My mother had both knees replaced after a round with breast cancer. She went from not being able to stand up to walking ten miles a day. Ten years later she died of cancer. If she had not been able to walk those last ten years, her quality of life would have been drastically lower and that alone would have made lose her will to live. Thank God she had free enterprise medicine.
Obama’s Nazi medicine would have written her off and I would not have had her those last few years.
And furthermore, who decides what "terminal" is? Aren't we ALL terminal? And how long is that interval?
And we all know how 0bama handles "difficult moral issues"; he defends late-stage abortions as well as death by neglect for those infants who survive them.
Taking care of an elderly friend forced my husband and I to make a decision to not provide physical therapy so that she could walk on her own again. She was 98, she was not strong enough to walk and continued to injure herself trying....while it was difficult to make that decision, it was OUR decision with her trust...the government had nothing to do with that choice and should NEVER have anything to do with that choice.
I dug up the whole quote, lest we be accused of taking him out of context (which they’ll invariably claim):
THE PRESIDENT: …I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care — it’s a related one — is what you do around things like end-of-life care —
NYT: Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.
THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.
So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.
And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.
I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. 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. 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.
NYT: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.
THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
NYT: So how do you — how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: …you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
Just to be fair, they should just set an age limit and kill people when they reach it. For Democrats age 150 limit, for Republicans age 37 limit. Then Dr Zeke can use our young corpses for organ harvesting including addadictomy’s for prisoners. Live on Mr Happy!
Medical resources will always fall short of demand, and the only sensible inquiry is how should they be allocated; by a bureaucrat with his/her own political motivation, or the free market? An example of the bureaucrat’s decision process is when the city of San Francisco decided their employee benefit plan would pay for sex change operations without any recognition that those operations would divert monetary resources from other medical needs. Unless, of course, that the city felt there was a surplus of medical resources???
Kind of an odd sales pitch...actually it is a pretty stupid sales pitch...unless you are selling to an 18 to 35 age group who do not want to pay for the medical care of their parents?
bookmark
For your ping list?
Utilitarianism prescribes The Principle of Utility (or The Greatest Happiness Principle) to determine the morality of one’s actions. The problem with this type of moral cost/benefit analysis is that an individual tends to weigh his or her happiness higher than another’s pain. Indeed, it is quite possible to justify immoral actions under the guise of promoting the greater good. Social Darwinism tends demonstrate The Real Principle of Maximum Utility quite well.
This is of what they speak, the “greater good”. When they take this view, there is not much that cannot be done based upon achieving this “greater good”. Remember, it all depends on the definition of the “greater good” ...
Once we head down this path, where does it stop?
schu
And that is the point. The farther away the center of command the more general the commands given. The bureaucrat in Washington can never know the intimate details of the situations he proposes to regulate. He can only issue broad mandates. And the result is that all the little (and sometimes not-so-little) details that are unique to each of us are simply ignored (because they are unknown) in the push to get the desired result as mandated by that far away bureaucrat.
It is at the local level that decisions can be made that take into account the “hard moral” choices. The more local and personal the power of choice is located the more just and right the ultimate decision is likely to be for the simple reason that the person(s) making the choices know the people involved and are most familiar with all the circumstances surrounding each individual. Just and fair decisions are far more likely to be made by those directly involved than by some remote stranger.
In the matter of illness, life and death the choices made, to be anywhere near wise enough to take into account all the moral and ethical issues in play, MUST be made by the people directly involved. Anything else results in injustice because the decisions become more and more arbitrary due to distance and ignorance. People complain about insurance companies and HMOs for precisely this reason. To replace these with a central control in D.C. will only make matters worse.
If this monstrosity passes, aging baby boomers will become an endangered species. In danger of termination.
Better stay healthy, or else...
Oh great, just snuff out the chronically ill and elderly and, what, my health insurance goes down 80%? (/S)
What the heck is the definition of “terminal”? Terminal illnesses can go on for years. ALS is a terminal illness and can take more than ten years to run its course before the onset of death.
Should someone with two months left to live be given a hpi replacement... uh... probably not... and it wouldn’t even be considered for someone in a delicate state because they probaby wouldn’t survive the surgery.
These people are either evil or stupid (or a combination of both).
A government worker assists a disabled senior citizen to the crushing machine under President Obama's re-designed "Cash for Clunkers" program.
“The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives ...”
Diabetes, arthritis, shingles,cardiac and pulmonary problems are chronic illnesses.
Obama has taken an enormous leap from terminal to chronic.
This is monstrous.
According to HHS-
“ Almost 75 percent of the elderly (age 65 and over) have at least one chronic illness.”
http://www.ahrq.gov/research/elderdis.htm
Senior citizens who take cardiac medications or have high blood pressure
and those who have stiff knees and hands best be paying attention.
Obama must really believe that he is a deity who can determine
when one “ is at the end of their lives.”
Euthanasia is not a term that should be thrown around loosely,but,
it’s hard not to see euthanasia and population reorder as being a driving factor in the way Barry views older Americans.
In fact, all Americans.