Futile Care Theory Metastasizes: Terminal Cancer Patients’ Lives Not Worth Extending

Chode do you notice this is not said about those members of society who willing contracted AIDS in a dirty toilet and AIDS is ten times more expensive than cancer ever was?

Do you wonder why?

Not that I do.

Just pointing it out.

Give us a number where you think a death panel should be permitted to end a person's life.

It won't come to pass in that way, wagglebee.

Current Medicaid systems reimburse doctors, hospitals and clinics at rates which are so low that patients are effectively rationed out of the market. That's what will be coming to Medicare in the very near future. Watch and see if either party proposes to maintain or increase Medicare reimbursements, I'm quite confident they will not.

Costs can be drastically reduced without the government ever having to explicitly deny a single service. For example, hospitals are already reducing the number of defibrillator implants placed in Medicare patients because the US DOJ has started a criminal investigation of cases where implants do not meet Medicare's rationing guidelines. No bureaucrat has to say no to a patient....they just put the fear of prison into hospital administrators and let them do it.

Much of this sort of thing will happen without respect to whether the government is conservative or liberal...the demographics of Medicare in particular are inexorable.

The answers to your questions are yes,yes,no,no.

And the key question is number 3. Since I do not pay all my medical expenses out of my own pocket, I accept without question that those who do pay the residue are entitled to a say in what services they will cover.

Define "high cost." Is it $1 million?

Suppose there is a treatment that will extend the lives of cancer patients by five years. This treatment costs $100,000 per year of treatment (that's high, but within the realm of current possibility).

Further, suppose that of the approx. 47 million Medicaid patients in America, 1 million have cancer and could benefit by this treatment. Do you:

1 - raise taxes on the rest of America by $100 billion to pay for this treatment?

2 - set the Medicaid payment rate for this treatment so low that no one will offer it?

3 - Empower someone or some group to decide who of the 1 million can receive the treatment, based on limited funds as available?

4 - Publicly say "Sorry. The taxpayers can't afford this. Medicare won't be covering it".

Note that there is no option 5 "cut foreign aid to pay for it" or 6 "find a pot of gold at the end of a magic rainbow".

My choice as you can imagine is #4. What's yours?

You're illustration is all well and good, but that's easy to do with an IMAGINARY HYPOTHETICAL.

Here are the FACTS:

1. The treatment you base everything on DOES NOT EXIST.

2. It is highly improbable that there are one million Medicaid patients with cancer (feel free to offer proof of this if you want to go down this road).

I am curious though, why did you choose Medicaid? This program is mainly run by the individual states and that is where much of the funding comes from.

Your illustration simply doesn't work; however, it does demonstrate the liberal/libertarian mindset of supporting death panels based on a problem that doesn't actually exist.

If it's only $1 billion rather than $100 billion, and if it's Medicare rather than Medicaid, the decision would be the same.

If a new and expensive treatment comes along, which was not contemplated in the program's budget, the choices are still (1) don't cover it, (2) cover it selectively, or (3) raise taxes to pay for it.

If you believe that the nation's taxpayers have a duty to accept (3), that's a valid argument. But you should say so.

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