Worse Than Hitler

Washington Times compares Obama Health Care Proposals to Nazi Programs

The photo used by the Washington Times to accompany their editorial about Obama's Health Care efficiency plan.

An editorial in the Washington Times has compared health care proposals by the Obama administration to programs employed by the Nazis which led to forced euthanasia. To hammer the point home, alongside the editorial is photo of Adolf Hitler.

There is no telling what metrics will be used to define the efficiencies, but it is clear who will bear the brunt of these decisions. Those suffering the infirmities of age, surely, and also the physically and mentally disabled, whose health costs are great and whose ability to work productively in the future are low. And how will premature babies fare under the utilitarian gaze of Washington’s health efficiency experts? Will our severely wounded warriors be forced to forgo treatments and therapies based on their inability to be as productive as they once might have been? And will the love between a parent and child have a column on the health bureaucrats’ spreadsheets?

Consider the following statement: “It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified.”

This notion is fully in the spirit of the partisans of efficiency but came from a program instituted in Hitler’s Germany called Aktion T-4. Under this program, elderly people with incurable diseases, young children who were critically disabled, and others who were deemed non-productive, were euthanized. This was the Nazi version of efficiency, a pitiless expulsion of the “unproductive” members of society in the most expeditious way possible.
Source: Washington Times

It’s an incredible read, really. It makes the case that efficiencies in our notoriously inefficient health care system will lead to one thing: forced killing of old people, diseased people, and other non-productive types.

This is basically a vacuum chamber editorial; the writers cannot possibly imagine it would be influential to someone on the fence over the issue. The only audience for this type of analogy is people whom already link every action of Obama to Hitler and the Nazis.

Of all of the potential critiques of the the proposal to make health care records more efficient, does the Washington Times really think that evoking the forced euthanasia programs of the Nazis is the most effective? They should consider the possibility that it is actually anti-effective. I think the editorial writers should glance at my primer and come up with a better analogy next time.

(To their credit, the Washington Times printed an excellent letter jointly written by the CEO of AARP and the CEO of the American College of Physicians condemning the editorial and saying “to invoke Nazi Germany is unconscionable.”)

Outrage-O-Meter
Audience Reach 7
Direct vs. Indirect 9
Inappropriateness 10
Final Score 9