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 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"
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