HITLER'S HEALTHSCARE PANELS AND MODERN PARALLELS

Wow - this is DISTURBING!

My SIL and her husband apparently voted for bummer in 2008.  They have a large, wonderful family and have fallen on hard times for the last decade, or so as her husband was not able to complete his education before starting their family.  I am sure income level factored into their decision to vote for the man who was going to hand out all kinds of free stuff and bring America back into prosperity by doing so...... cough, cough.....

Well, since then they came to their senses, but it was too late and bummerscare was passed.  Now, we have something that promises to get very draconian in how things are doled out and how people are forced to buy it - whether or not they can afford it.  It may come down to not having enough to go around and the old hitlerian-style policies will be put into effect once again where the infirm and mentally-retarded are quietly "dispatched" by the state.  Herein lies the irony:  the last set of twins my SIL had included a boy with Down's Syndrome.  The very person they helped get into power (and I will say, who is the anti-Christ), may well require the unthinkable of one of their children.

Before this becomes national policy, I would hope that civil war would rid us of this ulcer in the White House, but only time will tell.  Folks, this is going to get a whole lot of interesting here in the next couple of years.....

In July of 1939, a conference of medical professionals was held in Berlin, Germany. Participating were the professors and chairmen of the departments of psychiatry of the leading universities and medical schools of Germany, many of them, the most respected professionals in their fields. The subject? What would be the criteria for determining what patients would be considered to have "lives unworthy to be lived," and what was the most "practical and cheap" manner of removing them from being burdens on the health-care system—by death.

Thus, the bureaucratic machine began to be cranked up for what is known as Adolf Hitler's program of genocide through "euthanasia," a program which killed hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Germans, and eventually, millions of Jews and non-Germans as well.

That program, which had already begun years before, against concentration camp inmates and handicapped children, was officially put into effect in October 1939, when Hitler penned his own personal, and secret, authorization for the program, under the title, "The Destruction of Lives Unworthy of Life":

Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be accorded a mercy death.
To carry out this program, Hitler and his fiendish Nazi associates would fully utilize the "professional" apparatus which had been put in place, as well as the popular, British-eugenics-spawned ideology which had been increasingly dominant in Germany since Hitler seized power with the aid of powerful British-Wall Street financiers. The killing would proceed with the utmost "cost-effectiveness" and professionalism, in order to save funds for the Nazi state's preferred projects, and not waste them on "ineffective" medical treatments.

If that sounds familiar, it should. For the proposals which the Obama Administration has currently put on the table, follow them in virtual lockstep. First, the "experts" decide what is "effective" care, with "cost-effectiveness" foremost in mind, ruling out "inappropriate" treatments. These standards become the law, in terms of what medical care will be paid for. Then other experts efficiently implement those decisions, through the existing hospital apparatus.

The result, as in Nazi Germany, is that millions are, with the stroke of a pen, consigned to death.

The T4 Program

The T4 program, which was established following Hitler's secret order, took its name from its Berlin office address, Tiergarten 4, which address housed the coordinating organization for the program, the Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes. In charge were Philip Bouhler, chief of the Chancellory, and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and chief medical officer of the land.

Their first task was to devise the questionnaires which would be used to categorize the targetted institutionalized populations. Four categories were specified:

Patients suffering from specified diseases who are not employable, or are employable only in simple mechanical work. These included schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile diseases, therapy-resistant paralysis, feeble-mindedness, and the like.
Patients who have been continually institutionalized for at least five years.
Patients who are criminally insane.
Non-German patients.
While including these categorizations, the questionnaire overall gave the impression of a rather neutral statistical survey, which also delved into the patients' biographies, their financial situations, and the like (Figure 1). It was accompanied by a questionnaire for the institution in which the patient was housed, which asked about staffing, beds available, and budgetary questions. A significant stress was also put on detailing the patients' abilities to work.

The first questionnaires went out in October 1939, the month Hitler signed his order, to state hospitals and other public and private institutions where mental patients, epileptics, the mentally retarded, and other handicapped persons resided. The responsibility for filling them out, often in a very short period of time, fell on the physicians at those institutions.

The questionnaires were then sent to panels of three or four psychiatric experts, who indicated their opinion about whether the patient (whom they had never seen, much less examined, and whose medical history they were unfamiliar with) was to live or die. Each "expert" made his or her decision independently, and passed on the questionnaire to the next. The choice for the experts was effectively only one of two options: a plus sign in red, which meant death; or a dash in blue, which meant life. Occasionally, a psychiatrist would put a question mark in the space provided.

The questionnaires were then sent to a chief expert, who passed the final judgment. At this "higher" level, there was no alternative other than life or death. In fact, the "senior expert" was not bound by the recommended decisions. From his judgment, there was no appeal. From that point on, it was merely a matter of sending back the decision to the relevant institution, where the final dispensation of the patient was carried out, and, if so ordered, sending him or her to one of the designated "killing centers."

These centers were supervised by medical personnel, who oversaw the killing, and were responsible for devising the fraudulent death certificates which were sent to the families of those who had been determined to have lives "not worthy to be lived."

[link to www.mailmagazine24.com]