Obama and Hegel Meet Healthcare

The utilitarian view of who gets treated, which appears to be about wellness for those who are productive, is a false veneer however, disguising an even more dangerous utilitarian view, that of corporate profit.

Barack Obama and G.W.F. Hegel

(LONDON) - "There can be no doubt that in a subtle way the Hegelian premise of 'what is useful is right' has infected society, including the medical portion. Physicians must return to the older premises, which were the emotional foundation and driving force of an amazingly successful quest to increase powers of healing if they are not held down to earth by the pernicious attitudes of an overdone practical realism." Leo Alexander, MD, from Medical Science Under Dictatorship.

Many people were worried that Obama's health care plan contained death panels. Whether one would call committees that decide whether to continue paying to save someone or to stop paying and let them die, a death panel, what is clear is that Obama's plan is utilitarian, distinctly not founded on the principle that all lives have equal value. There is a definite hierarchy in place that preferences some people over others, specifically over the elderly.

At a time when the country is dealing with government of the corporation, for the corporations, and by the corporations - the very definition of fascism - it becomes apparent that those concerned about a health care plan that includes committees to decide whether to extend a life or not, were sensitive to a fundamental philosophical shift in attitude toward patients built into Obama's healthcare law. Such a shift was what underlay what happened incrementally to medicine in Nazi Germany, where the elderly and infirm began to be dispatched in favor of healthy "workers," and the disabled were gotten rid of as well. And the list of those of no value grew and grew.

One can come at this from two directions - either viewing Nazi Germany as a one-off aberration driven by personal pathology, or seeing that a fundamental philosophical divide was crossed and in time accepted by doctors, and that acceptance of a new view of medicine provided the necessary foundation for the horrors that occurred.

The divide is between the utilitarian and the moral/compassionate.

"The question [arises as to] whether there are any danger signs that American physicians have also been infected with Hegelian, coldblooded, utilitarian philosophy and whether early traces of it can be detected in their medical thinking that may make them vulnerable to departures of the type that occurred in Germany. Basic attitudes must be examined dispassionately. The original concept of medicine and nursing was not based on any rational or feasible likelihood that they could actually cure and restore but rather on an essentially maternal or religious idea. The Good Samaritan had no thought of nor did he actually care whether he could restore working capacity. He was merely motivated by the compassion in alleviating suffering. Bernal[17] states that prior to the advent of scientific medicine, the physician's main function was to give hope to the patient and to relieve his relatives of responsibility.

"Gradually, in all civilized countries, medicine has moved away from this position, strangely enough in direct proportion to man's actual ability to perform feats that would have been plain miracles in days of old. However, with this increased efficiency based on scientific development went a subtle change in attitude. Physicians have become dangerously close to being mere technicians of rehabilitation.

"This essentially Hegelian rational attitude has led them to make certain distinctions in the handling of acute and chronic diseases.

The patient with the latter carries an obvious stigma as the one less likely to be fully rehabilitable for social usefulness. In an increasingly utilitarian society these patients are being looked down upon with increasing definiteness as unwanted ballast. A certain amount of rather open contempt for the people who cannot be rehabilitated with present knowledge has developed. This is probably due to a good deal of unconscious hostility, because these people for whom there seem to be no effective remedies have become a threat to newly acquired delusions of omnipotence." Leo Alexander (see: http://www.restoringourheritage.com/articles/nej_medicaldictatorship.pdf)

And it is a clear move toward a utilitarian medical approach to Americans that some groups (religious groups, particularly) espied in the Obama health care plan, and they were right to howl. The pharmaceutical industry-derived Obama plan uses costs to enshrine utilitarianism. In that sense, a profound moral vacuum in regard to life is imbedded in the Obama health care law.

It must not be forgotten that it was the pharmaceutical industry that was responsible for the deaths of the disabled, the elderly, the infirm, the mentally ill, before they moved on to gays, Catholic priests, gypsies, Jews, and other groups.

"Whatever proportions these (Nazi) crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. This attitude in its early stages concerned itself merely with the severely and chronically sick. Gradually the sphere of those to be included in this category was enlarged to encompass the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted and finally all non-Germans.But it is important to realize that the infinitely small wedged-in lever from which this entire trend of mind received its impetus was the attitude toward the non-rehabilitable sick." Leo Alexander.

