Posted on 07/19/2009 5:47:29 AM PDT by tobyhill
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I believe Rush has got it pegged: Obama thinks nothing is special about America and it has limits on all sides.
This country, founded on unbridled optimism by our founders, is now neutered and leaderless by this Zer0.
Democrats will tell the blue states that quality care is their right and they’ll tell red states that they need to ration their health care to control costs.
Peter Singer is Voldemort, “Will of Death.”
This is the logical progression in thought and policy for a country that has embraced a “culture of death”. Where does this ultimately lead to? Mandated euthanasia for individuals who are a drain on societies resources. Google “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” and watch it. The prophetic series put together by C. Everett Koop and Francis Shaeffer back in the 70’s. I watched it as a teen and said to myself, this will never happen in the USA. I was wrong.
What happens if the diagnosis is wrong?
I think that we should ration the State Run Media.
Peter Singer, the author of this article, is morally bankrupt, and has seemingly has been so for all his adult life.
He carries the moral autority of Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot.
People should read more of Pete Singer’s ethics discussions to respect why he is such a great advocate for Bambi’s eugenic thinking.
Like the one where he advocates killing disabled babies up to a month after they are born. Having sex with animals if it is considered consensual. Or saving a mouse instead of a family when a house burns down.
Why, exactly, did Madelyn Dunham (Obama’s grandmother) get hip replacement surgery given that she was suffering from heart disease, terminal cancer and possibly had had a stroke?
“I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost,” Mr. Obama said in the interview with David Leonhardt of The Times. “I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement, just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model is a very difficult question.”
He went on to say: “If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life, that would be pretty upsetting.”
That’s the tragedy. The money was spent. The operation was performed. But it neither extended her life nor enhanced the quality of her life. She began to fail. In about two weeks, she was dead. She lived long enough to cast her absentee ballot. But not to long enough to see it counted.
Was it worth it, Barry?
I want the same healthcare that Michelle’s mom gets.
Just think if a Republican guernatorial candidate in TX, rather than a murderous leftist distinguished ethicist, had repeated this anti-feminist joke.
We could cut gov't costs by using a bullet for every three or four gov't workers. Does that make sense to this b0z0?
Could be. I get the impression that he really does not like muggles. :)
In all seriousness one of main roots of problems in the world is people who really hate their fellow humans. Sadly it is not confined to liberals.
At that point, or sooner - I hope, the red states will secede and leave the blue states to their Socialist fiasco.
Evil, pure evil, has set up shop at the white house.
Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns similarly lack the essential characteristics of personhood — "rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness"[28] — and therefore "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living."
“You’re in the final throes of death. You’re a cancer on the ass of America. Your advertisement revenues have plummeted to an all-time low because of your far-left, communist editorial slant and your anti-American bias. Your owner is a pompous little pustule who is flushing your business down the porcelain potty but no one cares. Now imagine that you, the taxpayer, are going to bail out this little bourgeois cretin with your hard-earned dollars. Makes you think about killing yourself, doesn’t it? Welcome to Obama’s world!”
Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, the leading organisation for blind people in the United States, strongly criticised Singer's appointment to the Princeton Faculty in a banquet speech at the organization's national convention in July 2001, claiming that Singer's support for euthanizing disabled babies could lead to disabled older children and adults being valued less as well.
Looks like Mr. Maurer is a prophet.
I believe you’re right. If there’s nothing exceptional about human life, then it’s not so bad if the state makes decisions on when to begin or end it.
Pete Singer is a real piece of rear-statement.
What kind of healthcare are the terrorists at Gitmo going to get if Obamacare passes?
No one will know if the diagnosis was wrong because the Government will control the diagnosis, treatment and information.
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?I have a few questions for the Great Ethicist Singer:
Do you think kidney cancer will ever be cured?
If it is cured, will it be cured in a single step, or will there be many steps along the way?
If we count all the people who will be cured of kidney cancer in the future, let's say the next thousand years, and put that number at, I don't know, a billion, is it worth it to pay for "expensive" steps to reach that cure-rate?
What if Sutent is one of those "steps along the way"? How much is it worth to cure a billion people of kidney cancer in the next thousand years?
Do you care about people?
In your mind, outside of your family and your circle of friends, and the people you worship, does human life have any value to you at all?
Exactly why health insurance and medical decisions should never be in the hands of the government.
If the patient dies, then the expectation is that there will be no means of proving that he would have lived had he received the treatment.
So if your 80-year-old grandmother with a heart condition is denied a pace-maker and then she dies, the bureaucrats can just say you can't prove that she would have lived if she had received one.
beautiful statement
Remember the joke about the man who asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars?If Rush Limbaugh told that joke, just think how up in arms the media would be. They'd accuse him of committing an anti-feminist thought crime.
Now, we enter a new paradigm: 'rats shifting their courtships, deciding its no longer to their vote-buying advantage to court the elderly. With the future of social security in doubt, and health care spending unsustainable, the money is better spent on buying younger folks votes. So, while this occurs, the inverse will lead: not only not court the elderly vote, but diminish it as well.
