Obamacare Death Panels?

Interesting read HERE.

According to the article, one of the main architects of Obamacare is shilling the idea that people over the age of 40 should go quietly into the night.

The good doctor bases his proposal on aggregate data that presumes to quantify "creative" output suggesting that people over age 40 are in a downhill slide and it is not cost effective to keep them...heck to keep ME....alive.

The Gulag Archipelago

As reported earlier I am slogging my way through Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.  Frankly, my fellow bloggers who call Obama et al Communists are engaging in hyperbole, just like the liberals who call anybody a NAZI who uses the term "personal responsibility".

Real Communists eat their allies.  They kill the peasants who grow the food.  They kill the engineers who run the trains and water treatment plants.  They kill entire nations.  They executed POWs who were repatriated.  The Communists repeatedly killed off their own leadership.

In the beginning the allies of the Bolsheviks were stunned to the point of being defenseless against the accusations.  "How can you arrest me??  I fought beside you in the great revolution against the imperialist bourgeois.  We were in the same camps and ate the same food.  We are comrades!" 

It mattered not.  They had served their purpose and outlived their usefulness.  In fact, at that moment they became a liability.  The Bolshevik's allies were effective fighters.  They knew where the weapons were stored.  They had a network of sympathizers who would support them.  They knew the weaknesses of the Bolsheviks.  They were a threat!

A case in point:  Union officials were first sent to prison and later executed even though they had been the Bolshevik's staunchest allies.  You see, the USSR was a worker's paradise and there was no need for unions.  Continuance of unions was sabotage because it contradicted the utopian narrative.

Stalin killed off his leadership, Communist leadership, several times over.  Both the political leadership and the military leadership were executed.  That is part of why the Soviets were ineffective during the NAZI invasion.  They were incapable of executing the simplest of military duties like establish a camp with sentries, sanitation, advancing with armor and infantry working in unison.

A trial balloon

Is this doctor's proposal a trial balloon to test public reaction, to see if anybody notices whose ox gets gored?  Obama's electoral success was due, in large part, by the African-American, the Hispanic and women's vote.  Let's look at the following diseases and see how those groups fare.  Most impacted groups highlighted with pink.

• Heart disease 
• Cancer
• Respiratory diseases like Emphasyma
• Stroke
• Alzheimer's
• Diabetes

 

Heart Disease

...Incident rates as percentage of population Native American men 14.3%, white men 7.7%, black men 7.3%
...Incident rates as percentage of population Native American women 8.4%, black women 5.9%, hispanic women 5.3%   Source

Cancer:

...incidence rates were highest among black men (0.55%), followed by white men (0.49%), Hispanic (0.39%)
...incidence rates were highest among white women (0.41%), followed by black (0.39% ), Hispanic (0.32%)

Lower Respiratory diseases

...incident rates for age group 65-74, women (10.4%) and men (8.3%)

Stroke

"

Stroke is the fourth leading cause of death for Americans, but the risk of having a stroke varies with race and ethnicity. Risk of having a first stroke is nearly twice as high for blacks than for whites, and blacks are more likely to die following a stroke than are whites.² Hispanics’ risk for stroke falls between that of whites and blacks.² American Indians, Alaska Natives, and blacks are more likely to have had a stroke than are other groups.^3"    Source

Alzheimer's

...the most frequent findings in reviewing this literature are that African Americans and Hispanics have higher prevalence and incidence of dementia and AD than whites. Native Americans appeared to have lower rates of AD in comparison to whites. Asian Americans had rates of dementia comparable to whites;  Source

Diabetes

Incident rate black men 9.9%, hispanic (no gender specified) 9.2%. black women 9.0%, white men 6.5%, white women 5.4%   Source one, Source two

Summary

Except for Lower Respiratory Disease, white women will be among the least impacted by "passive" euthanasia policies.

Native Americans are not broken out as a separate group for most studies but they are very highly impacted in those studies that do treat them as a specific group.

Blacks, and specifically black men, are likely to be disproportionately impacted by passive euthanasia policies.

Image from HERE

Obesity may be one of the underlying issues that link several of these diseases and their relative prevalence by race.  With the exception of Mexican Americans there is a strong trend between increasing poverty and increasing obesity.  That suggests that passive euthanasia policies will disproportionately impact the poor.