"It is an issue about protecting the most weak and vulnerable among us. When you are near death is when you are the most vulnerable to coercion, intimidation and to powerlessness."
Excellent points!
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Marking Washington off any future vacation list.
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We talk alot about abortion here at FR, and someone made some statements the other day about some of the candidates claiming to be prolife, when they are pro-euthanasia.
Do we have any official statements from the candidates about their positions on euthanasia, and of course, whether or not they defended Teri Schiavo or others who have been killed?
btt
I think I am getting sick of these people.
Apparently this clown believes he created himself ex nihilo.
Not wanting his loved ones last memory to be watching him die a pathetic, drawn out death drugged to a haze in a hospital bed. Not wanting to burn his life’s savings doing it when he could leave that money to help his family. What a selfish decision that is.
“He has fought back with an experimental treatment and regained lost weight and describes the cancer as “dormant.” It’s still “a matter of time,” Carlson observed, but he isn’t planning on checking out at any time soon.”
He’s lucky to have qualified for experimental treatment. Most either don’t or can’t afford it.
please ping me for your euthanasia posts.
I live in Washington State and do not, nor have ever, understood, the prevailing fascination with death: abortion, suicide rates, and now euthanasia. Is it the weather?
Funny thing, we got libs trying to get their right to die legalized. The irony is that their kids probably are in favor of offing them too because of the burden they’d be to them. Total madness and evil coming back around to get you. I’m not a Buddhist, but the libs know what I mean when I say “Karma is a b1tch.”
Joel Connolly rocks!
That "burden" also includes spending his grandchildren's college money.
Individual freedom is, however, not absolute. It can be limited when an individual's actions harm the self, the family or the human family.
To ignore the inherent trade-off here that puts us in a position where we MUST make unpleasant choices is equally immoral. I'm going to glom two pieces I've been dabbling with to make this clearer:
We all know what is going to happen with Social Security and MediCare. They will go bankrupt on the back end of the baby boom. There is a simple reason for this beyond demographic numbers:
So the working public, having a conscience, pays for such services without recognizing the corollary to the above fact:
2. One can always dream up more ways of spending more of other people's money in order to make life more pleasant, especially those providing services to the recipients.
The longer we live, the more expensive dealing with aging becomes. That means working people, who are asked to pay the taxes then have less to invest in future productive children. Less productive children will then have a harder time bearing the cost of supporting more of the elderly, each living longer and each demanding ever more expensive services…
It's a downward spiral. We all know it. At root, it's a moral problem. We all fear a lingering death alone without loved ones. What we've done is to subsidize it and the businesses that live off the system.
Social Security helps older folks stay in their homes instead of forcing them to impose upon their kids, which at first sounds humane to both. Consider however, the economic use of the housing stock when an aging couple or an elderly woman stays in a home large enough to accommodate a full family. That means those homes are not available to young families who need the space. The resulting increased demand for housing forces young families to pay higher prices and thus stay in debt for decades longer. Most often they then have to purchase housing they can afford far from work in remote suburbs. That means they spend less time with their children. It raises daycare costs at a time when they can least afford it. It also inhibits early savings for college…
Social security ends up alienating the aged from their families, too often to live alone and friendless and, as a result, dying at an earlier age. Isolating the elderly from young people removes the opportunity for the elderly to teach their history or culture to succeeding generations. The elderly end up feeling less valued, while the State and media are free to revise history and culture at will. We all know where that goes.
What's this to do with social liberalism? The people who brought us Social Security and the welfare state were communists. Their answer?
They work to make the process of dying more attractive, whether it's abortion, "assisted suicide," gay lifestyles (gay males live an average of 57 years), getting public school children used to death with games of "lifeboat," loose sex, extreme sports...
In a free society, health care choices are necessarily individual, but given the uneven chance that an individual will incur catastrophic healthcare expenses, individuals must pool resources to fund health coverage, usually by means of insurance.
When healthcare was funded by a single family, funds were necessarily limited; a family would not starve its children to treat the sick or aged. The amount of effort to save a single life that could be spent has changed for two reasons:
2. Pooling healthcare resources has vastly increased the money available to be spent on any one case.
In effect, the “family” now paying for the service is the entire insurance pool. That pool, or its agent, the insurer, then has a say in what they will fund, just as the family once did. So now, instead of a family refusing to starve, we have an insurer refusing to go broke. It's a tradeoff. We have more funds available for any one individual, but less control over how they are spent. As long as technology is increasing the upper bounds of what might be spent, we, as a pool, face hard choices about what we can afford. When a moral imperative to make an infinite commitment to save any one life meets a technical ability to bankrupt the pool, somebody MUST lose in the pursuit of saving that one life.
As the pool enlarges to a global perspective, the moral problem takes on a new dimension, and "the least of mine," takes on a whole new meaning. The money being spent on Terri Shiavo could feed, clothe, medicate, and educate ten thousand children who will otherwise die.
We have to find ways to make hard moral choices in order to contain costs. It's inescapable.
Seventy percent of your medical dollar (or nearly eight percent of the national economy)is spent upon people who die within six months. Meanwhile, pregnant mothers still don't get decent prenatal care that would prevent life-long medical expenses and aliens enter the country carrying hepatitis, parasites, and antibiotic-resistant strains of infectious diseases that go untreated. Hospitals are on the verge of bankruptcy caring for the indigent. Private insurance rates bear much of that cost as a hidden tax in hospital charges.
We have no other choice than to limit the size of the money pool, else the system WILL fail and the society with it. That is why we must gradually shift from a system based upon taxes to one based upon family savings.