Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the primary medical professionals who shaped Obamacare, writes in the current Atlantic Magazine that he wants to die at 75. The implication of his argument is you should too.He admits right off the bat that his friends and close relatives, including his famous brothers (Rahm and Ari, one the mayor of Chicago, the other arguably the mayor of Hollywood entertainment industry) and his parents, think either the idea is crazy or he is crazy.But Zeke is serious. This is how he argues living older than 75 is bad:
“Living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”
This is reminiscent of the former Governor of Colorado, Richard Lamm, who thirty years ago shocked the nation by telling a medical conference that the old have a duty to die. ”You’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way,” Lamm said in 1984. ”Let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.” It should be noted Dick Lamm is still among us at age 79, and that he never gave a specific age at which a person’s “duty to die” should occur.But Zeke Emanuel’s neo-duty-to-die declaration is much more dangerous than Lamm’s three decades ago. Lamm was not in charge in fundamentally transforming the American health care system. Emanuel was, and he did. We now have a system of health care that reflects his fundamental beliefs about how much health care resources should go to the young and how much to the old.
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