Caplan: Health care debate turns vile with Nazi analogy

Contrary to what Limbaugh and other Holocaust deniers would have you believe, German medicine and science were not brought into the Nazi party once Hitler took power. They fueled the fire for what became Nazism with bigotry proffered as science.

What distinguished the doctors and scientists of Germany pre-Hitler was that so many of them were firm believers in racial hygiene — the view that the Aryan race’s very existence was threatened by inferior peoples such as Jews, blacks and Slavs. They felt the only way to protect their "race," a concept that itself made little biological sense, was to prohibit reproduction with inferior people and, ultimately, to destroy them. It was racism masquerading as science that formed the basis for Nazi science and medicine right down to the gas chambers and ovens that my dad found himself staring at in 1945.

Caplan is right here.  No doubt.  I agree we have to be careful when we make analogies to Nazi Germany so as not marginalize what happened there.  But it is this next part that has me scratching my head:

Racism was at the core of Nazi medicine. Racism and a bizarre form of genetics that saw all manner of human frailty and weakness from prostitution to alcohol abuse to petty theft as highly heritable. When Hitler set out to kill the handicapped and the mentally ill he did it to protect the genetic future of Germany. When the "useless eaters" were targeted for euthanasia it was because of the threat they posed to the genetic health of future generations. When Nazi doctors mandated abortion it was to eliminate "mongrel" babies. When Nazi doctors analyzed how many of your ancestors had to be Jewish for you to be a Jew or when they killed all manner of Slavs, it was to remove these dangers from undermining the public health of the Reich.

Caplan seems to be saying that none of these abuses go on in this country.  But take a closer look and you will see that maybe we are not as far from these abuses as you might think.  Many women have recounted their experience with doctors bullying them into aborting their "genetically defective" babies. The Oregon Health plan (state run health care) has told terminally ill Oregon residents that they will pay for drugs to kill them but not drugs to extend their lives.  And ethicists have contended that it is criminal for parents with known geneticist defects to pass them on to their children.  In addition, there is some public sentiment that the "defective" are a drain on the rest of the nation.  Consider the following quotes from Lori B. Andrews, a reproductive rights lawyer:

"A woman I know was told by her obstetrician that her fetus had Down syndrome.  The doctor ordered her to abort, she refused....  Another woman was similarly coerced.  Her doctor told her that her baby would be more like a fish than a human and would only be as smart as a baboon."

"When I gave a speech at Emory Law School in Atlanta, students came up to me afterward and said that, with genetic testing readily available, women shouldn't be allowed to have children with disabilities, since it raises people's insurance rates." 

"Margery Shaw, a doctor and lawyer, wrote in the Journal of Legal Medicine that women who carry a genetic defect such as Tay-Sachs and who go forward with a pregnancy of an affected fetus should be prosecuted as criminals."

I contend we have a racism alive and well in this country.  Now, it is against those who are "genetically defective".

While Caplan rightly identifies racism as a driving force in Nazi medicine, I have to wonder of this racism have gone so far without a socialized system of medicine?  The Nazi's were socialists are all.  Would this prejudice have gone so far without the Nazi government running health care?  The Nazi's, as Caplan points out, took existing prejudice and took it to a another level. 

I am not eager to repeat the experiment to see if it would happen here. The British health system has already been accused of appalling treatment of the mentally disabled, including the starvation death of a man with Down syndrome in a hospital.

Unless the government is willing to uphold the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, I do not trust it to NOT put the current prejudices of the day into public policy.  Especially, with presidential appointees who idolize known eugenicists.