By DEXTER DUGGAN
Some Catholic media experts are scheduled to examine the Culture of Death that’s seeking to control medicine, and how people can fight this takeover of health care, at a by-invitation gathering in Virginia in mid-November.
“Exposing the Death Peddlers: Brain Death and Palliative Death Care” is the theme of the November 13-15 meeting in Woodstock, Va., for the Catholic Media Coalition (CMC).
Topics are to include “The role of community organizing in spreading the system of death,” “Trojan Horse legislation and the bureaucratic takeover of palliative care,” “Using false death to end life and take organs,” and “Repackaging death as life: Transformation from traditional care to palliative death care.”
The CMC (catholicmediacoali
tion.org) describes itself as “an organization of Catholic writers, editors, webmasters, and others engaged in producing media for and about the Catholic Church.”
With members from around the United States who belong to different, approved Catholic rites, the CMC says it welcomes “all practicing Catholic members of the media who are loyal to the Magisterium and to Church teaching.”
The pro-death movement in health care is “really a juggernaut! All the money and power is in the pro-death camp,” a meeting organizer told The Wanderer.
Meeting participants are expected from about 10 states, she added, including Massachusetts and Florida on the East Coast and Arizona and Washington in the West.
With its focus on “end of life issues,” the meeting is to examine “the false definition of brain death, and the corruption of palliative care from life-enhancing to death-inducing. This will be increasingly pushed in legislation as the baby boomers become more burdensome,” CMC told prospective participants.
Because this primarily is a Catholic group, euthanasia as an evil will be treated as a given, Virginia blogger Mary Ann Kreitzer, the president of CMC, told The Wanderer.
Kreitzer blogs at “Les Femmes — The Truth: Looking at life from a Catholic point of view” (lesfemmes-thetruth.blogspot.com).
Illustrating the dangers of a health-obsessed worldview, Kreitzer called The Wanderer’s attention to content at the pro-life Belbury Review blog (belburyre
view.com/wp/). An article posted October 25 was titled, “A step beyond food fascism.”
The article began: “Are ‘culture of health’ and ‘culture of death’ mutually exclusive? Ask most refugees from 1930s socialist Europe, and my guess is their answer will not only be ‘no,’ but more likely ‘the former ushers in the latter.’ That is to say, it is difficult to imagine a culture that assigns a value on human beings based upon their health, without questioning what that culture does to human beings who are judged to be ‘not healthy.’
“What brings this question to mind is a disturbing quotation . . . found at the National Academy of Medicine website. The academy is announcing its new Culture of Health program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and it explicitly links a person’s social value to being well,” the Belbury Review article continued.
It quoted Risa J. Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of RWJF, saying: “A culture of health is where good health flourishes across geographic, demographic, and social sectors; where being healthy and staying healthy is an esteemed social value, and where everyone has access to affordable, quality health care.”
The Belbury Review proceeded to ask: “Millions of frail, elderly, disabled people are chronically ill due to no fault of their own. Will they be esteemed in this new Culture of Health?”
A reader could recall the historically discredited German National Socialism’s stress on good health, fitness, and eugenics, and its scorn for those regarded as outside these norms, or even hampering them.
Cradle To Grave
Kreitzer herself has prepared an article for the CMC meeting, “When Social Engineers Play God: Transforming American Medicine.” It notes the change from recognizing the human dignity of an individual to using cost-benefit analysis to calculate his worth to the community and his “quality of life.”
Toward the end of her article, Kreitzer writes: “Palliative care receives rave reviews these days even from Catholic sources who see it as an alternative to assisted suicide. They have adopted a dangerous position because modern medicine has been hijacked by the hospice/palliative care movement which has evolved into a strategy to eliminate the vulnerable whose quality of life doesn’t meet the standards of the social engineers.”
Early in the article she writes: “Those seeking change in health care and its delivery make it clear that a primary motivation is to cut costs. Of particular concern is that too many of the elderly and vulnerable cost the system too much in the last few years of life, a waste of resources.
“The change agents want to limit hospital admissions for the very ill and encourage patients who may not be terminal but have chronic conditions to refuse treatment aimed at curing or controlling their diseases in favor of non-treatment, pain control, and comfort care,” Kreitzer writes.
“But their targets are not simply the seriously ill. They want everyone at every age, whatever their state of health, to be funneled into the system.”
Wanderer readers may recall that in 2009, when recently elected pro-death President Barack Obama was promoting his bureaucratic nationalized-medicine proposal, Obama callously told a woman at a town hall that perhaps her elderly mother shouldn’t have received vital pacemaker surgery but should have just taken a “painkiller.”
Kreitzer continues her article: “Bill Novelli, former CEO of AARP and board co-chair of C-TAC (Coalition to Transform Advance Care), told Congress in 2014: ‘Our focus is on advanced illness population management not limited by diagnosis, age, or mortality risk. It is based on health-care system integration; interfacing with other care models; and leveraging the health-care workforce.’
“In other words,” Kreitzer writes, “everybody from cradle to grave needs to be enrolled in the system as early as possible. Recently, in promoting C-TAC’s book, A Roadmap to Success, Transforming Advanced Illness Care in America, Novelli made this chilling statement, ‘Transforming health care is an ambitious goal, but every great social change starts somewhere’.”
When a person considers that U.S. health care has been the envy of the world, Kreitzer asks what this “transformation” involves.
“They want to shift resources from medical treatment to cure patients or control their diseases, to paying for ‘conversations’ about advance planning and focusing on ‘palliative care’,” she writes.
These change agents want to manipulate words without people understanding their process, Kreitzer writes. “And, in fact, words used in medicine today often mean something entirely different from their traditional meanings.
“Why is this happening? To fool people into accepting a new type of medicine ‘transformed’ from one that recognizes the human dignity of the individual and aims to protect and preserve his life until true death to one based on cost/benefit analysis that weighs the individual’s worth according to his ‘quality of life’ and his benefit to the community.”
She recalls the same thing happened in the 1970s regarding abortion, when the socially condemned and abhorrent killing of an unborn baby was redefined into the acceptable termination of a fetus.
Kreitzer quotes from an official editorial in the September 1970 issue of the mainstream journal California Medicine: “(S)ince the old ethic has not been fully displaced, it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death.
“The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices,” the editorial continued.
“It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted, the old one has not yet been rejected.”
The anti-life Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation both “are heavily invested in transforming American health care into managed death care,” Kreitzer writes.
Today, Kreitzer notes, the question is becoming, “Is the life of the patient and his usefulness to himself and others worth the financial costs of his medical treatment? Note that it is not the patient and his family who will decide. Again, as with the abortion debate, the shift to the new ethic must be hidden until the population is softened up to accept the new paradigm.
“It’s really the old frog in the pot trick. People won’t accept a ‘boiling’ change, but warm them up to it gradually enough with ‘semantic gymnastics’ and they will be in the middle of the new world of deadly ‘medical care’ without knowing how they got there,” she writes.
If this strategy succeeds, she writes, the vulnerable who manage to avoid euthanasia and “assisted suicide” “are likely to be pushed down the third path, where neglect and the morphine drip take them out. It really should be no surprise to anyone that this is happening. After all, our society has approved and promoted killing unborn babies with unlimited potential for half a century.
“Killing those with little potential left, except in the sight of God and their loved ones, is the natural next frontier for the death peddlers. But in the end the transformation of end-of-life care is only an interim stop on the way to the total transformation of American medicine,” Kreitzer concludes.
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