From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Governor Lam Offers Brave New World Rationalization For Euthanasia
Date: 6 Apr 92 21:23:05 GMT
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
X-Fidonet: Split

Index Number: 20811

Governor Lamm offers brave new world
rationalization for euthanasia
by Steve Parsons

During the 1980s, Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm
attained national notoriety for advocating what no other
major politician had dared to say: that the withholding of
medical care for those whose ``useful'' life had passed,
was not only appropriate, but a virtue necessary for
preserving the United States. Lamm worked hard to
popularize the socially taboo ideas of health care
rationing and euthanasia, which had heretofore been
confined to academic debates over ethics. Lamm argued,
``We've got a duty to die, to get out of the way.'' He
compared the effort to prolong human life to the futility
of pasting fallen leaves back on trees.
   Today, Lamm is the director of a think-tank at the
University of Denver called the Center for Public Policy
and Contemporary Issues. His career and his message have
intersected the increasing inability of the U.S. health
care system to meet the medical needs of the population,
at the same time that costs have soared beyond the means
of Americans to pay, and disease rates are rising because
of social collapse--tuberculosis, measles, AIDS, etc. What
is required are crash research programs on cures and
treatment for AIDS, cancer, and other diseases, and a
resumption of advanced health care--from infant
vaccinations to geriatric medicine.
   Instead, Lamm's outrageous views of yesterday are now
considered not only respectable, but are the genesis of
myriad legislation and medical regulations that aim to
curtail costs through restricting treatment and
prematurely ending life through living wills, ``assisted
suicide,'' and outright medical euthanasia.
   In contrast to these views of the death lobby, the
economic benefits to a society from high-technology health
care should be obvious. The real measure of the adequacy
of health care as an economic necessity is: Does it extend
human life? Does the average individual in society live
longer? And is the population growing?
   Examples abound of even simple money-saving benefits
from providing health care, instead of cutting budgets. In
the recent Texas measles epidemic, universal vaccination
of the young was not carried out, in order ``to save
money.'' Subsequently, thousands of children required far
more costly hospitalization.
   Lamm most recently appeared with Sen. Jay Rockefeller
(D-W.Va.) on a health care panel at a March 11 conference
sponsored by the Economic Strategy Institute, but his
rationalizations for denying health care had been
formulated in a paper entitled ``The Brave New World of
Health Care,'' issued in May 1990.

        - U.S. economy can't afford health care -
   In his paper, Lamm makes clear that his primary
concern over health care costs has nothing to do with
improving health care availability or delivery. On the
contrary, his subtitle, ``Health Care as Economic
Cancer,'' indicates his view that ``costs in the United
States are making our economy sick.'' He castigates the
morality that believes ``that everyone is entitled to
unlimited health care regardless of how costly and without
regard to a patient's prognosis for recovery,'' blasting
those who term his ``mere suggestions to the contrary ...
as an act of callous insensitivity.'' We must face up to
the reality that health care costs are consuming so much
of our gross national product that it will soon paralyze
the entire economy, he claims.
   It is the rising cost of health care that constitutes
one of the greatest drains from our competitiveness with
other nations, writes Lamm, as well as ``the single
biggest cause of individual bankruptcy and of industrial
unrest ... [which] could wreak havoc with reported
[corporate] profits, book values, and stock market
valuations.'' Our ``medical genius'' and ``exploding
technology'' are leading to ``fiscal suicide''--unless we
``begin making hard choices and develop a system that
provides the best possible health care to the greatest
number of people {at a price the nation can afford}
[emphasis added].
   ``We are careening rapidly into a brave new world of
health care'' whose ``basic defining characteristic ... is
that we have invented more beneficial medicine than we as
a society can afford to pay for.... America's economy no
longer throws off as large a growth dividend with which to
buy benefits for its citizens. Our exploding health care
costs and our shrinking economy (caused in part by our
exploding health care costs) are on a collision course....
We no longer are as wealthy a nation as we once were. Our
resources are growing arithmetically, our health care
geometrically.''
   Therefore, concludes Lamm, ``How we adjust to this
brave new world ... will be politically and professionally
painful.... We shall, inevitably, have to decide what is
`appropriate'--not merely what could be `beneficial.'...
Health care prioritizing is the ugly child of our
brilliant success in health care.'' This prioritization
amounts to triaging--a polite term for killing--whole
segments of the population, axing research and development
of new technologies, savaging the morality and practice of
the medical profession, and destroying the humanity and
cultural values of America.

