Ruthless Pragmatism

Bloomberg has an article based on an April interview with President Obama concerning end of life medical decisions.  In the article, Obama says that he would gladly have paid for his grandmother’s hip replacement himself; yet he found the decision for her to have a hip replacement troubling. He labeled the decision “a difficult moral decision.”  He did not mean “a difficult moral decision” for his grandmother.  He meant for the healthcare industry.

Obama seems to think it might be immoral to offer someone with a terminal disease a hip replacement.  Underscoring this line of reasoning, he makes a couple of follow-up statements which are indeed chilling.

First, he makes this statement:

“The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health- care bill out here.”  

Then, he makes this one:

“What I’ve been constantly searching for is a ruthless pragmatism when it comes to economic policy,”

When you couple such reasoning with the hard economics of deficit spending, you get fear from the elderly and fear from anyone who loves the elderly or terminally ill.  Add to these fears the necessity to cut $500 billion from Medicaid, and you get a clear picture of the future of American healthcare. And the picture is not a pretty one at all.  If you love your grandmother or your uncle who has cancer, you will want to fight Obama’s healthcare reform.