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Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - 3:55pmSanction this postReply
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Interesting, but not very complicated.  Because no one has a "right" to medical treatment, doctors can and should be free to withhold services, even if the next of kin demands them.

Post 1

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - 9:28pmSanction this postReply
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what gets me about it is the hospital the guy went to; people always blame religion for withholding certain medical practices or whatnot at a religious hospital...to which I then have to say "well who told you to go to a hospital partaking in certain religious practices to begin with? You knew where you were going, and you know what they practice. Go elsewhere"

Post 2

Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 7:25pmSanction this postReply
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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.

Post 3

Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 9:47pmSanction this postReply
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I have had a lot of fun posting against these articles lately. For some reason the supporters of these authors hate the way insurance premiums go up to care for the sick, but refuse to see that the problem will only be magnified if they ever get single payer. One poster complained about his insurer increasing premiums due to a few coworkers getting sick one year, but could not relate that to adding millions of people to the rolls of insured under the HC bill. It makes me laugh sometimes, but only so that I don't go out killing random democrats.


Post 4

Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 9:57pmSanction this postReply
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Good points, all around.

*************
While the visible victims may draw the headlines and attract indignant protests from so-called "pro-life" organizations, the invisible victims are people like you and me who will suffer from diseases that are never cured because funds are being poured down a healthcare sieve in order to maintain permanently-unconscious bodies on complex and costly forms of life support.
*************

Curious:
Has there been a study regarding the relative proportion of all medical insurance claims which have been spent on end-of-life care (vs. that spent on everything else)?

Ed


Post 5

Friday, June 25, 2010 - 8:34amSanction this postReply
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You wake up one day, and find you are living in a nation that is all about state plumbers 'allocating resources.'

Allocating whose resources?

This carcass carving crap will only last for so long. It is not how the beast was built.

In case we havent' noticed, the bones are already starting to show.





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