so, too, do they in the U.S.

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