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...
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