{"id":2515,"date":"2009-08-15T17:44:08","date_gmt":"2009-08-16T01:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2515"},"modified":"2009-08-15T17:44:08","modified_gmt":"2009-08-16T01:44:08","slug":"death-panels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/death-panels\/","title":{"rendered":"Death panels"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the question of whether health care is a market commodity or a human right, conservatives tend to come out on the commodity side, when they address the issue at all.\u00a0 Not so in reacting to Obama\u2019s tentative application <\/a>of cost-benefit analysis to publicly-funded end-of-life care, however:\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don’t know how much that hip replacement [for my terminally ill grandmother] cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life\u2014that would be pretty upsetting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This statement has produced a firestorm of criticism, to say the least.\u00a0 If I am understanding that criticism correctly, and I may not be, the right is arguing that raising the issue of cost in relationship to government-funded health care is a sign of a vicious, Nazi agenda.\u00a0 If so, then it seems to me that those critics do in fact believe that access to today\u2019s state-of-the-art medical technology is an entitlement that the government cannot withhold on a cost or any other basis.\u00a0 This is a perfectly defensible position.\u00a0 It is just contrary to the right\u2019s usual pronouncements and should be made explicit.<\/p>\n

Likewise, when Limbaugh et al. use the term \u201crationing\u201d as a self-evidently fatal rebuttal to any health care reform proposals, they also implicitly embrace the idea of health care as an entitlement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, the issue would not come up if health care were fully private\u2014a solution that we are unlikely to achieve.\u00a0 And I do not mean to defend any of the emerging Democratic health proposals, none of which I purport to understand.\u00a0 Obama\u2019s demonization of insurance companies is typical Democratic demagoguery; his notion that the government can act as a fair competitor to private providers is ludicrous; and his failure to call forcefully for deregulation of the health insurance market makes a mockery of his goal of offering consumers greater choice at lower cost.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think that raising the question of what health care is owed when taxpayers are footing the bill should be off limits; the question does not require any particular answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the question of whether health care is a market commodity or a human right, conservatives tend to come out on the commodity side, when they address the issue at all.\u00a0 Not so in reacting to Obama\u2019s tentative application of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[309,310],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2515"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2517,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2515\/revisions\/2517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}