Yours was a well-articulated, intelligent post posing difficult questions that have yet to be answered.
Since this thread was posted last night there's been perhaps a thousand patients at hospitals across the country whose life support machines were turned off after decisions regarding their prognosis were weighed against financial concerns as well as the need of others for these expensive and very limited in availability life-supporting machines.
There's been perhaps another thousand patients who died last night because a life support machine was not available to them. It was either being used by another patient, having periodic maintenance being performed on it or in a state of disrepair and awaiting the funding needed to get it fixed.
Finally, there's most likely countless patients whose lives depend on one of these life support machines becoming quickly available and who will die if one doesn't.
Hard decisions must be made. These machines are very expensive and there's more people who need them than there are machines available to use. That's an ugly truth but a truth nonetheless.
First of all, we are talking about a FEEDING TUBE, not life support.
Feeding tubes have been used with varying degrees of success for over FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. The early problems with them are entirely due to not having modern plastics to use and infections which are now irrelevant due to common antibiotics.
There is NO SHORTAGE of feeding tubes.
Hard decisions must be made. These machines are very expensive and there's more people who need them than there are machines available to use. That's an ugly truth but a truth nonetheless.
Actually, this isn't true at all. Feeding tubes are inexpensive to produce and cost about $700 a week to use.
You may not realize it, actually you almost certainly do, but you are pushing rationing and death panels. Your position is EXACTLY THE SAME AS OBAMA'S.
This is different situation. This FR thread below, sounds what you are on about. If this illegal immigrant problem isn’t fixed at all levels, NOTHING will be. “Martin Memorial Center in Stuart, chartered a plane to take Luis Alberto Jimenez back to his native Guatemala. An illegal immigrant, he had cost the hospital more than $1 million after a car accident left him in a coma.” Facing ever-increasing financial losses, Miami-Dade’s struggling Jackson Health System has spent $33 million this year alone on caring for undocumented immigrants.
On a quiet street in northwestern Miami, a Jackson nursing home serves 60 undocumented immigrants — some paralyzed, quite a few on ventilators — costing Miami-Dade taxpayers about $318 a day per patient.
``There’s no way to place them anywhere else,’’ says Armand Gonzalez, administrator of the Jackson Memorial Long-Term Care Center.
The cost of their care is part of the reason why the county’s public hospital system is struggling with growing financial losses that border on the disastrous. Losses are expected to escalate to $168 million next year because of South Florida’s unique problems — high numbers of uninsured and high healthcare costs that keep increasing the ranks of the uninsured.
On the national level, the issue of undocumented immigrants has become politically explosive.
Care costs for undocumented immigrants stack up http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2332523/posts