Fox News' Megyn Kelly Grills Slippery 'Architect' of ObamaCare
Fox News' Megyn Kelly hosted Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel on her show Friday night and called him an "interesting guy." Well that's an "interesting" adjective to describe Obama's former health policy adviser who thinks a government bureaucrat should dole out medical treatment based on the individual's usefulness to society.
At the heart of ObamaCare is Emanuel's 'complete lives' system proposal -- i.e. reduce costs by cutting health services to individuals who are prevented from "being or becoming participating citizens."
According to the doctor, the Hippocratic Oath is way overrated. A utilitarian-minded government panel takes the place of the doctor-patient relationship and decides who's a financial drain and who's not. On his list of those who need care, but shouldn't necessarily receive it, are newborns, toddlers, the disabled, those with genetic disorders, late-stage cancer, Alzheimer's, dementia, and senior citizens who have already consumed maximum resources.
Kelly didn't grill Emanuel on any of his eugenicist leanings due to the website rollout crisis. But the savvy Kelly asked him back so maybe she will get a chance to interrogate him further on who lives and who dies under ObamaCare.
Despite the time constraints, Kelly managed to elicit a few gems from Emanuel. When asked if Obama had "grossly" misled and lied to the American people when he promised that under the Affordable Care Act they could keep their health plans, Emanuel followed the progressive playbook, blaming big business: if premiums are doubling and deductibles rising, don't blame the Affordable Care Act. Emanuel suggested that big health insurers and employers adjusted their business practices to comply with the new law's regulations and should have been more cognizant of the effects on their customers.
From The Kelly File:
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, University of Pennsylvania Vice-Provost:
He [Obama] definitely said we are going to keep the same structure that we have. We are going to have private insurance. Employers are going to be mainly providing insurance. We are going to have Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for poor people and that's going to be the structure on which we build reform. If an insurance company is changing how it will structure its plan, that's not the law doing it. That's the insurance company deciding for business reasons. If employers decide not to continue to cover, that's them deciding for reasons related to their coverage.
Later in the interview, Emanuel blames Republicans for not coming up with an alternative to the rationing and redistribution the Democrats have proposed. He calls out McDonald's for selling a $50 a month policy that caps out care at $2,000 a year. Yet the proliferation of these types of policies is flooding the market because employers can no longer afford the high-dollar options due to the 2010 healthcare law.
With the law, parents got to keep their adult kids up to age 26 on their policies; insurers had to add more services to the policies whether the consumer needed them or not; and they had to comply with regulations on administrative costs as opposed to healthcare costs or face stiff penalties. Emanuel had to know, as Kelly said, that these changes would be passed on to the employers and the individuals.
Dr. Emanuel's c'est la vie attitude toward the whole mess isn't surprising. He had been building ObamaCare long before its namesake ended up at the White House. As Betsy McCaughey pointed out in a 2009 Wall Street Journal article, Emanuel had been after a government takeover of healthcare since 1993. In a Washington Post op-ed, the doctor suggested a wage and price freeze on health care. This would get the attention of all interested parties and force them to the table. "The desire to be rid of the freeze will do much to concentrate the mind," he wrote.
If Megyn Kelly can stomach another round with the megalomaniacal and "interesting" architect of the Affordable Care Act, she should invite him for a follow-up. By adding more heat to her questions, Kelly could get Emanuel to admit that his baby, the ACA, will eliminate private insurers and allow the government to cut costs by weeding out society's undesirables.