Ezekiel Emanuel's "Cut Me Off At 75" Proposal

Last week, Rahm Emanuel's brother Ezekiel generated plenty of headlines by going public with his preference to not seek medical treatments after the age of 75 and rather "letting nature take its course".  I was a little surprised by the lack of Tea Party freakout about "death panels" because I suspect the subtext of Emanuel's very public media tour selling this "let nature take its course" proposal is entirely about softening the public for the coming inevitably of health care rationing.  And frankly its an overdue conversation, although I feel he's setting the bar a little young at 75.  Depending on the nature of the condition I or a loved one was afflicted with, I doubt I'd want to turn the treatment spigot off for myself or them until about 82, which seems like a more contemporary timeline for the point of diminishing returns.  I've long believed that extending life expectancy through modern medicine doesn't jive with the capacity of the human body or the human brain, and the resources allocated towards the artificial extension of human life expectancy could thus be more valuable elsewhere.

Which, of course, brings me to the cognitive dissonance between Emanuel's thesis and public policy, which more than ever before is geared towards extending life expectancy by whatever means necessary and whatever cost to your freedom or happiness.  Ezekiel's brother Rahm has, as much as anyone, been at the policy forefront of weaponizing the American tax system to socially engineer outcomes that lead to longer lives with one after another punitive censure levied against those who engage in lifestyles that shorten life expectancy.

On the surface, it's hard to reconcile Ezekiel's vision of a cohort of seniors in an aging society that forfeits medical care in the interest of "letting nature take its course" with Rahm's vision of a nation of people who've sacrificed personal pleasure for health in the interest of living to a ripe old age.  Perhaps the two visions are not mutually exclusive if Ezekiel simultaneously supports the puritanical social engineering of healthy lifestyles IN ADDITION TO the forfeiture of a would-be old-age reward for a lifetime of sacrifice.  That's gonna be a spectacularly hard sell though.  If Big Brother's gonna slap the Mountain Dew, Marlboro, and bacon cheeseburger out of Joe Sixpack's mouth in the interest of actuarially sound health outcomes, they're not gonna be able to tell him he has to roll over and die at age 75 if he gets pneumonia.

When the time comes, I suspect that I will agree to reject health treatments when I'm 85, either due to limited health care resources that could be better directed elsewhere or based on merely "letting nature take its course", but I'd be far less likely to do it after having paid 200% "sin taxes" on every unit of Pepsi I consume levied by a government with the explicit intent of mandating that I get to age 85 in the first place.