WASHINGTON -- Ezekiel Emanuel, a top health-care adviser to President Barack Obama and older brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, is emerging as a target of conservatives critical of Democrats' health-care effort.
Rahm Emanuel's Brother New Focus in Health Debate
1:50Critics of Obama's health-care push are focusing on Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. WSJ's Naftali Bendavid explains why the longtime scholar of medical ethics and health reform is drawing criticism over who should receive care.
Dr. Emanuel, a prominent oncologist and medical ethicist who has taught at Harvard Medical School and served at the National Institutes of Health, has written dozens of scholarly articles over the years. Critics are using his writings to suggest Dr. Emanuel favors withholding care from the elderly and disabled.
One of their most-cited examples is a 1996 article Dr. Emanuel wrote in the bioethics journal Hastings Center Report. Exploring which medical services should be guaranteed to all Americans, Dr. Emanuel cited an approach that would favor active people, adding, "An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."
In a radio interview last month, Betsy McCaughey, a scholar at the conservative Hudson Institute, cited the article in asserting that Dr. Emanuel believes patients with incurable diseases shouldn't be guaranteed health care. She and other critics have suggested a tie between Dr. Emanuel's views and a provision in a House health bill that would pay doctors to counsel Medicare patients on end-of-life issues such as living wills. Ms. McCaughey said the bill provided "counseling on how to cut your life short."
Ezekiel Emanuel, shown speaking to the AMA in Washington in March, is an oncologist and medical ethicist advising the White House.
The White House forcefully defends Dr. Emanuel, saying he is an academic who explores tough questions surrounding life and death.
In an interview Tuesday, Dr. Emanuel said his 1996 piece was "attempting to analyze different philosophical trends," not expressing his own views. Dr. Emanuel noted that he was a well-known opponent of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
"I'm an oncologist who has cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients," he said. "For 25 years, I've been a researcher, one of the first to go into the field of end-of-life care with the goal of improving it....It's a perversion of everything I've done to take one or two quotes completely out of context, without any of the qualifiers I've added, and distort them."
In another article, in the Lancet last January, Dr. Emanuel said age was one of several factors that could be considered in deciding who receives scarce organs or vaccines. "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination," he wrote. "Every person lives through different life stages."
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.) blasted that and other Emanuel statements on the House floor July 27. "The president's adviser defends discrimination against older patients," she said. Other Republicans, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have suggested the Democrats' plans could lead to euthanasia, a notion dismissed as ludicrous by the bill's authors.
Dr. Emanuel and other supporters of Mr. Obama see the criticisms as misleading. "I find it a little dispiriting, after a whole career's worth of work dedicated to improving care for people at the end of life, that now I'm 'advocating euthanasia panels,' " Dr. Emanuel said.
Dr. Emanuel, who heads the bioethics department at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, is working temporarily at the White House. White House spokesman Kenneth Baer said Dr. Emanuel was brought in by budget director Peter Orszag, and that his role owes nothing to that of his brother.
Ms. McCaughey apparently launched the assertion that Democratic bills encourage people to die in her July 16 radio interview. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) said a week later the bill "may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia."
Ms. Palin warned Friday on Facebook that "my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's death panel." Mr. Gingrich said on ABC's "This Week" that "you're asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there clearly are people in America who believe in establishing euthanasia."
Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) said the death panel allegation is "probably an exaggeration of what is actually in the plans." But he said it stems from fears that Democrats would allow government intrusion in personal health matters. "The most important thing here is that those decisions must be left in the hands of the families and individuals most directly affected," Mr. Cornyn told reporters Monday.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D., Ore.), co-sponsor of the end-of-life House measure, said it was a bipartisan provision that would encourage people to think about issues such as living wills before it was too late. The criticism "illustrates just how desperate some people are to do anything they can to derail health insurance reform," he said.
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