Posted on 07/15/2009 10:25:10 AM PDT by nickcarraway
You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?
If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.
In the current U.S. debate over health care reform, “rationing” has become a dirty word. Meeting last month with five governors, President Obama urged them to avoid using the term, apparently for fear of evoking the hostile response that sank the Clintons’ attempt to achieve reform. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published at the end of last year with the headline “Obama Will Ration Your Health Care,” Sally Pipes, C.E.O. of the conservative Pacific Research Institute, described how in Britain the national health service does not pay for drugs that are regarded as not offering good value for money, and added,
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Peter Singer should take his own advice. He has nothing to offer society.
Yet these are the same people who want to give a blank check for care of illegals in this country.
“This bastard would have had my son euthenized at birth. My son’s crime? Hemophilia!”
Welcome to Eugenics, a key point of Socialist ideologies since it’s inception.
* - please do not pay attention to the two tiered system of government official, their families and others with political pull getting treatment you aren't allowed to have.
“If there is any point at which you say, ‘No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,’ then you think that health care should be rationed.”
That is non-sequitur. It can only makes sense if one assumes there to be a collective responsibility for paying and a collective authority for deciding.
I agree with you, I’ve long thought that Peter should put himself out of our misery.
We get rationing while he and his friends get anything they need, paid by our labor.
RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING, RATIONING
Your Senators are waiting to hear this from each of us.
What they completely miss: If you remove the funds that led to that extra 6 months breakthrough, you will destroy the incremental medical breakthroughs that lead to 6 months, 6 years, and ultimately a cure.
If they had their way in 1950, we’d still have 1950’s medicine and everyone would just die from cancer.
And all these advances were built on private profit and the treatments help poor as well as rich.
Soylent Green is People Feeding People.
First they came for the unborn, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t unborn...
I think most of us know where this is headed. We let the evil geenie out of the bottle when we started offing our young.
Where it’s going is hell on earth.
According to Pete, you no longer have a right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. I question his patriotism.
They will ration healthcare, but not to save money. The reason is that they hate the idea that someone can afford care and another person can’t. They want equal outcome - so what if people have to die to achieve it.
Oh, and the liberal elite won’t have to face such awful things. Their healthcare system is free and platinum plated.
Wow I’m glad he’s not in charge. My mother would have been dead by now!
This POS would have made Hitler proud.
Obama just said on TV that we have ‘to buck up’.....he’s already bucked up, BIG TIME!!!!!
People want to decide for themselves whether to spend money to extend their lives. They don’t want some government bureuacrat deciding for them.
There is no way a government can balance things. Is it better to treat a drugged-up, shot-up gangbanger with a fourth grade education who has been in and out of prison, but who is 21 versus a 70 year old who has worked hard all her life and wants to live to see her grandchildren.
You cannot make these determinations based on age alone. The gangbanger has already made his decision for himself that he doesn’t value his life very much by the life choices he has made.
And that's where the trouble started...
Rationing.....and there’s the added benefit of paying fewer people Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, and SSI.
A big incentive for the government to deny care to the elderly.
I always like to respond to socialists in kind; to refute their arguments on the same plane. That way they can’t say I changed the subject. Here’s the appropriate argument:
Sutent was created by a thorough and well-funded research program that has the goal of curing cancer. Without this research, Sutent would not exist. Nor would all of the other drugs, surgical procedures and technologies that have rolled back the curse of this dreadful disease. The drugs, like Sutent, must be tried on human populations to determine their effectiveness, and the data gained guides scientists in creating the next generation of drugs. Those drugs may not only prolong life with better quality, but may actually reverse and cure the disease. That research has a cost, and is most effectively borne by an insurance coverage system. The private sector, driven by motivations of profit and achievement, provide the competitive milieu to accomplish this.
Also, by spreading these costs of research and development through the insurance system, all members benefit directly, not just the isolated recipient of Sutent. Because we are all going to become ill someday. Without trying out these drugs on everyone, no one has the chance to beat what was once an incurable disease. And what human talent and ability is lost because of this? Will a talented physicist, who could have discovered a new source of energy for our planet, not make that breakthrough because he died of cancer at age 44? You cannot be selective here; you cannot spare the physicist and sacrifice the plumber because the plumber is “less important.” Without the research data gained by trying to save all, you wind up saving none.
Even you, Mr. Singer. Someday you may be diagnosed with cancer, or ALS, or Alzheimer’s disease. Under your system, you will be declared “obsolete,” and sacrificed on the altar of your socialist eugenics god. Perhaps if the proper research had taken place, there could have been a cure for your ailment. But alas, you deemed that it was not worth saving the “lost.” No research was done that might have saved you.
Too bad you condemned yourself to an earlier death than you otherwise would have had. But I won’t feel sorry for you; you brought it upon yourself. Instead I would feel pity for the millions of others you condemned to an early death. And the billions of all of us who suffered because of that loss of human potential.
He wants the rest of us to do what he and a few others he deems worthy will be exempt from, through their own wealth, rationalizing or perceived 'usefulness', ie his profession.
And who defines how much is too much to spend? How long is too long to savor another day? Is one life worth more than another? Oh, that's the best part - he thinks only he and people like him can do that.
And woe to us will be the suckers, the 'little people', who vote for it, endorse it, buy into it thinking it will be for everyone else, except them.
