It usually boils down to money. The common case is saving the cost of care, especially the heavy costs typical for people near the end of their lives. Former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm stated the matter plainly, saying that seniors have a DUTY to die. This kind of thinking infects all socialized medicine because in those systems, care must be rationed. It looks as if the elderly are hogging the care.
However, things don't work that way in private medical markets, which allocate resources differently.
Money plays a huge role in organ transplant cases (which is what I suspect was afoot in Haleigh's case). Here you not only escape the cost of care, you may make a six-figure profit selling the organs. The only trick is, you have to declare the patient brain-dead (a new definition of death invented at Harvard in the 1960s in order to make organs more accessible for transplantation).
Cases where money is not involved at all? Well, there are always a few sociopaths like Ted Bundy, Jack Kevorkian and George Felos, who kill for thrills or for the fun of it.
Hadn't thought of that. What better source of a nice fresh *commodity*. Sick.
And don't forget it was Dick Lamm who passed America's
first abortion law, signed April 25, 1967.
Lots of blood on those hands!
Pray for his repentance.
Thank you for your clear, concise and accurate post about the economics of organ donation. I never realized the seriousness and unavoidibility of conflicts of interest when an agencies/NGO's are allowed to both make the kill decision and to profit from that decision.
Though I stand with you against the culture of death, I support the brain death standard. It is simply true that sometimes so much of the brain has died that the person cannot recover even to a PVS-like state, and cannot breath without help. In such a case, they are dead.
If someone is using the brain death standard to run an organ scam, that just means they're doing the same thing a doctor would do if he heard a heartbeat and pretended he didn't. It doesn't mean the standard itself is bad.
Sadly, you just explained the reason why I am not an organ donor. I would like to be, but in order to keep the medical merchants from harvesting my parts too soon, I must carry a card that says I specifically decline to be an organ donor.