The odd thing is how many progressives and liberals, many familiar with Hegel, did not recognize this Hegelian shift in approach to patients. So driven were they, out of compassion to attain a health care plan for those without, that they missed that compassion itself had been removed from the Obama plan. And when conservatives and fundamentalists who opposed Obama's plan called it "socialistic," that word alone became a spur to liberals and progressives to oppose them as unfeeling about others and unwilling to share with them, and to support the bill. And yet "socialistic" was an apt term, where socialistic means putting the interests of the state ahead of interests of any individual where socialistic raises question of whether the healthcare plan was based on principles that were the basis of healthcare under National Socialism, or fascism.

And ironically, progressives, liberals, conservatives and religious groups were all acting out of compassion. They simply could not hear each other past old prejudices.

The Alexander article may help both sides focus on an area that can discuss more easily - the change in medical philosophy built into Obama's healthcare law that was the crucial element in Nazi control of medicine and instituting of deaths.

There is no question that the Obama plan limits health care based on a hierarchy of the value of person (limited monies will go first to saving those younger, fundamentally healthier, more mentally fit, etc.). And there is also no question that the interests behind the plan are corporations and financial entities, which have reduced human life to a dollar sign.

As Occupy Groups around the country fight back against corporate greed, they may want to look closely at the healthcare bill for in it, the ineffable worth of each life has shrunk away to nothing. What remains are committee discussions of how many more years someone can be productive. People's inherent worth - regardless of their age, work ability, mental functioning - is gone. The sacredness of all human life is missing in Obama healthcare plan - Hegel and utilitarianism undergird it, just as they did in Germany.

When all life is not considered sacred, then its "value" becomes something to be measured hierarchically, from most important to least. From there one arrives rather quickly at judging not only the worth of a person but moving on inexorably to judging the worth of a group, a religion, a race, because the inherent worth of each and all is gone. "Value" becomes a question of potential work output and commodification, and the word "useless" pops up, as in the infamous Nazi phrase "useless eaters" used by German and Austrian families about their infants and children, and, significantly, used by Henry Kissinger. (see: The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust - Lloyd deMause)

Kissinger proposed to the US government the "medical" use of vaccines to covertly sterilize (exactly what the Nazis were working to perfect in vaccines), and as to the useless eaters themselves (babies and children), he advised total control over food (obviously needed for health and healing) - both using health as a means to genocide. (see: http://www.restoringourheritage.com/articles/nej_medicaldictatorship.pdf)

During WWII, the Nazis forced doctors in almost all the countries it controlled to sign onto a utilitarian plan for treatment. In Holland, alone, did doctors refuse.

"There is no doubt that in Germany itself the first and most effective step of propaganda within the medical profession was the propaganda barrage against the useless, incurably sick described above. Similar, even more subtle efforts were made in some of the occupied countries. It is to the everlasting honor of the medical profession of Holland that they recognized the earliest and most subtle phases of this attempt and rejected it.When Sciss-Inquart, Reich Commissar for the Occupied Netherlands Territories,wanted to draw the Dutch physicians into the orbit of the activities of the German medical profession, he did not tell them" You must send your chronic patients to death factories" or "You must give lethal injections at Government request in your offices," but he couched his order in most careful and superficially acceptable terms. One of the paragraphs in the order of the Reich Commissar of the Netherlands Territories concerning the Netherlands doctors of 19 December 1941 reads as follows:

'It is the duty of the doctor, through advice and effort, conscientiously and to his best ability, to assist as helper the person entrusted to his care in the maintenance, improvement and re-establishment of his vitality, physical efficiency and health. The accomplishment of this duty is a public task.' [16]

