He is the current Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy.

His father, Benjamin M. Emanuel, is a Jerusalem-born[4] pediatrician who was once a member of the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary organization that operated in Mandate Palestine.

He provided free care to poor immigrants and led efforts to get rid of lead paint that was dangerous for children;[5] as of 2010 he lived in a Chicago suburb.

[4] Emanuel's mother, Marsha, a nurse and psychiatric social worker who was raised in the North Lawndale community on Chicago's West Side, was active in civil rights, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Emanuel mimics his brother's end of the conversation: "You want to change the whole healthcare system, and I can't even get SCHIP [State Children's Health Insurance Program] passed with dedicated funding?

[2] After completing his post-doctoral training, Emanuel pursued a career in academic medicine, rising to the level of associate professor at Harvard Medical School in 1997.

[9] He soon moved into the public sector, and held the position of Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Emanuel served as Special Advisor for Health Policy to Peter Orszag, the former Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration.

[11] Emanuel entered the administration with different views from President Barack Obama on how to reform health care, but was said by colleagues to be working for the White House goals.

To the contrary, it would be a way of avoiding the complex and arduous efforts required of doctors and other health-care providers to ensure that dying patients receive humane, dignified care.

[24] Sarah Palin cited the Bachmann speech and said that Emanuel's philosophy was "Orwellian" and "downright evil", and tied it to a health care reform end of life counseling provision she claimed would create a "death panel".

In one article, he was talking about a philosophical trend, and in another, he was writing about how to make the most ethical choices when forced to choose which patients get organ transplants or vaccines when supplies are limited.

"[36][37] An article on Time.com said that Emanuel "was only addressing extreme cases like organ donation, where there is an absolute scarcity of resources ... 'My quotes were just being taken out of context.

And the paradox, the hypocrisy, the contradiction is that many of the people who are attacking me now supported living wills and consultations with doctors about end-of-life care, before they became against it for political reasons."

Fee-for-service payments, physician directed pharmaceutical marketing, and medical malpractice laws and the resultant defensive medicine encourage overutilization.

[39] According to Time, Betsy McCaughey said that Emanuel "has criticized medical culture for trying to do everything for a patient, 'regardless of the cost or effects on others,' without making clear that he was not speaking of lifesaving care but of treatments with little demonstrated value.

However, more should be spent on fraud detection, coordinating health services for patients with multiple doctors, and evaluating the effectiveness of new medical technologies such as genetic fingerprints for cancer and better ways of managing intravenous lines.

[citation needed] In an article in The Washington Post that Emanuel co-wrote with Shannon Brownlee, they described the health care system as "truly dysfunctional, often chaotic", "spectacularly wasteful" and "expensive".

[50] Anand Reddi challenged Emanuel’s arguments for reallocating funds away from HIV programs to support broader health initiatives.

[51] Reddi argued that reducing HIV funding would jeopardize lifesaving antiretroviral treatment for millions in resource-limited settings and undermine global progress in combating the epidemic.