Yet at least two of President Obama's top health advisers should never be trusted with that power.

Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. "Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change," he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).

Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years" (Lancet, Jan. 31).

Cheney and Addington insisted that memos from our old buddy John Yoo gave the president the power to deploy the United States military on U.S. soil, Posse Comititus be d@mned.

I wish I could say this was so much worse than I imagined, but it's not. I can totally see this happening. Even sadder, I can imagine the American people putting up with it.

LAS MANOS, Nicaragua (CNN) -- Ousted Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya walked under a border chain Friday and returned to his country nearly a month after being removed by a military-led coup.

"I am not afraid when I work for a just and noble cause," Zelaya said to someone on a cell phone moments after crossing the border, surrounded by scores of cheering supporters.

Honduran troops had been blocking the border but did not stop him from fulfilling his vow to return after being removed by a military-led coup in June.

His arrival at the border came minutes after police and soldiers fired on his supporters in El Paraiso, CNN en Español correspondent Jorge Jimenez said. Two people were wounded, he said.

Neither the shooting nor the injuries could be independently corroborated.

The police and soldiers fired tear gas at the demonstrators for about 15 to 20 minutes before letting off a barrage of 15 to 20 shots, Jimenez said.

About 1,500 police and soldiers have faced off with Zelaya supporters in El Paraiso, about seven miles (12 kilometers) from the border with Nicaragua.

The apparent shootings happened minutes after Zelaya held a news conference on the Nicaraguan side of the border and asked police and soldiers to let him back into his country.

"Allow me to return to my country," Zelaya said, directly addressing his nation's police and army. "To embrace my fellow countrymen, my children, my wife, my mother."