SOCIAL EMERGENCY - Evil Rears It's Head

Want to see what genuine evil looks like? Here it is:
Physicians call for refusal of treatment

"Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives. Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone. Fertility treatment and "social" abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state."

"The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as "out­rageous" and "disgraceful." About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt. Managers defend the policies because of the higher risk of complications on the operating table for unfit patients. But critics believe that patients are being denied care simply to save money." ...

This is a manifestation of an evil ideology: "a person's value to society is a function of their state of health", in the form of: "you cost too much, so we will allow you to die".

This horrific evil has been cultivated and promulgated by the Health Promotion industry. The Health Promotion industry has degenerated into a Hate Promotion industry. Cold-hearted bean-counting technocrats in Health Promotion have been generating and disseminating outrageously inflated "cost-to-society" estimates for various social minorities over many years now, and this fear-mongering propaganda is being used to justify the call for discrimination based on state of health.

Dr Michael Siegel condemns the violation of medical ethics inherent to this discrimination:

"The fallacy in the argument being used to support denial of medical treatment for smokers and others with "unhealthy lifestyles" is that the true incentive to deny care is not a clinical one, but instead is based on either a desire to save money or a moral judgment about individual behavior. Either way, it is a dangerous way of thinking - one that should be universally condemned by all of us in the medical and public health professions.
By definition, physicians who support the denial of medical care on a systematic basis to various groups of people are not basing the decision on clinical judgment. Because by definition, clinical judgment requires that a decision be made on a case-by-case basis, taking the specific details of the individual patient into account.
As soon as we leave the realm of individual clinical decision-making and instead, make decisions based upon policies that apply to groups of people, then we are abandoning the reliance on clinical judgment in favor of making our decisions based on other factors, whether they be financial concerns or an attempt to impose moral judgments on others."

It is important to understand that this fear-mongering has not been restricted to "unhealthy lifestyle" cost estimates - this hate propaganda is being generated in relation to all manner of powerless and vulnerable persons; autistics, addicts, the mentally challenged, persons suffering adult dementias, fetal alcohol victims, learning disabled persons, "hyperactive" children, children with other "behavioral disorders", AIDS and other communicable disease victims, single mother families and on & on.

But it is the Health Promotion industry that has been the primary force encouraging people to cast a suspicious eye at their neighbors and worry about "how much are you 'costing' me"?

A "cost-to-society" estimate is an evaluation of the alleged total economic impact that a social problem or disease has on a country's economy. You see these all the time in news reports, in the form of; "alzheimers is estimated to cost our economy $5 billion a year", or "the social cost of alcoholism is estimated to be over $10 billion dollars every year" (not actual cost estimates). There are complex rationalizations and justifications for generating these figures. There are technocrats in the Health Promotion industry whose job is to coldly evaluate how much various social minorities allegedly "cost" our society. Direct medical treatment costs for diseases are always the smallest component of the final cost estimate - usually 90% of the cost figure is derived from completely hypothetical and fictitious models. It's a lotta BS, folks. Their primary purpose is propaganda.

It's hard to imagine being one of the people who makes such estimates for a living. How can they ignore the fact that they are reducing human lives to a financial balance sheet? How can they live with the reality that they are putting price tags on everyone's heads? Imagine them walking around their neighborhoods...oh, here comes a "$37,000/year cost-to-society single mom" and her "$56,000/year COS disabled child"...and now here comes a "$42,000/year elderly recovering heart patient". Could there possibly be anything more sick and twisted than that?

Junkfood Science blog rightly raises the spectre of historic precedent:

"What happens when a nation embraces the idea that people bring health problems on themselves through undesirable behaviors, that the common good is greater than that of the individual, and that government determines what is best for all? When government health and medical policies are based on the inherent worth of individuals, can those who are seen as more costly or less productive be cast aside? Mark P. Mostert, Ph.D., of Regent University, examined the history of medical and healthcare policies in Germany during the early 1900s, in an article for the Journal of Special Education:

Societal tensions generated by deprivation, war, and notions of peoples’ relative worth based on their ability to contribute to society continued to affect people with disabilities in institutions across Germany until the late 1920s, precipitating rapid and radical attitudinal changes even as the medical and psychiatric communities continued to struggle with custodial issues related to asylum inmates. It was clear, however, that extensive and expensive care could not be expended on people who could not immediately aid Germany’s economic recovery... two perceptions were firmly fixed among German medical professionals and laypeople alike.

The distinction between voluntary euthanasia and involuntary killing was thus effectively eradicated, and an ominous term was coined for the first time: “life unworthy of life.” In 1920 the concept of living beings not worthy of the life they embodied gained impetus with a tract published by two university professors, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche. Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life articulated key implications for people with disabilities. Binding and Hoche called for the killing of people with disabilities... the imposition of others’ will upon them. This shifted the burden of human existence from simply being alive to requiring an explicit justification for living... the right to live was to be earned, not assumed. One earned the right to live by being a useful economic contributor to society....


The coming tyranny of the healthy -
Everyone needs to understand that chronic diseases such as addiction, diabetes, cancers and many respiratory ailments, are multi-factorial. This means, their development in any given person depend on a very complex interplay of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors.

By far, the most important component of these disease puzzles is genetic. What the British doctors cited above and many other Health Promotion quasi-eugenicists are proposing, is that persons with "more fortunate" genetics - who are unlikely to ever develop chronic diseases no matter what their lifestyle is like - should be given a free ride in our health system, while persons with "less fortunate" genetics - who are likely to eventually succumb to chronic disease even if they faithfully follow every lifestyle directive issued by Medocrat popes - should be scapegoated for their own illness and made to carry the full cost-burden of the health system!

THAT'S EVIL! THIS HAS TO BE STOPPED!

Cost-to-society estimates should be banned as the fear and hate propaganda that they truly are.
All public funding of the Health Promotion industry should be immediately suspended and remain suspended until adequate, independent regulation of that industry - outlawing promulgation of the ideology that a person's value to society is a function of their state of health - has been instituted.

Update:

Junkfood Science blog is reporting that a bill has been introduced into the Mississippi Legislature which would prohibit "food establishments" from serving anyone fitting a government-mandated description of "obese". Where are they getting these "governance instruments" (secret code phrase for policy directives) from - Dr Evil? The concept of such legislation is vile and repugnant. Hey...if they complemented this bill with a later one (incrementalism is their principle strategy) banning grocers from serving "obese" people, they could "assist" such persons to shed their alleged excess poundage from under 6 feet of soil! Talk about betrayals of social justice - this one would be beyond obscene.

Read about it here