Ezekiel Emanuel Wants to Control Your Health Care

If Joe Biden is elected president in November, oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, the former vice president’s chief campaign health-care adviser, will almost certainly control the new administration’s health policies, perhaps even as secretary of health and human services. That is bad news. Emanuel was a prime architect of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and remains one of the law’s most enthusiastic apologists. Readers may also recall his infamous 2014 article in The Atlantic, where he wrote that he wants to die at age 75 — implying that we should too — because people after that age become “feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

That ageist piece is the least of it. More worryingly, Emanuel is a technocrat’s technocrat who believes that the government that governs health care most governs it best. Toward that end, he wants to erect an all-encompassing medical technocracy in which the federal government, as decided by “experts,” dictates universal standards of care, establishes prices of physician and institutional compensation, and forces doctors and other health-care professionals to provide controversial services to which they are religiously or conscientiously opposed.

About the Author

Wesley J. Smith

Wesley J. Smith is an author and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.

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If Joe Biden is elected president in November, oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, the former vice president’s chief campaign health-care adviser, will almost certainly control the new administration’s health policies, perhaps even as secretary of health and human services. That is bad news. Emanuel was a prime architect of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and remains one of the law’s most enthusiastic apologists. Readers may also recall his infamous 2014 article in The Atlantic, where he wrote that he wants to die at age 75 — implying that we should too — because people after that age become “feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”

That ageist piece is the least of it. More worryingly, Emanuel is a technocrat’s technocrat who believes that the government that governs health care most governs it best. Toward that end, he wants to erect an all-encompassing medical technocracy in which the federal government, as decided by “experts,” dictates universal standards of care, establishes prices of physician and institutional compensation, and forces doctors and other health-care professionals to provide controversial services to which they are religiously or conscientiously opposed.