"Let the sick die, look how much money we save and how merciful it is for the loved ones" -- latest medical philosophy of the death culture.
It's all well and good to be for a culture of life, but the unanswered question in all these situations is who's going to pay for it? I've never gotten a good answer. Not everybody has great insurance, and not every family has the financial resources to pay for it out of their own pocket. So who picks up the tab for this Culture of Life you talk about? The taxpayer? And isn't that socialism?
I'm not trying to get in a big fight over this, just pointing out that at the end of the day, like it or not, it DOES come down to economics. I'd love to be able to give everybody as much care as they could possibly want and then some, but there simply are not enough resources to do that, and it's going to get rationed somehow, whether by the insurance companies, the government, or families who finally decide that they simply can't afford to shell out fifty thousand bucks to keep their hopelessly ill loved one alive for six more months. Call that a culture of Death if you like, but unle
There's a real dichotomy about health care on FR: On threads like this one you'll see people decrying what they see as a Culture of Death in the allocation of medical care. At the very same time you'll see other threads decrying the never ending expansion of entitlements like Medicare. Two sides of the same coin.
It's all well and good to come down on the side of Life, but again I ask, who pays, and who decides who pays? putting forth solutions like Tort Reform won't cut it. That may stand on its own merits, but it would only be a drop in the bucket.
It is NOT merciful for the loved ones to know, or to witness (as is increasingly common), violent attempts to reanimate a corpse after the person who used to live at that address is no longer there.
Most CPR attempts, especially those that take place in hospitals or at disaster scenes, are futile (futile in the sense that the body is already dead).
CPR is not "necessary" when the object of the CPR is a corpse.