Ezekiel Emanuel, a self-styled "bio-ethicist," is brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a leading advisor to Obama's budget director Peter Orszag, and a member of the 15-person Federal Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research, the group which has been designated to prepare the list of which medical procedures will henceforth be permitted, and which will not, has co-authored a paper entitled "What Are the Potential Cost Savings from Legalizing Physician-Assisted Suicide?"

      Emanuel's co-author, Margaret Battin, has written other papers promoting suicide and selective refusal of medical treatment. The pair present Karl Brandt's defense of euthanasia at Nuremberg: "Death can mean deliverance. Death is life—just as much as birth. It was never meant to be murder." But it was.