[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I guess Cass Sunstein missed the Twentieth Century. Nudging people to what was right for the greater good was popular in a lot of countries and the results weren’t pretty.

[ravingnutter]

I guess Cass Sunstein missed the Twentieth Century. Nudging people to what was right for the greater good was popular in a lot of countries and the results weren’t pretty. We are definitely headed in that direction though:

Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Cass Sunstein, has advocated that laws be changed so that deceased patients’ organs may be harvested for transplant without prior consent from the patient or family.

Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler outlined the policy in their 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Many organs that could be used in transplants are lost because patients fail to give their consent before dying, Sunstein and Thaler note, and family members often refuse to donate their loved one’s organs.

This “explicit consent” should be turned into a “presumed consent,” write Sunstein and Thaler, where laws would assume that, unless people explicitly choose not to, they want to donate their organs to science for transplant or other medical uses.

Obama Regulation Czar: Organ Harvesting Without Consent

According to this story, it has actually begun:

According to the Washington Post, taxpayers are now financing, via a $321,000 HHS grant, a pilot program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Presbyterian Hospital and Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh to obtain organs from emergency room patients, a practice heretofore "considered off-limits in the United States because of ethical and logistical concerns."

The goal of the project, reports the paper, is to "investigate whether it is feasible and, if so, to encourage other hospitals nationwide to follow."

The article is somewhat obtuse about the longstanding moral problem at the center of organ transplantation, which is that the donors aren't actually dead.

It seems to accept uncritically the bogus definitions of death as "brain death" and "cardiac death" that the medical community uses to take organs from the dying but not dead. (Organs from cadavers are useless, so the medical community had to come up with the convenient lies of death as "brain death" and "cardiac death" to pluck usable organs from the living.)

The Future's Shadow (Obama's Organ Harvesting Plan)

That man is just evil, the next step is involuntary euthanasia for those not deemed "productive", you can count on it.