Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Like Apples and Gravity.....


Death Doctors follow socialized medicine.





The patient could have a terminal disease, like cancer. And patients at the "end of life" could be babies born with serious medical difficulties or seniors whose bodies are shutting down, one system after another.

"It's a cascade," Barrette said. "We can't invent it. We see it. There are safeguards."

Knowing someone personally who was in a position to fall under the needle for activation of a living will and then came to shortly after the decision was taken to "off" them , I suspect the docs are inflating their ability to predict outcomes and "you win some, you lose some" will be replaced with "you lose some" by the expedient of having any possible winners definately dead. Recently birthed babies are also mentioned in the article and this fits with the socialist tendency toward eugenics. Doctors are suckers for this kind of thing as it elevates them to the Godlike position of culling humans and that appeals to the hubris the practice of the healing arts tends to make one susceptible to. Don't think so? Talk to a woman whose unborn child has been diagnosed with Down's about the pressure and lies that were used to try to get her to abort the child.

As with any well intended authoritarian system there will be victims of mistakes and there will be victims of malicious action, both of which will be counted as cheap in the column of costs by Death Doctors and their proponents. It is worth noting that the mistakes will be dead as will the victims of malicious intent, so those unfortunate souls will be counted as evidence of the validity of a Death Doctor's eugenic quest.

5 comments:

Ken said...

You're absolutely right, socialists (and other logical thinkers) do wish to apply a little bit of realism to our healthcare system.  80-year olds should not be getting heart transplants.  "Slightly more than half of Medicare dollars are spent on patients who die within two months."  And it doesn't matter if they use private insurance - all healthcare is already socialized.  One insured person's claims make everyone's premiums rise.  

Certainly, quality-of-life considerations and the likelihood of future costs should be weighed in healthcare decisions. 

And then we have Sarah Palin's irresponsible choice ...  "Mean and median medical costs for children 0 to 4 years of age with Down syndrome were 12 to 13 times higher than for children without Down syndrome."

Bill said...

Ken, you're pointing out a few of the problems with socialized medicine, this means that we should move toward a free-market system, not further toward a fully socialized one.  And what you advocate is not "a little bit of realism", it's killing people deemed by a dis-interested third party to be not worth saving, and furthermore and more importantly - it costs all of us in ways we can't yet imagine.  Think what happens when the calculus moves toward "cost saving" and away from "life saving"... this is the tricky part.  What incentive is there to develop new treatments?  How are these new treatments financed?  We begin to accept lowest common denominator care because that's what gets paid for, and that's what gets developed.  This is why innovation happens in free-market systems, not socialist systems.

JACIII said...

Logical thinkers are capable of following a line of reasoning and projecting it forward, this in no way describes a socialist and his head-in-the-sand economic philosophy. Once you sacrifice old people and the very young to grease the wheels of a state regulated medical care system it inevitably follows there will be further  categories of humanity offered up for the alter.

This is hard for a leftist to understand, as they tend to believe the law of unintended consequences is suspended in all utopian schemes. Not that eugenics is an unintended consequence of the serious left, mind you.

Michael Maier said...

Just like I read this moron decrying anyone saying the "health care reform" was going to give us socialized medicine.

Of course it is, they're just lying bastards. They fully know it's just the first step and if they were honest folk they'd say so. The "reform" gives partial-govt paid medicine while it destroys incentives for private companies to provide insurance at all. Thereby moving more folks out of private care and into govt care.

Eventually, it will become cost-prohibitive for private companies to exist at all and they'll fold.

Then the communists will say "SEE? The greedy companies couldn't compete with our fine system."

I do agree with Ken that geezers shouldn't be getting transplants... if they can't pay for them, anyway.

The problem with the current "system" is that the customer (AKA the patient) is almost fully removed from ALL financial decisions.

I defy anyone to figure out beforehand what a day of tests will cost them after the insurance payouts.

Between "write offs" and vague definitions of care, no one can possibly have a clue.

Buying and registering a car is simplicity itself in comparison.

Susan said...

If an 80 year old is in good health and otherwise fine physically, I see no problem with transplants if the funding is available.

On the other hand, there are a LOT of younger folks who get transplants of some kind and then proceed to continue a bad lifestyle. Why should they get a pass and more transplants because of their age?

I always wonder about people who are pro aborts. Are they glad their parents didn't choose to murder them?