Obama's 'Dr. Death' Lashes Out at Critics

A close adviser to President Obama at the center of a conservative assault on a government health insurance plan, defends himself in today's Wall Street Journal and says the attacks badly distort his record.

Writings of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, are being savaged by Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and others on the right. Now terms like "death panels" and the notion that grandma is going to be put out to pasture appear to be influencing public opinion.

The attacks are seen as a means of killing the idea of a public insurance plan as part of a health care reform package. A number of business groups, particularly insurers, oppose a government-run plan. If the scare tactics are successful, opponents of the president's reform would have a key influence on a final version of the plan.

An article Dr. Emanuel wrote in 1996 is being trumpeted by opponents who say he advocated not giving medical care to people with dementia. That's earned him the nickname "Dr. Death" or "deadly doctor." Dr. Emanuel, a medical ethicist who has written on care for dying patients, tells the Journal that his comments were taken out of context.

"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 tells the Journal.

He adds: "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."