| | The author reveals his collectivist thinking here (emphasis add be me)
...in a nation of finite healthcare resources, society would be acting reasonably to limit additional medical expenses on his care, even if he wished otherwise. Of course, if Betancourt's family were willing to pay for his care out of pocket, and could find physicians willing to treat him, I would have no objection to their preserving his body in such a state indefinitely. In fact, as I have written in regard to the Jesse Koochin case in Utah, I would have no problem with the family keeping his corpse in their home forever -- as long as they could do so in a manner that did not create public health risks.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery. Money spent on vegetative patients is money not spent on preventive care, such as flu shots and mammograms. Each night in an ICU bed for such patients is a night that another patient with a genuine prognosis for recovery is denied such high-end care. Every dollar exhausted on patients who will never wake up again is a dollar not devoted to finding a cure for cancer.
Wealth is not finite. When an individual spends his money he is not taking away money from someone else. It's not a zero-sum choice. And what the author really wants to say is that he would rather a central authority dictate how individuals should spend their money rather than an individual himself decide, a guaranteed way to shrink wealth all together and get even less money to the things this author purports to be more valuable.
|
|