"The physicians of Holland rejected this order unanimously because they saw what it actually meant—namely, the concentration of their efforts on mere rehabilitation of the sick for useful labor, and abolition of medical secrecy. Although on the surface the new order appeared not too grossly unacceptable, the Dutch physicians decided that it is the first, although slight, step away from principle that is the most important one. The Dutch physicians declared that they would not obey this order. WhenSciss-Inquart threatened them with revocation of their licenses, they returned their licenses, removed their shingles and, while seeing their own patients secretly, no longer wrote death or birth certificates. Sciss-Inquart retraced his steps and tried to cajole them—still to no effect. Then he arrested 100 Dutch physicians and sent them to concentration camps. The medical profession remained adamant and quietly took care of their widows and orphans, but would not give in. Thus it came about that not a single euthanasia or non-therapeutic sterilization was recommended or participated in by any Dutch physician. They had the foresight to resist before the first step was taken, and they acted unanimously and won out in the end. It is obvious that if the medical profession of a small nation under the conqueror's heel could resist so effectively the German medical profession could likewise have resisted had they not taken the fatal first step. It is the first seemingly innocent step away from principle that frequently decides a career of crime. Corrosion begins in microscopic proportions." Leo Alexander

Here, doctors go through a pharmaceutical industry funded medical training that leaves them severely ignorant of the value of nutrition and thus of the knowledge that it alone provides health and it also offers natural means to fully cure disease. But cures would end the pharmaceutical industry, so doctors' training is in adhering to a faith in drugs and vaccines, and however much they failed or even threatened life.

American doctors, including Jewish ones, have been astoundingly silent as the Nuremberg Code, designed to prevent a repeat of the medical horrors under the Nazis, is dismantled in the US. Nor do doctors speak up for the human rights of their own patients to have complete information on vaccines (and drugs) and based on that to consent or refuse. Instead, doctors have threatened parents that they will not treat their families if they do not accept having their children injected with these potentially lethal pharmaceutical industry products which no longer even have liability attached.

Few people realize that in Kentucky, doctors cannot discuss chelation therapy with their patients or else they are subject to revocation of their license. Indeed, almost all Kentucky physicians who use alternative therapies have been either forced out of state or forced to desist from using alternative therapies, especially chelation therapy, because it “departs from prevailing practice in the State of Kentucky.” In other states, pediatricians face the loss of their insurance reimbursements if they fail to vaccinate all their patients. (see: http://www.restoringourheritage.com/articles/nej_medicaldictatorship.pdf)

And for those doctors who question, the pharmaceutical industry has tightened things to such a degree that doctors can face prison for doing what they think is best for their patients if it doesn't follow the regimen laid out by the corrupt AMA and state medical boards.

The regimen includes vastly increased mandated vaccines for children. There is evidence those vaccines are causing autism but whatever the cause of autism, there are huge numbers of autistic children now, who are becoming autistic adults. In the utilitarian world of Nazi "medicine," the disabled were killed. In our current corporate-controlled medical situation, in which vaccines are forced on all children based on the pharmaceutical industry's self-serving utilitarian mantra "it [their product] is best for the society," the pharmaceutical itself is creating the disabled who will be last in line for medical treatment.

The utilitarian view of who gets treated, which appears to be about wellness for those who are productive, is a false veneer however, disguising an even more dangerous utilitarian view, that of corporate profit. While the Obama healthcare plan is designed to be able to offload the financial dead weight of the elderly and disabled, its corporate utilitarianism extends far beyond that, and to some much more insidious, and dire for humantiy. The reality is that the pharmaceutical industry is invested in disease (far and away the most profitable "business" on Wall Street) and the Obama health care plan is designed by the pharma to facilitate diseases.

It ensures the increased sale of drugs and vaccines by various means. While condemning the useless elderly to loss of medical care and to deaths, the Obama/pharmaceutical industry plan worsens the health situation for children by forcing treatments on them that kill adults while pharma is profiting immensely by this new market and creating a chewable candy version for kids. With parents already begging doctors and medical authorities to stop forcing vaccines on their children because they are being maimed and even killed, and increasingly avoiding vaccines, Obama's plan puts clinics in schools where children are left without parental protection from life threatening and irrevocably contaminated vaccines or from the many drugs the pharmaceutical industry is preparing to give them, beyond the drugs American children have been put on already. In addition, adults and children face suspect screenings for disease after disease and a requirement to take prescribed drugs even if harmful or deadly (prescription drugs are the leading cause of death in the US) for their "wellness," or face steeply higher insurance costs.

