Only after you fall into a vegetative state. The money that it may have taken to keep you alert and functioning before that, you’ve got to find on your own.
Is this a whoosh?
Bryan Ekers, speculations on the masturbatory fantasies of other posters are not permitted in GD. Do not do this again.
[ /Moderator Mode ]
Hmm…people tend to forget that Nazi Germany didn’t only persecute and execute Jews. They also sterilized the mentally deficient - and it’s possible (I can’t seem to recall the cites) they killed them and the infirm, as well.
But as I said, this was to keep them out of the gene pool (hence the ‘genics’ in ‘eugenics’) not to save money on caring for them. Also, as has been stated ad nauseum, that’s far from what the writer of the article is proposing.
Sorry. Wasn’t aware that could be taken as anything other than satirical.
Wow, just read the appropriate rule so I completely withdraw the statement and would be just fine if it were deleted.
Yes.
Based on that I shall now annex Mr. Big for the Bedroomland.
I think it is a serious issue. As I understand it the great majority of people spend most of their medical money in the last few years of life and always to no avail. How long can the society afford this?
Face it folks, everybody dies and I certainly don’t want my family bankrupting itself to keep me going.
On a related note, I have a grandson who was a little over three months pemature. He is now almost 21 and I’m glad he made it because he’s a fine young man. However his care cost about $350,000, a modest amount was paid by insurance and the rest forgiven by the hospital because what does the average guy do when someone says you owe me $300,000? I really question whether society can afford to do such things.
Maybe if we cut down on our massive military budget somewhat we could better afford to take care of our own.
While I don’t particularly like the analogy, it does have some truth to it.
Nazi Germany used a lot of slave labor to build its war machines. At the death camps people were separated into groups that were strong enough to work and those who were not. The weak were killed and the strong shipped off to the slave factories to work until they dropped dead or became to weak. The weak ones were killed.
All people were expected to give to the Nazi cause and if they couldn’t give they were usually exterminated. Hilter was one cold person, he was mentally ill.
Now, as for the article, the person who wrote it was also one cold person who values money over human life. This is very sad. Mostly because money is plentiful in this country. National health care should be a reality. I understand America is the only developed country without it. I don’t know what the average doctor makes, but I heard one complaining in the elevator that he made only $15,000 dollars for the current month. Nurses make $40-$50 an hour where I live. But the people who need their services make $6.00-$12.00 an hour among the people I worked with. Something is wrong.
Handicapped people do have the constitutional right to live. They can also perform services to others no matter how bad the handicap.
I read the story of a woman who had lost her husband, she had no children, she felt so alone she decided to commit suicide. The attempt failed. Her councilor asked her to volunteer her time at a nursing home. While she doubted herself, she set off to try. She was assigned a 32 year old female that was totally paralized. Her job was to go in the mornings and clean, dress, and feed the young woman. Then strap her into a wheel chair to watch TV. Her patient showed no signs of anything. But the longer she did this the better she felt about herself.
Then one day she noticed a certain gleam in her patient’s eye when she watched a certain program on TV. This caused great joy, and from there on she was cured of any thoughts of suicide. She was needed.
We do not need the government deciding when and how we shall die. In this country all people have the right to vote. I hope they will not allow this heartless philosophy to exist in America.
It’s unusual when the birth of a child costs half a million dollars. We can probably handle it.
It’s not unusual anymore that someone gets very old and dies.
My paternal grandfather was fit as a horse, but developed late-onset Alzheimer’s. He lived to be 89, but the last two-or-three years he didn’t know up from down. It was like an persistent ambulatory vegitative state. Not surprisingly, he got into accidents. One day, he finally fell out of a chair and broke his hip.
The last two weeks of his life were spent in a hospital, where he was subjected to three invasive procedures: one for the hip, one for a complication due to a blood clot, one to drain fluid from his thoracic cavity. He finally succumed to a massive case of septicemia caused by a drug-resistant strain of bacteria, which he no doubt contracted because he was full of holes.
