Wednesday, October 3, 2012

OK  This was found over at "Some Assembly Required"
Rationing: The health care cost problems in the US stem from two things – for profit medicine, and the tendency to lavish costly efforts on elderly Americans without considering the cost/benefit ratios in the context of the overall health of the nation. To put it a tad more clearly, we need death panels.
 Now on the same day, over at "Jesse's Cafe Americain"
"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.  
The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps.
The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small.
Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin

Now, this is the hard thing that I have been wrestling with of late.  This one has given me fits for three weeks now.  Where does the right exist to live beyond ones natural lifespan?  Does withholding expensive medical care constitute abuse?  Are the elderly more important than those in their younger years.  Where does honor thy Mother and thy Father start and end.

I can't seem to pin down the answers.  Any attempt leaves me unsatisfied.  There may not well be a right answer, just a series of unsatisfactory compromises.

2 comments:

tweell said...

The least unsatisfactory answer to me is to do away with Medicare, Medicaid and all those types of government funded medicine. Let the tyranny of the marketplace rule, where if someone has the money, they get the procedure.

What we will get instead will not be death panels, but delay panels (as seen in England). Lose the paperwork, make folks resubmit for the least problem, take time approving surgeries, and people will either die or not be able to be saved by that procedure. Problem solved!

russell1200 said...

Jesse leaves out a little information.

When the public got wind of what was going on, there were serious protests and the program was ended.

To some degree this is why the Germans were a little more careful about putting a happy face on the preceedings when they restarted the genocide programs.