In forcing these treatments, profits accrue, as do diseases, even new ones, and with each disease, profits multiply. This is now called The Idiot Cycle." (video) "[The ]chemical companies, who manufacture and emit cancer causing chemical substances, also develop, produce and invest in cancer treatments, the most profitable disease on the planet."

And doctors who have full cures are prevented from providing them, with government on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, spending years and millions of dollars trying to imprison them.

Leo Alexander concludes that:

"Hospitals like to limit themselves to the care of patients who can be fully rehabilitated, and the patient whose full rehabilitation is unlikely finds himself, at least in the best and most advanced centers of healing, as a second-class patient faced with a reluctance on the part of both the visiting and the house staff to suggest and apply therapeutic procedures that are not likely to bring about immediately striking results in terms of recovery."

While Dr. Alexander is correct that hospital staff is less willing to treat patients who can't be easily rehabilitated, he seemed (as of the time of his article) unaware there are treatments that could bring rapid recovery to people whom conventional medicine is unable to treat and of the concerted effort of medical authorities to prevent just such cures (Video). The pharmaceutical industry is attempting right now, as word of those cures are leaking out everywhere, to put cures for almost all diseases out of reach, resorting to absurdities and non-science to lay the ground work.

Dr. Alexander continues, truly missing the depth of what has happened to medicine.

"I wish to emphasize that this point of view did not arise primarily within the medical profession, which has always been outstanding in a highly competitive economic society for giving freely and unstintingly of its time and efforts, but was imposed by the shortage of funds available, both private and public."

But funds are available. What's more, the cures doctors could provide right now are extremely cheap and unpatented, but this leaves the pharmaceutical industry out in the cold. The medical profession has been corrupted, and for those who haven't been, they have been threatened, charged with crimes, lost licenses, been imprisoned.

"From the attitude of easing patients with chronic diseases away from the doors of the best types of treatment facilities available to the actual dispatching of such patients to killing centers is a long but nevertheless logical step."

That logical step has been taken but in a disguised way. Hospitals are, in fact, killing patients at the rate of "[a]n average of 195,000 people in the USA died due to potentially preventable, in-hospital medical errors ..."

"Resources for the so-called incurable patient have recently become practically unavailable." " Leo Alexander, MD

Alexander is right about the danger of utilitarianism in medicine leading to horrors but not to the heart of who is driving it and it being a corporate ulitarianism, disease only being the profit source. But he is wrong about the resources. They are there but being intentionally kept from the public. He clearly didn't know that the pharmaceutical companies caused the millions of deaths during WWII (shortly after having caused millions of deaths during 1918-1919). He didn't know that most of the societies he praised at the end of his article have been taken over by the pharmaceutical industry. He didn't see that the industry saw that diseases are most profitable industry in the world and the ultimate "utilitarian" thing for them to do was to stop talking about hating and genocide and instead, to take control of healthcare worldwide - the WHO, the CDC, the AMA, etc. - and to talk about saving poor black children in Africa or Indian children or Native Americans. It was utilitarian to buy politicians who'd vote for mandated products, and to act the philanthropists as they invested millions in tax free dollars on their own products. It was utilitarian to control medical care, from where they would be able to do two things - force their products on people - products that routinely cause disease - and to remove access to all nutrition (real food and food supplements - Video) because it is curing now (Video) and without it diseases will multiply like never before in human history.

Obama's healthcare plan turns the American people over to the control of the industry responsible for eugenics and genocide, allowing them to control life and death services for the elderly and to force toxic "help" on children and not-yet-elderly adults.

Obama has met Hegel and that union is a nightmare for the American people.

"Under all forms of dictatorship the dictating bodies or individuals claim that all that is done is being done for the best of the people as a whole, and that for that reason they look at health merely in terms of utility, efficiency and productivity. It is natural in such a setting that eventually Hegel's principle that "what is useful is good" wins out completely. The killing center is ... of all health planning based only on rational principles and economy and not on humane compassion and divine law." Leo Alexander