the Catholic church, IIRC, has a basic attitude that you don't have to break the bank to save one person, unless its your own money of course....
would we rather have tube feedings and suction for an incoherent 90 yro OR have vaccines for young children?.....if we only had finite dollars, what do you choose?.
If you want to spend a half million dollars of your own money (or your children's inheritance) during the last month of your life, then have at it. The government should have no rules to prevent this. But tradeoffs have to be made somewhere when it's a question of spending government money to keep people alive for short periods at extraordinary cost.
Either get rid of socialized medicine or accept its limitations.
In a recent interview, David Goldhill, author of Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father had something interesting to say about the distortions caused by socialized medicine:
Many people think that, you know, if they're seniors, that Medicare is paying for their health care. What's interesting about seniors and what almost no one understands about Medicare is in 1965, when seniors paid for almost all of their health care themselves, roughly 10 to 12 percent of their income was spent on health care. This year, when seniors pay almost none of their health care themselves - Medicare pays 95 percent of the bill - that little 5 percent they pay now accounts for 20 percent of their income.
So what you have is people who think they're being protected by having these big intermediaries between them and the price of health care, in fact, what those intermediaries are doing is so inflating prices, so inflating demand, building so much waste and complexity into the system that all of us are bearing this extraordinary cost. We just don't see it because it's so many different hands into our pocket. But there is no other place for the money to come from.
“what do you choose?.”
Since we made the decision 55 years ago not to have childern knowing what they would have to live through in the demise of this country, I chose medical care!!!
The Parasite Class is the problem. Spending on parasites is driving this country bankrupt. I would rather spend money on keeping a WWII vet alive for another month than spend it on welfare, government schools, ubion thugs, bridges to nowhere, bailouts and any other progressive nonsense. Yes, a choice has to be made.
If someone is dependent on government to pay for their medical care, then they should be aware that money is NOT infinite. I’m surprised rationing isn’t even more common. Choices have to be made, especially in single payer systems (we aren’t there, yet, but the federal government is paying for a large percentage of Americans).
People really have no right to demand that other people cover whatever costs might be necessary to extend life for as long as possible. If someone wants no expenses spared, then they need to pay for it themselves or request the (voluntary) charity of others.
first you deny treatment to “incoherent 90 year olds” to justify rationing
then when your costs continue to rise and your dollars remain “finite’, how about denying treatment to incoherent 80 year olds? well, then, how about 70 yr olds with stage 4 cancer that can be managed but not cured? Is that last 5-10 years of life “too expensive”??
What about a 40 year depressive who wants to die? Is it worth expensive treatment to keep them alive against their will?
Now, what about vaccines for a Tay Sachs child or neurobastoma child with a life expectancy of 2 years? For a Down’s child? For a child with a 3rd recurrence of leukemia? Is that the best return for your finite dollars?
What about a 22 week fetus? Is it worth a million dollars to do a C-section and try to save them with a 10% chance of normal survival?
Government takeover and then rationing of medical care for private citizens is not a line in the sand - it is a steep and slippery slope. If I had to choose between the Catholic church and the obama administration to make decisions about medical care and the value of my life, I choose the church
opinion.
You're getting perilously close to the third rail here (I've tread on it many times).
This conservative website contains many, many posters who believe that the government should spend unlimited quantities of taxed and borrowed money to keep every American nonagerian on unlimited high tech life support.
Anything less is routinely equated with opening up the cans of Zyklon B.
I choose a strong capitalistic system that allows people to pay for whatever care they want and a government that is out of the medical industry completely!!
If you want heroic end-of-life measures, be sure to get rich during your life.
Just as food, shelter and jobs are not rights, neither is health care. Access to these things is a right but the things themselves must not be guaranteed by the state.
Providing these things provides short term benefits, especially for lying politicians, but eventually destroys the host.