         - Accommodating to economic collapse -
   Unlike most other purveyors of the same bestial
policies, Lamm has exposed the fallacious premise of all
the arguments for rationing and triage: that one must
accept as a given the destitute and degenerating condition
of the U.S. economy. If one accepts that premise, there is
indeed no way that necessary health care can be provided.
If one does not change what for Lamm is this immutable
reality, then virtually everything he delineates, from the
breakdown in health care to the ``painful remedies,'' is
inevitable, regardless of one's moral outrage.
   Lamm believes Americans will do nothing fundamental
to reverse the depression. In 1984, he wrote an article
for {Playboy} magazine saying that George Orwell's {1984}
was not wrong, but merely a bit late. He titled that
article ``1994: A Prediction,'' and wrote:
   ``I believe we are now heading toward a gloomy future
filled with major economic, political, and social traumas,
and it's not that we can't alter that trend but that we
{won't.} Thus, we're careening toward disasters of our own
making.... These hard problems ... won't get better,
they'll get worse--unless attacked immediately. What
follows are my own best-guess predictions about where
certain political, social, and economic forces are taking
us. I have borrowed a technique from Orwell, whose book
projected 35 years into the future to help us conceive the
inconceivable. In this case, I have merely added 10 years
to this date.
   {``We will see a Depression-like economic trauma
before 1994''} from the ``{new reality of the static
economic pie.... By 1994, it will have become clear that
the U.S. is a country in liquidation.... 1994 will see the
U.S. with a substantially reduced middle class, and we
will have moved toward a two-class society.... 1994 will
see a bitter battle over a shrinking number of jobs.... I
predict that 1994 will see America's cities largely full
of angry, frustrated, and unemployed minorities....
America's health care system will be bankrupt by 1994.
   ``The Third World will be bankrupt by 1994.... By
1994, the U.S. will have an international welfare caseload
to add to its domestic welfare caseload.... We will see
constant political turmoil on our southern borders''}
(emphasis in original).
   In a 1985 lecture series at Pacifica School of
Religion in Berkeley, California, Lamb underscored his
contention that his predicted fate of nations is the
result of failing to act to change these otherwise
inevitable outcomes. ``These are not `developing'
countries,'' Lamb said. ``They are `never-to-be-developed'
countries. It is sad but true that most of the world's
poor will stay poor--and that there is nothing the
developed nations can do to alter this ... [to] make a
dent in their poverty.... Aristotle said it so well, `From
time to time it is necessary that pestilence, famine, and
war prune the luxuriant growth of the human race.'|''

            - Competitiveness ... and Perot -
   It is obvious that if the United States continues in
its present course, Lamm's 1994 brave new world will
indeed become reality. He and his accomplices in the death
lobby will have succeeded in destroying what he targeted
in that same lecture series: our cultural ``optimism
[that] is too deep; our traditions [that] are too strong;
our history [that] is too rich; and our self-confidence
[that] is too bold.''
   Indeed, Lamm's line that health care is one of the
biggest causes of the nation's lack of international
competitiveness, was retailed on March 1 by the
Competitiveness Policy Council. ``We single out this
sector for particular attention,'' said the council. Such
costs ``divert a large share of national resources that
could be used productively elsewhere.''
   This thinking is also reflected by billionaire H.
Ross Perot, who is now being puffed by the media as an
independent presidential candidate. During an interview
March 27 on the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, Perot blamed the
elderly for much of the nation's economic ills. He said he
agreed with outgoing Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.), who
blasted ``special interest'' groups for blocking attempts
to cap entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social
Security. ``He's right,'' said Perot.
   ``There's a wonderful phenomenon going on here around
all of these special interests, and I think there can be
some good balancing out of that, specifically on the
entitlements and so forth,'' Perot said. ``We now have a
new huge groundswell coming up of the 18- to 40-year-olds
who are mad as the devil and are not going to take it
anymore because we're spending their money. Now ... if
they ever get organized, they have a secret weapon....
Some of the people who created this problem, by and large,
are their parents. They will sit down with mom, dad,
grandmother, and granddad and, on a private basis, get a
lot of this straightened out, because no mother and father
can look their children in the eye and say, `Sure, we're
taking your money and we're proud of it.' That's democracy
at work.''
   If the baby boomers in fact do what Perot advocates,
and gang up on their parents and grandparents in a show of
social Darwinian force, Lamm's predictions will indeed
come true. Ironically, Lamm's brave new world will soon
destroy the rest of the population, which will be
systematically weeded out by such epidemics as AIDS and
diseases of poverty that an increasingly triaged health
care system will be unable to combat.

>From  Executive Intelligence Review, V19, #15.

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         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com