Monday, June 06, 2005
The Dirty Secret Of The Teri Schiavo Case
With a Hat Tip to Cheat Seeking Missiles for pointing to this article and this web site by and about Leslie Burke.
That is the dirty secret of the Schiavo case and others like it. At bottom it is about who makes decisions about your life and death. Whether it concerns pulling the plug or rationing care, someone else is making those decisions, or desperately wants to. The reason is straightforward. The cost of health care has risen (somewhat artificially in my opinion, but that is another post) to the level that health care must be viewed as a precious and rare commodity.
In an egalitarian impulse, we attempt to provide equal access to that commodity by socializing it, whether literally as in the UK, or by third-party payers as in the US. Either way, you lose control of your fate. Teri did, Mr. Burke did, and there are many, many others - probably you some day.
The only way to ultimately restore personal control is to restore medicine to "pay as you go." That means that people with fewer resources will have fewer options, but they will have control. We can then work on their options by things like breaking the cartel of the American Medical Association and the medical schools which keep the number of physicians artificially low.
What do you value more? Life or control? Socialistic medicine will give you life, but it will cost you your control. Is it really worth it?
THE MOST IMPORTANT BIOETHICS LITIGATION in the world today involves a 45-year-old Englishman, Leslie Burke. He isn't asking for very much. Burke has a progressive neurological disease that may one day deprive him of the ability to swallow. If that happens, Burke wants to receive food and water through a tube. Knowing that Britain's National Health Service (NHS) rations care, Burke sued to ensure that he will not be forced to endure death by dehydration against his wishes.Everyone argued in the Schiavo case that it was about granting Teri her wishes. And yet here is a case where the patients wished are extremely well known and the state continues to fight him.
That is the dirty secret of the Schiavo case and others like it. At bottom it is about who makes decisions about your life and death. Whether it concerns pulling the plug or rationing care, someone else is making those decisions, or desperately wants to. The reason is straightforward. The cost of health care has risen (somewhat artificially in my opinion, but that is another post) to the level that health care must be viewed as a precious and rare commodity.
In an egalitarian impulse, we attempt to provide equal access to that commodity by socializing it, whether literally as in the UK, or by third-party payers as in the US. Either way, you lose control of your fate. Teri did, Mr. Burke did, and there are many, many others - probably you some day.
The only way to ultimately restore personal control is to restore medicine to "pay as you go." That means that people with fewer resources will have fewer options, but they will have control. We can then work on their options by things like breaking the cartel of the American Medical Association and the medical schools which keep the number of physicians artificially low.
What do you value more? Life or control? Socialistic medicine will give you life, but it will cost you your control. Is it really worth it?