Before my grandfather lost his mind, he experienced a brief but agonizing period when he was aware of what would be coming, and lucid enough to worry about it. He went on a long walk with my father, where they discussed matters pertaining to his estate. My grandfather had seen his mother succumb to a similar illness. My great grandmother lived to be 98. The last decade of her life was spent essentially mindless. Now, to remain cognizant until one’s eighties is doing pretty well. Most folks would feel satisfied with that. My great-grandmother reportedly was. She was also a very proud woman, and would have found the notion that a nurse’s aid would be wiping her ass for her for ten years while she rotted in a nursing home utterly repugnant. My grandfather, having witnessed his mother’s fate, knew full well what lay in store for him. So he asked my father if he would shoot him.
Of course, my father said he couldn’t. And he didn’t. So, the last days of my grandfather’s life were spent being cut open and infected by doctors working hard to sustain a living corpse, at a huge expense. At times he was howling in agony. My father and his brothers literally begged the doctors to stop it, but they kept it up until their incurable patient died of shock. I’m sure they felt they had no choice in the matter.
My father wished he’d shot my grandfather when he asked, after that.
If the same thing happens to my father, I’m hoping this country has wised up enough to give me some legal means of helping him die with a modicum of dignity. The consequence of prolonging life into our eighth or ninth decade is our last years are spent essentially falling apart. Many of us are reduced to idiots shitting ourselves in the well-heated morgues they call nursing homes. A good portion of the denizens of those places would blow their own brains out before letting that happen, if they didn’t grow up believing it was wrong, or a sin, or that it might get somebody else in trouble. Or they’re just too afraid, and don’t want to die alone.
We try to live well, but we don’t have the right to die well when our time is up. If we are fortunate enough to pass in our sleep, or drop dead of a heart-attack at a ripe old age, then there’s little cause to mourn. But it’s tragic when the person just withers away into mindless decrepitude, or spends their last years enduring terrible pain and wishing for a swift and natural death. I don’t think there should be any shame in saying “now’s my time” after a long life, and taking our bow gracefully. Hospice care and well-controlled euthanasia could probably help immensely with that process, but here it’s a sin. I think it’s a sin when old people have to ask their sons to kill them, because they know they’re going to be reduced to infantile helplessness and be a financial and emotional burden. The vast majority of people contemplating such a fate don’t want it. Why force it on them? Our long lives are no less unnatural than the ability to elect a painless and humane death. It seems to me the ethical extension of our desire for a maximum of good years is a way to minimize the truly bad ones when life must inevitably grind to a halt.
So far at any rate. However the same mind set that tries to keep 98 year old people going at any cost will insist on treating premies at an earlier and earlier time as medical technology advances and all at great cost.
There are in fact important moral issues here, but I fear they are being ignored in favor of more inflammatory comments.
Life is a good, and when we start talking about dollars versus life we are in fact on a slippery slope that leads to treating each human being as just an economic unit. That is highly immoral.
But how else, but in dollars, can we make rational decisions on how to preserve, extend and enjoy life? In truth, spending millions on the last few years of suffering seems to me to be greedy.
Eighty percent of the the average American’s lifetime expenditure in health care is in the last two years of life. Is that a wise way to spend the cash?
I would propose no for two reasons. First it takes huge gobs of money. I would not want my estate transfered to the local hospital that way. It is just as wrong to spend tax money that way.
Next what you get for the money is a couple of years of a pretty low-quality life punctuated with lots of pain. No thanks.
Let me go in a natural and cheaper way sooner. Let my estate be used for new boogie boards for the kids.
If you are unwilling to spend your own money on a medical treatment, is it moral to use other people’s money on the same treatment?
I cannot help but wonder if all this discussion as to the ‘need’ to spend acres of money on late-life medical care is not somehow sparked by the general aging of the First-World. Having had an expensive, luxurious life people now expect and demand the same sort of death.
For all of those who say that life shouldn’t be judged with money, get used to it, because it has been happening for as long as there has been modern medicine. It is not a new phenomenon – how do you think the insurance companies know what to charge as premiums? Their actuaries have made the insurance sector rich by getting really good at this.
In fact, many of these kinds of decisions, no matter how emotional, come down to a matter of money. Money is just the modern world’s proxy for resources. As such, it just reflects the evolution of the social human condition. Societies that don’t make rational decisions about their resources don’t stick around very long. If our society decides to bankrupt itself over quixotic end of life care, then it too will fade away.
