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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (14194)	3/31/2012 10:29:18 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

<<< I said health care not Medicare.>>> Boy there's a dodge if there ever was one You seem to have a problem with drawing distinctions between related things. That's your "death panels" Tim. Under the scenario of and ever increasing number of people living forever, but being unable to support themselves. In any case I don't call limits on what the government will spend to support someone "death panels". Your not ordering their deaths. We're a fairly rich and generous society and will often spend a lot to help someone out who's truly in need, esp. if its through no fault of their own, but there has to be a limit. One can argue that some proposed or actual limit is too low, but even if the argument is accepted there has to be some limit. To go to the extreme to make a point, We (properly) wouldn't spend a billion dollars of government money to extend an 80 year old's life so he reaches 81. In practice (and mostly reasonably I guess) we go a lot further in the rare cases where its clear a truly enormous expense will nearly certainly extend someone's life (esp. if it extends the quality of life as well), then we would if we had to make a general rule for a common occurrence of such a thing. The smaller and less certain the extension of life, the lower quality those additional moments will be, and the more people that would need such major spending, the lower the amount probably should be, but in a rich country it will likely always be fairly large. If the panels controlled private spending, if you couldn't spend your own money if the treatment wasn't considered cost effective, or even if you couldn't accept charity to extend a life, I'd think calling them death panels would be reasonable. But recognizing that people don't have a positive right to have the government pay an unlimited amount for their medical care doesn't make for a death panel. Esp. if the amount that actually is paid is very high.