Watch out. This is Nazi Doctor stuff.

The Washington Times ran an editorial February 11, 2009, warning that "the President is trying to rush through Congress ... a major overhaul of the American health care system" whose precedent is the "program instituted in Hitler's Germany called Aktion T-4." The editorial accurately documents the fascist nature of the Obama Administration health care "reform," which Lyndon LaRouche has committed himself to defeat.

Accompanied by a photograph of Adolf Hitler, the editorial detailed Obama's "cost-effectiveness" proposal and went through the Nazi euthanasia crimes, even including the opposition to it by German Bishop Galen.

Under the title "Health 'Efficiency' Can Be Deadly," the Times editor points first to an element of the House version of the stimulus bill, which calls for the creation of a National coordinator of Health Information Technology, who will be in charge of collecting and monitoring the health care being provided to every American." The purpose of collecting the information, the Times says, is allegedly to "help increase health care 'quality, safety and efficiency.' The first two goals are commendable, but what does efficiency mean?"

The editorial then turns to the approach presented in Tom Daschle's 2008 book "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis," which it says, seems to have inspired that section of the legislation. Daschle's book discusses multiple ways of cutting down health spending, "including restricting the types of expensive treatments available to seniors and people with severe maladies."

The editorial continues: "There is no telling what metrics will be used to define the efficiencies, but it is clear who will bear the brunt of these decisions. Those suffering the infirmities of age, surely, and also the physically and mentally disabled, whose health costs are great and whose ability to work productively in the future are low. And how will premature babies fare under the utilitarian gaze of Washington's health efficiency experts? Will our severely wounded warriors be forced to forgo treatments and therapies based on their inability to be as productive as they once might have been? And will the love between a parent and child have a column on the health bureaucrats' spreadsheets?"

"Consider the following statement: 'It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified.'

"This notion is fully in the spirit of the partisans of efficiency but came from a program instituted in Hitler's Germany called Aktion T-4. Under this program, elderly people with incurable diseases, young children who were critically disabled, and others who were deemed non-productive, were euthanized. This was the Nazi version of efficiency, a pitiless expulsion of the 'unproductive' members of society in the most expeditious way possible...."

Why do private insurers Medicare Advantage plans cost more than old fashioned Medicare? United Health - or rather their customers - spent $1.5 million on lobbying in Q!, $3 million on a CEO, and made $992 million net. I can see three ways to cut health care spending right there.

The UHG paper translated into English: 1) Pay doctors less 2) Get terminal patients into hospice sooner and reduce cancer treatments 3) Do fewer transplants and only at top transplant centers 4) Quit making people sicker in nursing homes and hire nurse practitioners instead of MDs to treat nursing home patients 5) Keep people out of the hospital

6) Quit aggressive treatments and get people to accept hospice or DNR orders sooner 7) Get better medication control for heart failure patients 8) See if a nurse can treat chronic patients over the phone. 9) Make hospitals call the insurer before admissions and get patients to be healthier to keep them out of the hospital 10) Use cheaper family practitioners as gatekeepers to coordinate and approve care

11) Quit paying doctors so much and give them bonuses to deny care. 12) Black list doctors that don't do things cheaper 13) Make the doctor call the insurer before ordering an X-Ray, CT, or MRI 14) Make the doctor call the insurer before ordering radiation therapy for cancer patients 15) Take longer to approve claims and reject more claims for more reasons.

COPY OF THE PLAN: http://tinyurl.com/r6j7xp

Medicare Advantage plans pay more because they are designed to weaken the public plan that is Medicare in favor of private-insurance-run plans that can pick and choose its (more healthy, younger) customers and offer them things like health club memberships and pay for them with Medicare funds. The eventual goal is to kill Roosevelt's New Deal and return to the good old days when McKinley was in office, there was no social safety net, and there were neither unions nor legislation to protect workers.

United Health Care may make many good suggestions, but NONE of them approach the $400 BILLION PER YEAR in savings we would attain if we enacted a publicly financed/privately delivered health care plan: See HR-676, also called Medicare for All, and S-703, Bernie Sanders' plan for having each state create its own publicly financed universal health care plan (as John Marty has already done for Minnesota with his Minnesota Health Plan).