Kevin Williamson of NRO writes about a proposal from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel:

Dr. Emanuel describes Americans’ consumption of medical services as a “catastrophic force,” and assigns the blame to an eccentric collection of items that apparently are not to his taste: fancy waiting rooms, highly paid physicians, and the Hippocratic Oath.

Dr. Emanuel is stiff-arming Hippocrates because traditional Hippocratic ethics treat the patient as an individual. Dr. Emanuel prefers that the patient be treated as an input in an economic equation governing the allocation of medical resources under political discipline. (If you think that is an exaggeration, please do read the article.) With government in charge of health care, the objectification of human lives is inevitable. Governments must make resource-allocation decisions, which means that they must choose between eyesight-saving treatments for your grandmother and corrective orthopedic surgery for the kid next door.

Word to the wise: Short your shares in Grandma, Inc. That’s because Dr. Emanuel has embraced a technique for simplifying some of the tough calls: age discrimination.

Chilling stuff.  Williamson's full article is here.