TRANSCRIPT: Hello. Dr. Keith Smith with you – Surgery Center of Oklahoma.

Principiis obsta, et finem respice.

This translates into “Resist the beginnings. Consider the ends.” I love this Latin phrase and I think about it often, particularly when I think about the government paying for people’s healthcare.

Government paying for people’s healthcare means government decides what healthcare to pay for and even what healthcare is. What its definition is. And as the government expands into healthcare even more, we will see more issues where the government is decide what is – and what is not – healthcare.

We will see something even more insidious though, where the government, ostensibly set up originally by the founders to protect individual rights, will now see people – particularly people who are elderly, whose end of life experiences can be very expensive – will see them as liabilities.

Here in the United States now, physicians are going to be paid to counsel and advocate that elderly people keep their death on a budget. This is not for the sake of the elderly person. This is for the sake of the state — the government — that will be bankrupted because they’re paying for these people’s healthcare.

They’re simply not going to pay for these people’s healthcare. And no one knows what the circumstances of their death are going to look like. But the seniors are going to be counseled and the physicians that are paid by the government are going to counsel elderly people to keep their death on a budget.

This is just the beginning and I say it should be resisted. We do not need to look very far to see what the end looks like. Right across the Atlantic Ocean, the National Health Service in Great Britain actually pays physicians a bounty to secure contracts from patients that will relinquish their end-of-life care. Physicians in Great Britain rush to the bedsides of dying patients eager to sign the death certificate because they receive a further bonus for this.

Resist the beginnings. Consider the ends.

It is not that difficult to see what this conversation with elderly people here in the United States will end up looking like. I’ve thought for a long time that ultimately, the elderly would say enough and would demand an alternative to the healthcare that is paid for them by the government. And I believe now that we will see it as this unfolds and it becomes more and more clear to people what this is really about, that this government sees human beings who are no longer of any use to the state clearly as liabilities.

Thank you for joining us in this video blog series. We’ll see you next time.