Re: WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS ..SCARE GRANDMA

"John the Savage"

Having bureaucrats determine my life or death issues is abhorrent ...
but seemingly welcome to you ...

Well, when you need the bureaucrats (and the taxpayers) to pay for it, you
are going to have to accept it.

You are correct, the new order will be that the taxpayers will pay for it
and you will have no choices in the end.

If you can pay some ridiculous fee to keep your life for another few
months, nobody is going to stop you.

But they will. Your choices will be limited. While I agree that people
spend their money on foolish things in many cases, it is indeed their money.
The new order takes away your freedom to choose. You can shout all you
want, but that is what is happening and what will happen in the future. I
agree that many people make bad choices, but I do not include myself in that
group. I think I make good choices. I prefer to keep my freedom to choose.
You seem to believe that the panels that will be making choices for you are
the right way to go. I disagree. You are apparently going to get your way.

But if you're requiring that the taxpayers pay for it, and you aren't will
to set *any* limit on what is too much money or what is too little time of
extended life, you're going to bankrupt the country. Period.

The country will eventually bankrupt itself. This new effort to accelerate
the process is just one more step. No one requires taxpayers to get more or
less health care. The new order is making decisions best left to
individuals. These decisions are no different than many others that are
made. It will not be long until the same logic will be applied to even more
aspects of life. There is no limit to the tyraney that is possible when the
people lose control of their government.

We already "ration" care, we just do it in a nonsensical way. Health care
is a limited resource. This isn't about keeping Grandma from having a
bypass operation. This is about the insane amounts of money that are
spent on procedures to extend life sometimes by only a few weeks even when
the quality of life is utter misery.

You are correct, we do ration care. It is not perfect. But the solution to
providing "more" care for those that make bad choices is not to deny freedom
to those that make good choices. This is very much about people being able
to provide for themselves verses the government deciding what is best for
them. It is no different than any other "choice" that people can make for
themselves. What you eat, what you wear, where you live ... these
"freedoms" are vanishing at an astonishing rate.

Sometimes we need to accept that death is a part of life and the denial of
death that feeds into many of these wasteful procedures is completely
irrational and is economic suicide for our country. We can't pay hundreds
of thousands of dollars to extend a life for a month or two that is in a
horrible state anyway.

Your hyperbolic pronouncements are not helpful. I agree that death is part
of life. Not everyone can obtain "wasteful procedures" at taxpayer expense.
You seem to like the idea of "death panels" ... why not explain to Jerry
that they are a great innovation.

There is no reason to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend a life
for a month or two when that life is already in a horrible state. We can
solve those problems without losing our freedom to determine our own health
care needs. We can provide basic health care to everyone (as we do now) at
much less cost. We cannot provide sophisticated health care to everyone
that cannot pay for it.

I suspect you disagree, but we are about to retard the development of health
care. It has to be so. Those with more resources always pay for the
improvements but it takes time for those with less resources to reap the
benefits of those improvements. That is the way it works. Substituting a
political solution for an economic problem has never worked in the past.
There is no reason to believe it will in the future.

I know it isn't a popular idea but sometimes we just have to accept that
Grandma is going to die.

Everyone knows that Grandma is going to die. This red herring is useless.
Not all seventy year olds are the same. When you get to be seventy and are
in good health but are denied some procedure because it needs to be directed
to someone just because they are younger than you are ... you may (or may
not) live to rue the day you bought into this foolishness. After all, we
just have to accept that government guys know best when to stop your
treatment ... no matter what you thought might be a better plan.

This isn't about stopping a bypass operation that will extend a quality
life for years. This is about setting some reasonable limit.

It is about whether you should have a say in that decision. You like giving
up your say. I do not.

If you can have a $50,000 procedure that will extend your life for 6
months, is that okay? What if it's 3 months? What if it's $1 million for
1 month, with a very low quality of life? You must accept that without
setting *some* kind of reasonable limit on this sort of thing we are all
going to go broke. There won't be money left procedures that could do far
more good. It requires a nuanced, levelheaded, and realistic analysis of
the situation we are currently in. I need you to not fall for this
appeal-to-stupid bit about Grandma. Please?

You seem to think that everyone gets everything they want right now. They
do not. Medicare is out of control. There needs to be changes in Medicare.
You seem to buy into the hype that "those without insurance" can get all the
health care available to those with health insurance and somehow just have
those "levelheaded" bureaucrats running Medicare and Medicaid can "save"
enough money to pay for it. Making it worse will not make things better.
It is useless to discuss this because you know you are correct and
everything will be "better" now that the government is taking over. Those
that believe this are fools. Sorry, but those that think the government is
the solution to major problems are fools.

The government is the ultimate non-business monopoly. We cannot spend
ourselves out of debt.


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