Jim Towey reports in the Wall Street Journal (via Ed Morrissey at HotAir),
If President Obama wants to better understand why America’s discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.
Obama’s response to the idea of death panels in his health care plan is,
As every credible person who has looked into it has said, there are no so-called death panels — an offensive notion to me and to the American people.
First, what’s the deal with death panels anyway? The extremely simplified, reader’s digest version is as follows.
- Health care is extremely expensive, in particular certain treatments such as chemo therapy, certain organ transplants, etc.
- In a universal health care system, in particular a single payer system (government sponsored), the cost to care for health care at a national level will be exorbitant.
- At some point, cost effectiveness will become an issue under a single payer (government financed) system. There simply will not be enough money to handle all the health care needs in the nation.
- In order to cut health care costs, the health care financier (the government in a single payer system) will begin comparative cost/benefit analysis. Chemo therapy for a 25 year old would be a better investment than chemo therapy for a 75 year old diabetic. This practice is also called health care rationing.
The death panels, made famous by Sarah Palin’s facebook entry, would be those government run boards of bureaucrats sitting behind tall oak tables deciding who receives treatment and lives, and who doesn’t receive treatment and dies. Sarah Palin made the point that her son with Down’s Syndrome probably wouldn’t have made it past these government death panels.
Obama’s main defense has been that Palin et al have been raising bogey men to scare ordinary American taxpayers into voting against an otherwise kind and benevolent health care legislation.
Towey’s report, however, raises the question of whether this sort of practice might already be under way, in a sense. Towey shines a light on the Veteran’s administration, which is a government run health care program, auspiciously a model for Obama care, specifically the reintroduction of a new pamphlet called, “Your Life, Your Choices” into the Veterans Administration counseling repretoire.
This is a twenty minute interview, so let me do some of the heavy lifting for you and send you to some hilights. First in the segment with Chris Wallace and Jim Towey:
The exchange at the 1:36 mark, gives you the basic framework of the conservative perspective on where government run health care inevitably winds up:
Wallace: President Obama calls talk of a government run, “death panel a, quote, extraordinary lie. But I want to put up what you said in your Wall Street Journal article this week. `You said the following, “When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?” explain.
Towey: I think the fears that Americans have, is that somehow when they are fragile, and they’re vulnerable, and they’re facing serious illness, that a discussion they are going to have with their doctor is going to be biased or tilted in some fashion. Here you have the government that has a financial stake in the answers that they give, and I think that a lot of people are afraid that they are going to somehow going to be steered toward a denial of care…
Towey’s rhetorical question is, what do you do when you have more care than you can care for? The logical answer is that you go into triage mode. The 80 year old diabetic is a much greater actuarial risk than the 25 year old marathonner, so naturally the diabetic grandma is going to be steered toward dying with grace, or as Obama put it, given a pain pill.
Obama promises that it’s not going to happen. Yet, it’s already happening. The VA is a government run health care entity, and it has already employed literature to give veterans the terms on which to choose that maybe it would be better to just pass on and stop being such a burden to those around me. What are some of those conditions, you ask, that might make a trip on the up elevator worth it?
- I can no longer walk, but can get around in a wheelchair
- I live in a nursing home.
- I cannot seem to “shake the blues.”
When a persistent case of the blues becomes reason to consider an advanced directive, that’s too far. This is already happening in America under government run health care. Veterans with a case of the blues are being guided in a process of asking the question, “when is it too much?” With physician assisted suicide already a legal reality in Oregon, the specter of our sad veterans being counseled or led to believe that it just might be better to cash it in and save my precious family all that heartache and expense. It’s already happening, today, in America.
The issue that frames this conversation is a devaluing of life. When life ceases to become sacred, it becomes purely utilitarian. Utilitarian values are measured precisely by their addition to or subtraction from the greater good. Life isn’t utilitarian, it is sacred. A life isn’t something to be evaluated on an actuarial table, it is a story or a potential with inherent value. We can’t create life, but we have unfortunately become culturally desensitized to taking it. Helping people process whether it is “the right time to die” isn’t a question that anyone should have to answer. They should simply be allowed to live until they die. Any person or entity that says otherwise presumes to play God, or at least to participate with him in a way that God never intended.
NOTE: Interview with Tammy Duckworth, the VA’s Public Affairs Chief, begins at 10:22. Wallace has his way with her. It’s interesting, in a sporting kind of way.