In a socialist system, there is still rationing, only it is now done by unelected government officials making rules as to what they believe is the common good. To be totally fair, they do have input from the Congress, which is at least theoretically representative of the people's wishes.
The problem is that government officials get to make the decisions, as opposed to the free market, their inherent human biases come out and they decide who gets what based not on need, as Marx said, but on who they THINK has a need. This distorts the market so badly that you end up with situations like the one in England where people are pulling their own teeth because they can't get in to see dentists.
Liberals, blinded by their Marxist religion, believe that this is a better system somehow.
And that's where the trouble started...
And why did that happen? Wage and price controls during WW II prevented companies from competing for the remaining employees with pay, so the sneaked some benefits like medical insurance under the radar. Just as the housing bubble was caused by government interference in the market, so too are many of the problems with the medical system.
Yes, unfortunately. Low birth weight preemies, like me, are also on the list as too costly to bother with. Post-birth abortions.
Peter Singer should take his own advice. He has nothing to offer society.
Lead by example.
This is a diabolical ethos and has no place in a rational society that values the individual. This is a logical outcome of a society where materialism is God. Funny how conservatives are often referred to as greedy, materialistic, and cold-hearted. No, we believe in the inherent value of the individual over the collective. Without the triumph of the former, the latter will always suffer.
You’ve gotten right to the source of the problem. When employers began picking up the tab for health care, people began to think of it as a “right” and that it would be provided by someone else at no cost to them.
Look at it this way:
Who here has car insurance? All of us responsible people do.
Who takes good care of their car with routine maintenance, oil changes, etc...? All us responsible people do.
When we do take the car in for routine maintenance, how many of us think we should submit a claim for payment for the oil change to our auto insurance carrier?
Anyone?
Anyone?
Daschle-Obama-Hillary! (DOH!) health care: The solution to the Social Security / Medicare funding problem.
(Someone tell the AARP! I tried. They don't care.)
This doesn't make sense to me nor does it sound likely to hold up under closer scrutiny.
You first, Peter.
It won’t be called “Rationing”...
It will be called “Responsible Spending!”, or somesuch, and the Obama-worshipping MSM will play right along.
Meanwhile YOU, and very likely your relatives, WILL DIE.
CHANGE (Eugenics) HAS ARRIVED!
So the term ‘pro-choice” only applies to killing an unborn child?
Liberalism is in fact a mental disorder.
Yes indeed. Peter Singer once recommended euthanasia centers in every city where new parents could turn in their infants
they were not satisfied with, go home and have another.
This scumbag is a mentally ill little twerp who would have hospitals kill babies who somebody decided were defective.
I suspect from what I see as an RN that they need to revise upward the statistics of survival for a whole lot of cancer treatments. Newer treatments are given best low ball numbers in their efficacies for treament(to avoid pollyanna
pronouncements of “instant cures”).
Over time however I often see many patients who have lived years beyond forecasted mortality rates because their cancer treatments were much more efficacious than predicted. I see a lot of 80 year old women who come in with typical old age ailments who have had multiple bouts of breast cancer over 30 years. Even lung cancer patients are living way beyond forecasts with good quality lives. I had one patient who was into her 4th treatment for non-hodgkins lymphoma who was averaging 3 years remissions.(she was benefiting from new discoveries when treatment time came around again).
Liver and pancreatic cancers are the only ones that continue to be stubborn and resistant to treatments.
Hell, They started the business provided health care system when the enacted wage freezes in the 40’s. That was the only way they could attract employees. Anytime there is a disconnect from direct impact on the wallet of the consumer, you will have run away prices.
There is a direct correlation of the ever increasing cost of medical care from the time government started mucking with wages and then sticking their nose into health care.
Evil.
Just plain evil.
Trouble is he is a professor at a prestegious university and is charged with forming young minds.
Yes, in the Medical Ethics Chair, no less! Princeton University.
I have a male cousin who has been quadriplegic for nearly 26 years due to an accident. His wife of 26 years told us last week that my cousin believes he would not be the person he is had he not been injured. How does that view jibe with Peter Singer’s view?
I despise liberal academic pencilneck pinheads (which is a redundant phrase) like Singer who think they know what’s good for everyone else.
Same jackasses wrote blank checks to banks and insurance companies..who turned around and wrote checks to the members of Congress ...who gave them the blank checks in the FIRST Place...????WTF???
I agree that we already ration healthcare, but we ration it in a capitalist way which makes the marketplace the decision maker not the government. Huge difference as we can see from the horrible systems in Canada and UK.
The premise that if we already ration it a bit privately, we should institutionalize total rationing, is ridiculous.
I also find it unbelievable that the UK does not have a death penalty for criminals just for the sick.
Further, discussions of rationing never mention the wholly preventable disease AIDS and its high cost treatment ($300,000) for an incurable disease.
exactly.
Leave the government out of it. I don’t want my government making those decisions.
Also the story about O’s mother. Would you rather worry about how you were going to pay for the care or worry about how you were going to get the care?
The former are the socialized med countries; the latter is the US.
my mistake. reverse those
Do we get roll over? I’ve been to the doctor maybe 6 times in the last quarter century, that should get me a lot later.
I can tell that this guy is a hydration tube puller.
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