Death Panels

Death Panels:

One of the fairest and most reasonable points that I've heard ObamaCare proponents make is that there is already "rationing" in our current system; it's just that the rationing is handled by the market, and particularly by the insurance companies. This lies at the heart of the claim that they are the "villains" of the story, because they make money while choosing who lives and who dies.

A lady speaks here with passion and fury about the death of her mother.

I’ve been part of a death panel conversation. I know about death panels.

You have no idea what it’s like to be called into a sterile conference room with a hospital administrator you’ve never met before and be told that your mother’s insurance policy will only pay for 30 days in ICU. You can't imagine what it's like to be advised that you need to “make some decisions,” like whether your mother should be released “HTD” which is hospital parlance for “home to die,” or if you want to pay out of pocket to keep her in the ICU another week. And when you ask how much that would cost you are given a number so impossibly large that you realize there really are no decisions to make. The decision has been made for you.

Unfortunately, we are not facing a choice of saving people or letting them die. What we are facing is the choice of who will decide when they die.

The fact is that those impossibly large numbers don't change when the government is picking up the tab. The only difference is that it will be a government official who has to decide whether or not to pay, instead of you. You will be spared going into that room; but in return, no one who loves your mother will be consulted.

The result may well be the same in any case.

A loving child might possibly sell everything to pay for a mother's extra week of life. Then again, even a loving child might believe that their mother wouldn't really want them to lose everything. They make a decision in pain, and out of love.

The bureaucratic solution that is proposed has no love, and no place for love. Love is not a metric that it can understand, account for, or factor into decisions across a broad number of cases. If you are going to have a system in place that makes reasoned decisions for millions of people, emotions have to be left behind.

Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).

Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.

That's what Mrs. Palin was writing about, and what bothers her. It is a system forlorn of love, where the decisions are as sterile as the room in which they are made.