Thye fundamental question to ask Singer is who sets the limits on what can and cannot be spent and on what?
Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another.Health care is scarce because the government is already massively involved in it and it will become more scarce -- dramatically more scarce -- as the government becomes more massively involved in it.
Is telecommunications scarce?
Just think if the US Government was the "single payer" for all telecommunications services? Just think how scarce they would be?
You want call-waiting on your phone? You're willing to deprive someone else of dial-tone just so you can have call-waiting?
And just think of how selfish texting would be.
No. The fact is, if the government ran telecommunications we'd all still be connecting through switch-board operators.
Whatever production the government is involved in, that product becomes scarce.
They’ll sue if it’s not the finest.
All these years the left has been telling us health care is a RIGHT, and now Singer is telling us health care needs to be rationed for our good.
How whack is that?
Would Obama ration trasplants? you bet.
President Obama has said plainly that America’s health care system is broken.And you take him at his WORD?
Based on his BACKGROUND in the field?
Based on his EXPERIENCE?
Premature babies will be ones of the first to be impacted by this administration, the elderly, who were for the past
50 years scared by the Democrats, that the Republicans would be taking away their health care, will be next.
But Obama and the Black Liberation Theology brethren see it differently. To them...
This country, founded on unbridled greed of Whitey...When Obama said "share the wealth"...he also meant "share the health"
first if Peter Singer is on your side. YOU are the nutcase.
If we ration we won’t be writing blank checks to pharmaceutical companies for their patented drugs...Aha! I was wondering when we would get to the evil pharmaceutical companies.
Let's see...
How many new drugs are developed in England, Canada, France or any of the other socialist-medicine countries?
I thought so: ZERO.
Well, President Zero wants us to join those countries in producing ZERO new drugs in the future and Maximum Cheerleader and DeathMerchant Singer is leading the charge!
Hip hip hooray! Death is on the way!
I will ration my own health care, not someone else's and I don't want someone else rationing mine.
It seems strange that the health insurance companies can make a profit by providing whatever the patient needs to stay alive, but OBAMA and the government he leads can NOT provide what the patient needs Which tells us that the government should stay out of the health care business.
Obama lied when he told us that we can choose our own doctor and our own health insurance company. What he DIDN’T tell us is that in his DeathCare bill we must choose which doctor and health insurance company the government controls. In other words, we have no choice but to accept government controlled health care.
But the British media leapt on the theme of penny-pinching bureaucrats sentencing sick people to death.And we're going to make sure that no media in America makes THAT mistake, right?
President Zero already has 95% of the media in his pocket and the other 5% is going to be heavily REGULATED.
If you oppose health care rationing you're a HATER, right Singer?
If you oppose health care rationing you're involved in HATE SPEECH, right Singer?
If you oppose health care rationing you're guilty of a HATE CRIME, right Singer?
Cheers!
In Britain, everyone has health insurance.
In Britain, everyone waits in line for health care.
In Britain, the people are finally waking up to how horrible their health care is.
In Britain, after years of public silence on the subject, people are finally starting to say: THIS SUCKS!
There is a role for insurance that is simply insurance against risks that the insured is not willing to pay for himself.
The Fair Tax folks are missing the opportunity to have a public discussion that we sorely need: at what level of need does a citizen deserve help from the rest of us and at what level should it be the duty of a citizen to pay their own bills? This includes food, clothing, shelter and yes, medical costs.
We have allowed government to define a level of health care that raises costs. I don't mind paying for lifesaving care for the indigent, but paying for sex change operations for prisoners? We have stretched and expanded what is considered medically necessary to include treatments for the indigent that almost insult the taxpayer.
We have also allowed government to force insurance companies to cover conditions such as mental health that only raise costs for the rest of us. One way to cut insurance costs is to allow companies to sell stripped down plans across state lines. Another way to lower costs is to require hospitals to give their best price to patients who will pay for their bill in full in cash.
The author doesn’t get it.
My health insurance premiums cover MY health insurance which is a contractual agreement between myself and my insurance company.
The competitive for profit insurance model ensures that group risk rates are accurately spread out among all members and that the necessary premiums will take into account the “outlier diagnoses/treatments.” This model is best for all as the person who gets really sick and needs special long term care pays a lower premium relative to the care they receive while the remaining healthy members pay a minimally higher premium. Everyone that pays premiums gets coverage. This works because the very sick person’s use has already been factored into the premiums everyone pays.
Add to this the competition element between insurers, and this has two interesting effects. First, it encourages more accurate risk health assessments across the represented groups. Second, the competition results in lower premiums for the individual as those risk models are further refined. Competition also allows the insureds to choose which insurer best fits their needs while the providers also can choose which insurer pays them the highest UCR and whether or not to accept members of that plan.
A forced single payer health care system is not a health care plan at all. It’s simply additional taxation without representation and yet another example that the Left is only pro-choice when it comes to abortion.
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