Subject:
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Re: Rights to free goods? (was Re: What happened?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 4 Jul 1999 22:02:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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1026 times
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On Sat, 3 Jul 1999 20:43:09 GMT, Larry Pieniazek uttered the following
profundities...
> Frank Filz wrote:
> >
> > Healthcare is definitely the toughest nut to crack here. The problem is that
> > essentially for anyone in the world, there is a medical condition which
> > would take more resources to treat than they themselves own (god knows what
> > it would take to bankrupt Bill Gates, but even if he is "safe", I doubt
> > there are more than a few hundred or thousant people in the world who would
> > be "safe").
>
> The one that will get Bill Gates is the one we can't cure yet. Same as
> what got Princess Diana. We currently cannot save people that get
> crushed to 1/2 their volume and aren't extricated and gotten to the
> hospital that very instant. It did not matter if Diana had all the money
> in the entire world, there just was no way to save her available to us.
>
> There are lots of other deaths that cannot be prevented. Some swift,
> some not so swift. It's the not so swift ones that sucker us into
> spending a lot of resources on a hopeless cause. Everyone dies
> eventually, remember.
>
> I refrained from commenting on John C.s situation at the time. But I
> thought about it some more and it seems to me that, cold and heartless
> as it might be, we're STILL just dealing with scarce resource
> allocation. Utilitiarian: To use infinite heroic measures to save one
> person may not be a good use of societal resources. How much is a life
> worth? Who gets to decide?
>
> While a universal health care system may do a good job of ensuring
> everyone gets treated when they're hit by a bus, although I doubt it, I
> have very strong doubts that it will do a good job at deciding the
> harder ones. And mark my words, the decisions will be made, but they
> will be by faceless bureacrats.
>
> I'd rather make the decision myself now, in advance, thusly: Spend no
> more to try to save me than my health insurance covers, plus X, where X
> is a *relatively small* percentage of my total net worth. No heroic
> measures please. I love my family too much to wish poverty on them
> individually because they spent resourcs on me that would have been
> better spent on me.
>
> And I love my country(1) too much to wish poverty on it collectively
> because it squanders resources on hopeless causes or foolish fixes. Let
> people decide for themselves.
>
> My life is definitely not worth more than 5M to me or to my family.
>
> > What this means is that we need the ability to pool our resources to share
> > the risk. That means that the healthy people need to participate.
>
> Agreed. But the pooling must be proportional to the risk. As long as we
> do not allow insurance companies to charge MORE for riskier people, they
> will instead maneuver underhandedly to exclude them completely.
>
> I snipped most of the rest of Frank's append because I mostly agree with
> it, he's on the right track.
>
> 1 - That's right Jeff Stembel... I love this place even while I rabble
> rouse.
>
>
It is an interesting measure of "humanity."
How much do we make the sick, and their families, suffer, in
order that we expend vast resources in order to save the
unsaveable? Is the perpetuation of life, where it is futile
to do so, worth the expenditure, in order to retain the
collective notion of us doing all we could to save them?
(This statement is mainly in support of euthenasia. It is
illegal in many countries to not give care, or to accede
to a request to not give care when requested by the
patient or their family, regardless of the futility of
such treatment. Allowing someone to live a few extra
days in extreme pain and indignity, rather than the
system be thought of as a murderer for not allowing
the patient, or assisting the patient, to die with
dignity).
--
_____________________________________________________________
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