Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Death Care and the Commodification of Life

Quoting James Lewis at American Thinker:
“Federal ‘healthcare’ must inevitably turn into ‘Death Care,’ because the bureaucracy will have the sole power to determine the rules under which you and I will live and die. The bureaucrats will have a fixed pot of money, and money spent to save your life comes from the same kitty that is used to give prenatal care to some poor woman from Mexico or Bangladesh. That is what they think is moral -- and this is an argument about morality above all. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm's brother and big advisor to Obama, considers fee-for-service medicine immoral, because it allows richer people to pay more.

There are all kinds of economic arguments against that position, but that's what they believe. It assumes, of course, that there is only one lock-box of money, which cannot expand, and which cannot become more efficiently used as we discover new medications. It assumes that costlier medical care today will not pay off in cheaper medicines tomorrow; but that is the whole history of modern medicine. Poor people are benefiting today from the costlier treatments purchased by others yesterday, just as our cheap netbook computers today came out of five decades of developing huge, very expensive, slower, and clunkier computers. Your aspirin pill today costs pennies. The equivalent of willow bark a hundred years ago was much more expensive…

I want to have the choice to sell my car to save my loved one, or to take out a loan, or a mortgage on a house. The power to make that choice is being taken out of our hands, and that is why Sarah Palin has a more moral position on healthcare than Barack Obama does.”
Click the image & read the rest:
Click the image & read the rest
Click here for a related editorial (& the source of the image).
Click here for more on ObamaCare.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I read the article by Feldstein on Obama care and I had a thought: What we need is an experiment on a group or two using incentives to watch their expenses in healthcare. This could be done by sharing the money not spent in all the yearly scenarios that a family or individual encounters. The theory is that many people over use their insurance and if they were paying they would opt for less expensive tests or other care. We need to prove that people don't need all of the care and resulting costs. I would love to know if my theory is sound.. well its not just my theory many including the author of the article seem to believe this.

SBVOR said...

Thomas,

You might also find this article of interest. And, you may have already read it. It is certainly relavent.

People will always over consume any goods and/or any services which they believe (rightly or wrongly) somebody else is paying for.

SamT said...

This article is something that opened my mind regarding death care. I think I should think of this carefully.

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