Your Only Value Is As A Taxpaying Asset To The Government
When you are old and sick, you are worthless and unworthy of any health care. I give you Peter Singer, a “bioethicist” who only considers you as a liability if you live too long and need expensive care at the end of your life.
The case for explicit health care rationing in the United States starts with the difficulty of thinking of any other way in which we can continue to provide adequate health care to people on Medicaid and Medicare, let alone extend coverage to those who do not now have it. Health-insurance premiums have more than doubled in a decade, rising four times faster than wages. In May, Medicare’s trustees warned that the program’s biggest fund is heading for insolvency in just eight years. Health care now absorbs about one dollar in every six the nation spends, a figure that far exceeds the share spent by any other nation. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it is on track to double by 2035.
President Obama has said plainly that America’s health care system is broken. It is, he has said, by far the most significant driver of America’s long-term debt and deficits. It is hard to see how the nation as a whole can remain competitive if in 25 years we are spending nearly a third of what we earn on health care, while other industrialized nations are spending far less but achieving health outcomes as good as, or better than, ours.
Rationing health care means getting value for the billions we are spending by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse. If we ration we won’t be writing blank checks to pharmaceutical companies for their patented drugs, nor paying for whatever procedures doctors choose to recommend. When public funds subsidize health care or provide it directly, it is crazy not to try to get value for money. The debate over health care reform in the United States should start from the premise that some form of health care rationing is both inescapable and desirable. Then we can ask, What is the best way to do it?
More on Peter Singer from Wikipedia:
Peter Albert David Singer (born July 6, 1946) is an Australian philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics, approaching ethical issues from a secular preference utilitarian perspective.
He has served, on two occasions, as chair of philosophy at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he ran unsuccessfully as a Green candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, he was recognized as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies.
Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement. Not all members of the animal liberation movement share this view, and Singer himself has said the media overstates his status. His views on that and other issues in bioethics have attracted attention and a degree of controversy.
He is described as a “utilitarian”. In other words, you’re worthless after you are no longer useful to him and those like him. You must be a productive taxpayer to be worthy of any expenditure from the government that has funded itself off the sweat of your brow.
Go read the whole thing. Then take a shower. Or several showers.
One simply cannot wait for Singer to confront his own state-mandated declaration of uselessness.
We have seen this exact, same reasoning before, but it wasn’t called “bioethics” then.
By feeblemind, July 15, 2009 @ 6:26 pm
If we were able to eliminate medicare with the wave of a magic wand, how many seniors would be able to afford the coverage they now enjoy from medicare from a private insurer? Perhaps most seniors would be unable afford such insurance premiums so the outcome described is what would happen anyway? Also, is it ethical to expect the young to pay for the care of someone elses parents, even when the expense causes their own children to do without? That was not done for the first 190 years of the Republic. It is a legitimate question. Finally, the rate of increase in the cost of medicine is unsustainable. At some point, and I don’t know where it is, the money will run out, whether or not health care is nationalized. And then what? Nationalilized medicine will just fast forward us to that day.
By Mockingbird, July 16, 2009 @ 10:31 am
Peter Singer needs to be liberated in the “Chicago Way”.
No, I need not explain that, as it doesn’t matter what I think.
Good bye, Mr. Singer.