There is a man whose money has facilitated a wide variety of projects in this country and abroad. His name is George Soros, and his ventures run the gamut from politics to helping the poor. Among them, there is his extraordinary work in the area of palliative care (pain relief), death and dying.
In view of the rant currently being propagated by the Pallimed blog, which is a commentary on news and items of interest to hospice and palliative medicine, there is a need to dig deeper and explore the underlying philosophy among those who are outraged that people like me are saying something negative about their agenda.
When those in the business of providing pain relief to patients charge forward with negative descriptive adjectives, meant to demean the work of people like myself and the LifeTree experts, you can pretty much conclude that we are on to something. If not, the supporters of Obamacare would be using logic rather than pointing fingers and attempting to relegate us to the right-wing fringe.
It’s a free country, but the facts are essentially unchanging regardless of the hysteria. In the real world where people live and die, a recent e-mail from a hospice nurse reminds us that all is not well in health care:
How grateful I am to have run across your website! This may be an answer to a desperate prayer! I am a nurse who has practiced for 17 years. I am horrified about hospice, and how they routinely and blatantly murder patients on a regular basis, and somehow convince the patients and their families that their actions are "merciful" and reduce suffering when in actuality they are increasing the suffering of these patients and refusing any life-sustaining and true comfort measures. I feel so powerless to convince people about the truth of hospice, since many have used and been fooled by them and their propaganda. …[I]t is going to be hard to convince people about the truth of hospice, since they have worked very hard to create "trust" in people who clearly don’t know the truth. People need to know the truth; they need to know about how hospice KILLS and does not comfort.
I realize that her comments are anecdotal, and that not every hospice is cost-cutting by killing, but she’s not the only one from whom I’ve heard. Situations like this one and the one I described in a previous commentary , “Imposing death in a government-run hospice,” are not the sort of reports people want to hear, but the truth always stands alone.
And that brings me back to Mr. Soros. One of the facts I learned from LifeTree experts is that Soros is fundamentally necessary to this entire brainwashing cabal who want us to believe that pain relief can mean whatever they want it to mean, as long as the patient is “comfortable” and perhaps even comatose due to overdosing.
As LifeTree makes perfectly clear on their website:
The Obama administration wants "palliative care" (e.g., pain control) because it is a cost-saving alternative to curative treatment. "Palliative care" is presented as both symptom management and curative. That is misleading, and deliberately so. "Palliative care" is symptom management. "Palliative care" has been defined and cultivated by the same people who are pushing universal coverage. Soros-funded doctors have spent the past decade establishing "palliative care" as a new medical sub-specialty. "Palliative care" is a cost-savings device.
LifeTree is by no means a lone voice. Marie Jon , a news analyst and religion writer recently opined
If Obamacare is passed, the same insidious protocols — "Advance Care Planning" — will be set into place to cut the cost of his massive government healthcare program. Our senior citizens will receive mandated appointments for counseling that will determine if they receive minimal medical treatment or are told to go home and die. They will be offered assistance and instructions on how to take their own lives.
Marie sites the actual legislation and quotes from it in the same way we and others have been doing.
John Griffing penned a sobering evaluation of the current Obamacare bill:
… if HR 3200 becomes law, "due process" regarding someone’s life will become a question for bureaucrats. When all is said and done, the ultimate result of the proposed bill is to transfer to government the unprecedented power of determining who lives and who dies.
Once a government adopts this utilitarian stance toward human life, anything becomes possible. Suspend for a moment your jaded response to Hitler references, and note that in Germany, Order T4 required physicians to kill 70,273 people[i] "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination"[ii] or those "unworthy of life."[iii] 5,000 of these victims were children. The elderly, the mentally infirmed, the deformed, and the racially impure, were put to death by teams of "medical experts." Thousands were sterilized. By 1939, 360,000 people had been sterilized to prevent the reproduction of the socially "unfit."
Although the methods have grown more subtle and the language more libertarian, our attitudes are not so very different in America today. We casually discuss whether people with certain afflictions merit the costs necessary to keep them alive. Quality of life trumps sanctity of life in most quarters. Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s assisted suicide methodology, once unthinkable, is now an acceptable topic for polite conversation.
George Soros is the money behind much of the creative planning that has gone into the Obamacare proposals addressing care at retirement age and beyond. If one examines the history of the Open Society Institute , Soros’ first and foremost think tank, it would not be news to learn that Soros wanted to create change in the way Americans speak about a number of things including death.
In 1996, Soros launched Project on Death in America . The aim of the project was a simple one: “Change the culture of dying .” Writing on the success of the project, Gary LaMarche, vice-president of the Open Society Institute, explained that from the beginning, Project on Death in America was focused on change, on the involvement of politics in health care and the Soros vision of what dying should be like.
Between 2001 and 2003, Soros funded a study group with specific attention paid to palliative care. In his reflections on the project and death in America, Soros tells the reader:
My mother’s death was more recent. She had joined the Hemlock Society and had at hand the means of doing away with herself. I asked her if she needed my help; I offered it, although I wasn’t particularly keen to do it. But I would have helped her because I felt that I owed it to her. At the point of decision, however, she did not want to take her own life, and I’m glad she didn’t.
Soros’ commitment to a benevolently utilitarian program involving pain relief and palliative care is evident in the work of the Project on Death in America. It is not unfair to suggest that the apparent ambivalence Soros has toward assisted suicide further suggests a less than humanitarian, Christ-like perspective that could well be what is permeating the Obamacare proposals. It is no secret, after all, that Obama and Soros have a great deal in common. Soros became an Obama fan early on and his ability to pour huge sums into a project he likes is nearly legend.
Michelle Malkin, a commentator whose work is always carefully documented, has revealed precisely how deep Soros’ financial support for Obamacare goes. The numbers may overwhelm you, as they did me, but we have to understand the man is a billionaire and he likes what Obama is proposing. Wing nut? You decide…
So why do I care? I have a concern for those in our culture who have been and could be ever more marginalized, even to death, by programs, projects and laws that create an illusion of good while advancing an agenda of evil.
Former presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan’s “Time to go, Grandpa ,” reminds us:
To secularists and atheists who believe life begins and ends here … the woman alone decides whether her unborn child lives, and the terminally ill and elderly, and those closest to them, have the final say as to when their lives shall end. As it would be cruel to let one’s cat or dog spend its last months or weeks in terrible pain, they argue, why would one allow one’s parents to endure such agony?
When all the name-calling is set aside, the tortuous debates have ended, and America is left with what I hope is a failed attempt to nationalize health care over the bodies of the vulnerable, one wonders who will be found to be accurate in their assessments and who will not. Only time will tell.
In the interim, the web of deceit has been finely woven and the spiders are working overtime to snap up the unsuspecting.
