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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (3485)	12/26/2007 12:47:11 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

"I think that several hundred thousand dollars of someone else's money for a few months of added life is unreasonable unless there is some extraordinary reason for it, like the patient being a heartbeat away from a cure for cancer or some such. I'm not sure what the exact cut-off might be. We'd probably need some dollar/longevity/quality/probability scale. Ten or twenty thousand for a few months could be considered reasonable, all other things being equal. Fifty would not, IMO. Others' mileage may vary, of course. The medical ethicists can make appropriate proposals. Medical ethics do not require doing anything and everything for everybody. " Vesting the power of life and death with any government bureaucracy is asking for the worst case of abuse of power. Exactly the kind of people you would never choose to give that power to would be motivated to hold it. "One of the advantages of a decentralized payment system is that consumers have some choice of contracts, including contracts that pay for otherwise unreasonable treatments. With single payer, Congress would have to approve the set criteria across the board." Then Congresspersons would be calling the bureaucrats to intervene and grant unauthorized treatments to the preferred few. Can you imagine treatment earmarks? Yuk, what a horrible idea.