There is a health care crisis in this country that the public is only slowly waking up to. It used to be the mantra that we didn’t ration health care and we didn’t wait in line for care. Open up your eyes, guys. There are often several week waiting times to see specialists, even for reasonably serious conditions. The cost of health care only increases as health care simultaneously becomes harder to obtain. There is a three-way war between the doctors and patients and insurance companies, the result of which is that only the insurance companies end up happy (because they buy more lobbyists). It is a mess that is spiraling out of control. Subsidized or single-payer health care will very shortly be a necessity. Health care will be rationed, and we will all be better off. There is nothing emotional or even moral about this; it is a rational decision to increase the overall health of the society. And anybody want to guess how they decide on which types of care to cover and which ones not to?
I have read the posts, and at least in part, agree with them. However, I don’t think they go wide enough to enclose the problem.
When I was young, during WWII, doctors still came to your house, and whatever treatment they had was administered there. Old people lived with their children until they died, not a great expense for society. What changed all this?
Doctors were dedicated to helping people, and were paid little. Then Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance, the company started by doctors, began to be sold so doctors could receive more compensation for their work. At the beginning this worked fine, insurance payments were small, mine were about $10.00 a month for full coverage. What has happened since then has been a steady progression of yearly health care costs rising 2 or 3 times more than inflation. There were numerous abuses, people going to the hospital for rest cures, etc. until we have created the monster before us. Rather greed has created it, a little here, and a little there. Having worked in a hospital it was impossible not to notice it.
When my wife’s father died, he spent about a month in the hospital, and two weeks in a nursing home, my mother-in-law received over 30 bills from various doctors. The hospital costs were all paid by insurance. Some of these doctors she had never heard of or didn’t know why they had sent her a bill.
I printed up a sheet of paper, asking for an itemized bill, along with the doctors name who approved the consultation, speciality, need, and other information I wanted before I paid any bill. I enclosed the paper in every bill and sent them back.
In the long run only 9 of the 30 replied with the information and were paid.
Now, I am for some safe way to allow people who have lived thier lives out and wish to pass pleasantly. But I believe the law, or bill, whatever it might be will be strongly opposed by the health care industry. After all, we are talking about 80% of their business.
edwino:
Damn straight. Here’s an analogy:
When an army goes to war, it of course brings with it medical assets to help save the lives of the wounded. But some of the wounded still die who would live had there been even more medical assets available. But an army with more doctors than soldiers, more bandages than bullets, isn’t going to win wars, which is their first priority. (And doubling the amount of medical assets won’t double the number of wounded saved–there’s the principle of diminishing returns.) Also, army doctors perform “triage” because the time spent trying to save one very badly wounded soldier can result in several others dying.
A society in peacetime faces a similar situation, only more drawn out. We are fighting a constant battle against the forces which degrade our economic infrastructure and (one would hope) environment. We simply cannot afford to give a blank check to one narrow endeavor at the expense of everything else. And as we’ve seen on communist Russia and China, economic mismanagement can cause millions of deaths.
I can’t remember who said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”, but I don’t think it was Hitler.
So, let me get this straight: not a dime of public money to try and PREVENT people from having huge costly medical problems. But once they are brain dead, then every effort must be spared to preserve the beating of their hearts at all costs.
That strikes me as an utterly bizarre and sickening understanding of what life is and why it’s worth defending.
lekatt, you might want to look up what my Econ textbook calls “the cost disease of the service sector.” Medical cost inflation isn’t about doctors being greedy (or at least it isn’t solely about doctors being greedy).
DirkGntly, we also sterlized the mentally deficient in this county. I know a woman a few years younger than me (in her 30s) that was steralized. And for, I believe, a good reason. She is bright enough to live in a group home, but not responsible enough to raise a child. Read about lobotomies in this country. And yes, the Nazi’s did gas (and otherwise murder) the handicapped. We haven’t gone quite that far (to the best of my knowledge), but our own treatment of the handicapped during that era was not much better.
Did not mean to imply the doctors alone were responsible for the outrageous prices of health care. The hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, not to mention hundreds of suppliers helped a lot.
Everytime someone in Congress authors a bill to control or restrict any health care monies, lobbists come out of the woodwork with millions of dollars to defeat it. We need National Health Care like other countries have. Doctors would have salaries, and drug prices would be controlled. But don’t try to pass a law, because there will be millions and millions of dollars paid to see it fails.
Half of all personal bankruptces are because of medical bills. People lose everything trying to pay them. When the public gets tired of being victimized they will do something about it. I believe that time is near.